EUROPE
Croatia gets EU green light
EU leaders gave the go-ahead on Friday for Croatia to join the organization, after six years of preparations marred by slow democratic reforms in Zagreb and the EU’s reluctance to expand. The former Yugoslav state of 4.4 million people should be able to wrap up accession negotiations next week, they said at a summit in Brussels. The recommendation marks a turnaround for Croatia, which struggled for years to convince the EU’s 27 governments that its judicial reforms would produce genuine results and prove it has recognized its role in the Balkan wars in the 1990s. However, its efforts will face more EU scrutiny, and its hopes of joining the EU in July 2013 could be jeopardized if reform slip-ups persuade some of the EU’s national parliaments to delay ratifying the accession treaty.
UNITED STATES
Obama touts manufacturing
President Barack Obama said a government program to encourage the creation of advanced manufacturing jobs will help spur US economic growth. In his weekly address on the radio and Internet, Obama touted a US$500 million program that helps companies and universities develop new manufacturing technologies. “Their mission is to come up with a way to get ideas from the drawing board to the manufacturing floor to the marketplace as swiftly as possible, which will help create quality jobs, and make our businesses more competitive,” Obama said in the address recorded on Friday at Carnegie Mellon University, one of the schools benefiting from the program.
SPAIN
Budget cut of 4% proposed
The government on Friday proposed cutting government spending by nearly 4 percent next year to reduce a bloated deficit that has investors worried the country may become the next European country to need a bailout. Finance Minister Elena Salgado said central government spending in the proposed plan for next year would be 117.4 billion euros (US$167 billion), down 3.8 percent from this year. Salgado said the country remains committed to reducing its deficit from 9.2 percent of GDP last year to 6 percent this year and 4.4 percent next year, then down to the EU “limit” of 3 percent in 2013.
INVESTMENT
Baidu moves into travel
Chinese search engine Baidu (百度) has agreed to invest US$306 million in domestic travel Web site Qunar (去哪兒) as it seeks to cash in on the booming tourism market in China. Baidu, which dominates the Chinese search market after Google retreated following a spat with Beijing over censorship and cyber attacks last year, will take a majority stake in the travel search engine, Baidu said late on Friday. “Travel has long been one of the top categories on Baidu and the number of travelers in China has been growing very rapidly, so this is a market of obvious strategic importance to us,” chief financial officer Jennifer Li (李昕晢) said in a statement.
CHINA
Hungary loaned 1bn euros
Beijing “is willing” to purchase “a certain amount” of Hungarian government bonds and has agreed to extend a 1 billion euro loan to finance development projects, Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) said. The state development bank will provide the credit line, Wen said at a press conference in Budapest yesterday. Beijing wants to boost bilateral trade with Hungary to US$20 billion by 2015, Wen said.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
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
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
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],”