UNITED KINGDOM
Q2 GDP edged up 0.2%
Economic recovery remained lackluster after official figures released yesterday showed GDP rising by only 0.2 percent in the second quarter of the year. The preliminary growth figure, which is subject to revision, was in line with market expectations. The weak second quarter followed six months of essentially no growth, with a drop of 0.5 percent in the fourth quarter of last year followed by a gain of 0.5 percent in the first quarter.
INTERNET
Baidu profit surges 95%
Baidu Inc (百度), which operates China’s dominant search engine, said yesterday its quarterly profit jumped 95 percent on traffic growth and strong spending by big advertising customers. Profit for the three months ending June 30 was US$252.6 million and revenue rose 78.4 percent from a year earlier to 3.4 billion yuan (US$528.4 million), the Beijing-based company said. Baidu expects continued strong growth this year and forecast a 75.1 percent to 79.5 percent increase in total revenue for the July-to-September quarter.
INTERNET
Google buys PittPatt
Google on Monday said it had bought a computer vision startup spun out of the robotics institute at Carnegie Mellon University. The California-based Internet giant did not disclose the financial terms of its deal to buy Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition, referred to as “PittPatt,” which was launched in 2004. The founders of the company specialized in enabling machines to identify objects and spatial relationships between them.
SEMICONDUCTORS
ARM sales beat estimates
ARM Holdings PLC, the designer of chips used in Apple Inc’s iPhones, posted second-quarter revenues of £117.8 million (US$191 million), higher than the £109 million estimate in a Bloomberg survey of analysts. ARM predicted that revenue for the second half would be in line with market expectations. Meanwhile, French-Italian chipmaker STMicroelectronics reported on Monday disappointing quarterly results and a weak sales outlook. The company said second-quarter net profit rose 18 percent from a year ago to US$420 million on sales of US$2.57 billion. However, it warned that sales in the third quarter would be 2 to 5 percent lower than the second quarter.
INTERNET
Netflix warns of slow growth
US video giant Netflix reported on Monday revenue rose 52 percent in the second quarter to US$789 million, short of the US$791.5 million expected by Wall Street analysts, and said it expected slower US subscriber growth this quarter. Net profit was up 55 percent to US$68 million. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said in a letter to shareholders he expected a recent pricing change to result in some US subscribers dropping the Internet streaming and DVD-by-mail service.
TELECOMS
RIM to lay off 2,000
Faced with tough competition and falling profits, BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd (RIM) is cutting 2,000 jobs as part of a cost-savings plan announced last month and is shuffling some senior executives. The job cuts amount to about 10 percent of the company’s workforce. The company said on Monday it would notify affected employees this week. RIM also said it was naming two executives to take on different parts of the role of chief operating officer, after Don Morrison went on medical leave last month.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to