Tokyo Electric Power Co president Masataka Shimizu, the utility behind the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, apologized at his company’s Tokyo headquarters yesterday and said he was standing down to take responsibility for the nuclear crisis.
“I wanted to take managerial responsibility and bring a symbolic close,” he told reporters, bowing several times during the news conference. “We are doing our utmost to settle the crisis.”
Three reactors at the company’s Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant went into meltdown after a March 11 earthquake triggered a tsunami that destroyed the plant’s cooling systems. Efforts to stop leaking -radiation and get the reactors under control have been a perilous struggle and are expected to continue into next year.
The move was widely expected as heads of major Japanese companies are expected to step down to take responsibility for even lesser scandals and problems.
TEPCO reported that its losses for the fiscal year ending in March totaled ¥1.25 trillion (US$15 billion). TEPCO recorded a profit of nearly ¥134 billion the previous fiscal year.
Overall losses from the disaster are expected to be far bigger, including compensation for the thousands of people forced to evacuate from their homes around the plant and businesses such as farms that say produce was damaged by radiation.
TEPCO must also shoulder the cost of resolving the problems at the reactors, as well as restarting other non-nuclear power plants, to make up for the electricity shortfall.
The government has been studying possible bailouts, including using contributions from other utilities and taxpayer money to help TEPCO deal with the towering costs.
TEPCO has been criticized for being unprepared for the tsunami despite certain scientific evidence that earthquake-prone Japan could be hit with a wave of that size. It has also been criticized for being slow and lacking transparency in disclosing information about the plant’s problems.
Separately, Japan’s central bank kept its key interest rate unchanged at virtually zero yesterday to shore up the nation’s quake-battered economy.
The Bank of Japan’s nine-member policy board voted unanimously at a meeting to keep the overnight call rate target at zero to 0.1 percent. The decision was widely expected.
The move came a day after Japan’s government said the world’s No. 3 economy shrank in the first quarter of this year, veering back into recession as factory production and consumer spending wilted in the aftermath of March 11.
Japan’s economy contracted at an annualized rate of 3.7 percent in the quarter. Exports also went south in March for the first time in 16 months. Companies are -reporting lower earnings and a diminished outlook for the rest of the fiscal year.
The central bank warned yesterday that Japan’s economy would face “strong downward pressure” for the time being as a result of tumbling production and falling exports in the wake of the March twin disasters.
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