MINING
Zijin fined for toxic spill
The Zijin Mining Group (紫金礦業集團), one of China’s biggest gold producers, has been ordered to pay 30 million yuan (US$4.62 million)a by a local court in Fujian Province for a toxic spill last year that caused severe environmental pollution. Long Yan City court also issued prison terms ranging from three years to 42 months to five of Zijin’s staff, who were found to be involved in the incident, Zijin said in a statement yesterday. The leak of wastewater containing acidic copper from its Zijinshan Copper Mine spilled into the Ting River in July, killing or poisoning thousands of fish and affecting water supplies for about 60,000 people.
CONGLOMERATES
Siemens Q2 profit surges
German industrial giant Siemens yesterday reported a healthy rise in net profit for its second quarter ending March and raised its earnings forecast for the current fiscal year. Second-quarter net profit was 2.8 billion euros (US$4.1 billion), up from 1.5 billion euros in the year-earlier period. Sales rose 7 percent to 17.7 billion euros, while orders surged 28 percent to 20.7 billion euros. “We’ve achieved outstanding, broad-based order growth. We’re raising our earnings forecast for fiscal 2011 to at least 7.5 billion euros,” CEO Peter Loescher said in a statement.
BANKING
BNP profit up on lower costs
BNP Paribas yesterday announced a 14.6 percent rise in first-quarter net profit to 2.62 billion from 2.28 billion euros a year earlier. The company attributed the strong performance in part to the reduced cost of its risks: It had 919 million euros of outstanding customer loans, down 418 million euros on the same period last year. It also made further cost savings from the integration of its 2009 acquisition of Fortis and strong performances from all its units, it said.
AUTOMOBILES
BMW sales boost profits
German luxury carmaker BMW said net profit in the first quarter rose strongly to 1.21 billion euros, as sales rose all around the world, particularly in China. That’s up from last year’s 324 million euros. Revenues rose 29 percent to 16.04 billion euros. Sales of the company’s BMW, Mini and Rolls-Royce brands rose 13 percent in Europe, 17 percent in North America and 72 percent in China.
TELECOMS
RIM to use Microsoft’s Bing
Research In Motion (RIM) will use Microsoft’s Bing services on new BlackBerry smartphones. Microsoft Corp CEO Steve Ballmer made the announcement on Tuesday at RIM’s annual BlackBerry World conference in Orlando, Florida. Bing director Matt Dahlin outlined the plans on the Bing Search Blog, saying that BlackBerrys shipped to wireless carriers would use Bing as its default search and map services. Bing will be the BlackBerry browser’s preferred search engine. RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook tablet already uses Bing for search and maps.
RETAIL
Amazon debuts sales site
Amazon on Tuesday unveiled a membership-only private sales site called Myhabit.com offering designer and boutique brands. The Seattle, Washington-based online retail giant said Myhabit.com would offer up to 60 percent off list prices on selected fashion products, such as designer clothing through daily events. “Myhabit gives fashion customers an elegant and easy-to-use online destination for private sale shopping,” Myhabit president Maria Renz said in a statement.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts