INDIA
August sets inflation record
Inflation climbed to its highest in more than a year as prices of food and manufactured goods surged, reinforcing the case for another rate hike tomorrow despite weakening growth and a worsening global outlook. The wholesale price index rose 9.78 percent last month, higher than the 9.22 percent recorded for July, the Department of Commerce said in a statement in New Delhi yesterday. The Reserve Bank of India has raised interest rates 11 times in 18 months, but inflation remains at more than twice its comfort level. The bank’s inflation comfort zone is 4 percent to 4.5 percent.
CHIPMAKING
Intel, Google team up
Intel on Tuesday announced that it has teamed with Google to tailor chips to get top performance out of smartphones powered by the Internet giant’s Android software. The alliance with the world’s largest computer chipmaker came as Google ramped up its push into the hot smartphone market with a deal to buy Motorola Mobility for US$12.5 billion. The joint effort by Google and Intel is aimed at quickly bringing to market a family of Atom processors that will drive Android smartphones, Intel chief executive Paul Otellini said.
INVESTMENT
GE wants to buy back shares
General Electric Co says it is offering to pay US$3.3 billion to buy back preferred shares bought by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc during the depths of the financial crisis. GE said in a regulatory filing on Tuesday that it has mailed its offer to Berkshire, which is based in Omaha, Nebraska. The US$3.3 billion price for the shares includes a 10 percent premium. GE, based in Fairfield, Connecticut, is also offering to pay accrued and unpaid dividends through the redemption date of Oct. 17. Berkshire invested US$3 billion in GE in October 2008. The move amounted to a huge vote of confidence in the iconic company that had been battered by the financial meltdown.
AUTOMOBILES
Toyota up to speed in US
Toyota Motor Corp resumed full production at all North American plants this week and said it will expand US output of small engines as Japan’s largest automaker works to boost sales slowed by a March earthquake. As of this week, “all plants and suppliers in North America are at full speed, and most are working overtime,” Steve St Angelo, executive vice president for North American engineering and manufacturing, told reporters on Tuesday in Torrance, California. “Our parts problems are now behind us.”
Toyota will also add production of four-cylinder engines at its plant in Huntsville, Alabama, he said. The company will hire 240 more workers at the factory, he said.
CLOTHING
Japan’s Fast moving quickly
Japan’s Fast Retailing, the operator of cheap-chic clothing chain Uniqlo, yesterday said it aimed to open 200 to 300 stores per year worldwide as part of efforts to ramp up its global presence. The company also said it aimed to boost its sales to ¥1.7 trillion (US$22 billion) by 2015, a two-fold jump from ¥836 billion it projected for the year to last month. The company will open its two largest outlets in the world in New York next month. The company currently operates stores in New York’s Soho district, London, Paris, Shanghai and Taipei, in addition to Japan, where Fast Retailing has 840 outlets.
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
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],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained