ISRAEL
Crowds protest living costs
Tens of thousands of people gathered across the country on Saturday to call for lower living costs in an effort to show the government their protest movement has countrywide support. The gatherings followed a rally last weekend in Tel Aviv, in which more than 250,000 demonstrators called for economic reform. It was the biggest socio-economic protest the country of 7.7 million has ever seen. Past demonstrations on such a scale in the country have usually been over issues of war and peace, but on Saturday rallies from Haifa and Afula in the north of the country to the resort town of Eilat in the far south all focused on “social justice.” The protests have put pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who last week named a panel of 14 experts led by economist Manuel Trajtenberg to deliver proposals for changes within a month.
ECONOMY
Soros proffers advice
George Soros, the US speculator turned billionaire philanthropist, has suggested both Greece and Portugal quit the EU and the eurozone because of their massive debts. “One has so mishandled the Greek problem that the best way forward at present might be an orderly exit,” with Greece leaving both the EU and the euro common currency, he said in an interview yesterday in the German magazine Der Spiegel. He suggested the same might go for Portugal. “The EU and the euro would survive it,” he added. Soros also suggested the time had come for eurozone members to accept the introduction of euro bonds. “Whether you like it or not, the euro exists. And for it to function properly, countries sharing the currency must be able to refinance part of their debt under the same conditions,” he said.
AUTOMOBILES
BMW agrees to extension
Luxury automaker BMW said on Saturday it had agreed to a contract extension for employees at a California warehouse following a union dispute that had threatened to go national. The Teamsters, a nationwide union with about 1.4 million members, had said the company planned to lay off the workers at the end of this month before re-opening the facility with a lower-paid workforce. “Many of these employees have worked at BMW for decades,” said Bob Lennox of Teamsters Local 495, which represented the 68 workers. “They were facing foreclosures on their homes and the loss of their health insurance at a time of record unemployment in southern California.”
BANKING
ICBC executive found guilty
A former senior executive of Chinese banking giant ICBC (中國工商銀行) has been found guilty of accepting hundreds of thousands of Hong Kong dollars, bottles of wine and a watch as bribes, Hong Kong’s anti-graft watchdog said. Chan Yick-yiu (陳翊耀), former head of real estate and finance of the bank’s Hong Kong unit, was convicted over the handling of loan applications, the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) said in a statement late on Saturday. The 44-year-old was found guilty by a district court on Saturday over nine counts of charges, including accepting HK$2.5 million (US$321,000) in cash, five bottles of red wine and a luxury watch from a businessman. The ICAC said the judge ruled that the prosecution had “proved beyond reasonable doubt” on all charges against Chan, who was accused of helping the businessman and his firms to prepare credit proposals for loan applications. The former banker will be sentenced tomorrow.
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