CREDIT
Formosa ratings steady
Taiwan Ratings Corp (中華信評) said yesterday credit ratings for the four core companies of the conglomerate Formosa Plastics Group (台塑集團) were not immediately affected by the fire that broke out earlier last week at the group’s complex in Mailiao (麥寮), Yunlin County. According to the ratings agency, Formosa Plastics has sufficiently diversified its business and stocked up on inventory, so it should be able to weather the impact of the fire for now. The four core units of the group are Formosa Plastics Corp (台塑), Nan Ya Plastics Corp (南亞塑膠), Formosa Chemicals & Fibre Corp (台灣化學纖維) and Formosa Petrochemical Corp (台塑石化). All four units are rated “twAA-” by the agency for their long-term debt and “twA-1+” for their short-term credit with a stable outlook.
SPORTSWEAR
Yao Ming sues over name
Chinese news reports say that injured NBA all-star Yao Ming (姚明) has sued a sportswear maker for allegedly using his name and logo to sell its products. The Xinhua News Agency reported late on Friday that Yao had sued Wuhan Yunhe Sharks Sportswear Co (武漢雲鶴大鯊魚體育用品公司) for using his name and logo, “Yao Ming Era,” on its shoes. It said the lawsuit was filed in Wuhan, Hubei Province. The Houston Rockets center, who has a licensing agreement with Reebok, is currently recovering from a possible career-threatening ankle injury.
INTERNET
Blogger back in action
Google’s Blogger was back up on Friday after suffering an outage that knocked the blogging platform used by millions offline for over 20 hours. “We’re very sorry that you’ve been unable to publish to Blogger for the past 20.5 hours,” Blogger manager Eddie Kessler said in a post on the Blogger Buzz blog. “We use Blogger for our own blogs, so we’ve also felt your pain.” The outage was because of data corruption during scheduled maintenance work on Wednesday night, he said. Blogger is one of the world’s most popular blogging platforms and has millions of active blogs.
INTERNET
Amazon unit used by hackers
Amazon.com Inc’s Web Services cloud computing unit was used by hackers in last month’s attack against Sony Corp’s online entertainment systems, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Hackers using an alias signed up to rent a server through Amazon’s EC2 service and launched the attack from there, said the person, who requested anonymity. The account has been shut down, the person said. The development sheds light on how hackers used the so-called cloud to carry out the second-biggest online theft of personal information to date. The breach at Amazon is likely to call attention to concerns some businesses have voiced over the security of computing services delivered via others’ remote servers, referred to as cloud computing.
TECHNOLOGY
App trademarks challenged
Microsoft Corp and Nokia Oyj are among four technology companies challenging Apple Inc’s EU-wide trademarks for “Appstore” and “App Store.” Nokia, the world’s largest mobile phone maker, Microsoft, Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB and HTC Corp (宏達電) all filed separate requests on Thursday with the EU trademark agency in Alicante, Spain, seeking to invalidate Apple’s trademark rights. Apple’s App Store, started in 2008, offers downloads of programs from the company and third-party developers.
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
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],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained