PHARMACEUTICALS
Takeda to buy Nycomed
Japan’s top drugmaker, Takeda Pharmaceutical, has reached a US$12 billion deal to buy Swiss drugmaker Nycomed, a report said yesterday. Takeda has struck a basic agreement and is expected to make a formal announcement soon, the Nikkei business daily said in its evening edition. It will be the largest ever acquisition by a Japanese drugmaker and make Takeda the world’s 10th largest pharmaceutical company, it said.
INTERNET
Baidu to pay damages
Chinese Web giant Baidu (百度) has been ordered to pay damages of more than US$75,000, the maximum penalty available, to a literary Web site after losing a copyright suit, state media said yesterday. A Shanghai court has ruled that Baidu should pay 500,000 yuan (US$76,950) in compensation to Shanda Literature (盛大文學), a content provider Web site, for violating the company’s copyright, the Global Times said. Baidu spokesman Kaiser Kuo (郭怡廣) said the company has appealed the ruling.
FINANCE
BofA Merrill Lynch fined
Hong Kong’s securities watchdog says it has fined a unit of Bank of America (BofA) Merrill Lynch HK$3 million (US$386,000) over the sales of some financial products to clients in 2007. The Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) said yesterday it also issued a reprimand to Merrill Lynch (Asia Pacific) Ltd over the sales of the index-linked notes to 72 clients. The SFC said an investigation found Merrill Lynch failed to “properly assess the financial situation and investment objectives” of 40 clients.
JAPAN
Current-account surplus down
Japan’s current-account surplus narrowed more than expected in March as a record earthquake disrupted the nation’s supply chain, curbing exports. The gap shrank 34 percent from a year earlier to ¥1.68 trillion (US$21 billion), the Finance Ministry said yesterday. Exports fell 1.4 percent and imports increased 16.6 percent, the ministry said. The ministry also said in a separate report yesterday that Japan fell into a trade deficit of ¥786.8 billion in the first 20 days of April. Exports fell 12.7 percent year-on-year, the sharpest fall since Oct. 1 to Oct. 20 in 2009, while imports rose 14.2 percent.
FINANCE
Treasury selling AIG stock
American International Group (AIG) and the US Treasury said on Wednesday they would sell just under US$9 billion in AIG stock, suggesting the government’s exit from its crisis-era investment will be more difficult than originally thought. The US$9 billion figure is less than half of what had been contemplated earlier this year. Based on the government’s US$28.72 break-even point and the government’s total shareholding, the Treasury would have to raise just over US$47.5 billion in total from AIG share sales to break even.
SOFTWARE
Oversight of Microsoft ends
US Department of Justice oversight of Microsoft ended yesterday, more than a decade after the US authorities filed an historic anti-trust lawsuit against the US software giant. “Microsoft no longer dominates the computer industry as it did when the complaint was filed in 1998,” the US Department of Justice said in a statement on Wednesday. As a result, the settlement with the Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft known as the “final judgment,” which has been in place since 2002, would expire yesterday, it said.
ISSUES: Gogoro has been struggling with ballooning losses and was recently embroiled in alleged subsidy fraud, using Chinese-made components instead of locally made parts Gogoro Inc (睿能創意), the nation’s biggest electric scooter maker, yesterday said that its chairman and CEO Horace Luke (陸學森) has resigned amid chronic losses and probes into the company’s alleged involvement in subsidy fraud. The board of directors nominated Reuntex Group (潤泰集團) general counsel Tamon Tseng (曾夢達) as the company’s new chairman, Gogoro said in a statement. Ruentex is Gogoro’s biggest stakeholder. Gogoro Taiwan general manager Henry Chiang (姜家煒) is to serve as acting CEO during the interim period, the statement said. Luke’s departure came as a bombshell yesterday. As a company founder, he has played a key role in pushing for the
China has claimed a breakthrough in developing homegrown chipmaking equipment, an important step in overcoming US sanctions designed to thwart Beijing’s semiconductor goals. State-linked organizations are advised to use a new laser-based immersion lithography machine with a resolution of 65 nanometers or better, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said in an announcement this month. Although the note does not specify the supplier, the spec marks a significant step up from the previous most advanced indigenous equipment — developed by Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment Group Co (SMEE, 上海微電子) — which stood at about 90 nanometers. MIIT’s claimed advances last
CROSS-STRAIT TENSIONS: The US company could switch orders from TSMC to alternative suppliers, but that would lower chip quality, CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), whose products have become the hottest commodity in the technology world, on Wednesday said that the scramble for a limited amount of supply has frustrated some customers and raised tensions. “The demand on it is so great, and everyone wants to be first and everyone wants to be most,” he told the audience at a Goldman Sachs Group Inc technology conference in San Francisco. “We probably have more emotional customers today. Deservedly so. It’s tense. We’re trying to do the best we can.” Huang’s company is experiencing strong demand for its latest generation of chips, called
EUROPE ON HOLD: Among a flurry of announcements, Intel said it would postpone new factories in Germany and Poland, but remains committed to its US expansion Intel Corp chief executive officer Pat Gelsinger has landed Amazon.com Inc’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a customer for the company’s manufacturing business, potentially bringing work to new plants under construction in the US and boosting his efforts to turn around the embattled chipmaker. Intel and AWS are to coinvest in a custom semiconductor for artificial intelligence computing — what is known as a fabric chip — in a “multiyear, multibillion-dollar framework,” Intel said in a statement on Monday. The work would rely on Intel’s 18A process, an advanced chipmaking technology. Intel shares rose more than 8 percent in late trading after the