OIL
Shell to build FLNG plant
Royal Dutch Shell PLC said it has decided to construct a massive natural gas plant for use off the Australian coast. Shell did not say how much the “Prelude FLNG” (floating liquid natural gas) facility would cost to build, but claimed that it would be the world’s largest floating manmade object. It would be designed to take in the equivalent of 110,000 barrels a day in gas from undersea fields 200km off the coast and cool it into liquefied natural gas. Shell said the facility, to be built in a South Korean shipyard, will be longer than six football fields and made of 260,000 tonnes of steel. Shell said yesterday that Prelude would operate for 25 years, and be able to withstand the worst hurricanes.
CHINA
High savings a problem
Central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan (周小川) said yesterday that too many people were saving too much money, which could lead to asset bubbles, adding that Beijing needed to find a way to promote growth and curb inflation. The nation’s savings rate is one of the highest in the world, standing at about 50 percent of GDP last year — much higher than developed economies. Zhou also reiterated that Beijing would take a “gradual” approach to making the yuan fully convertible, as it continues to promote the international status of the currency.
JAPAN
Sales tax hike considered
The government is considering raising sales tax from 5 percent to 10 percent by 2015 to fund rising social security costs, the Yomiuri newspaper said yesterday, although the economics minister said he had held no discussions on such a proposal. Prime Minister Naoto Kan has made social security and tax reform key to his policy agenda and the government wants to include the tax hike proposal in a welfare and tax reform plan it aims to draft by next month, the Yomiuri reported without citing sources. The sales tax rate in Japan, saddled with public debt double the size of its US$5 trillion economy, is among the lowest in major economies. The extra revenue generated from the 5 percentage-point hike, likely to be about ¥12.5 trillion (US$153 billion) a year, would be used to fund welfare costs such as medical and nursing care for the elderly, the Yomiuri said.
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