INTEREST RATES
India raises repo rate
India’s central bank yesterday raised its key interest rate by a quarter percentage point to battle persistent inflation. The move follows a hike in gasoline prices by state-owned oil companies. The Reserve Bank of India raised its short-term lending rate — or repo rate — to 8.25 percent from 8 percent. The bank has lifted interest rates a dozen times over the last 18 months to tame inflation, particularly for food. Officials say slower growth will be the cost of controlling inflation, which was nearly 9.5 percent for the week ended Sept. 3. Overnight, state-owned oil companies raised gasoline prices by up to 3.32 rupees (US$0.07) a liter after a dip in the rupee’s exchange rate increased the cost of buying crude.
UNITED KINGDOM
Brace for more QE: Cable
The Bank of England should be ready to reopen its program of quantitative easing (QE) to prevent weak demand threatening the nation’s fragile recovery, Business Secretary Vince Cable said yesterday. “We cannot and will not allow the economy to fall into a trap of stagnation,” Cable said in a pamphlet for the CentreForum think tank outlining proposals to foster sustainable growth in the country. Cable highlighted the use of further quantitative easing in a list of five broad initiatives that could be taken to restore business and consumer demand, while maintaining the government’s tight fiscal plans to reduce a record deficit.
INTERNET
India users to triple: Google
Google expects India’s number of Internet users to triple by 2014 as telecom carriers invest in high-speed wireless infrastructure and smartphones become cheaper, a report said yesterday. Google’s country head in India, Rajan Anandan, told the Wall Street Journal that the company forecasts India would have at least 300 million Internet users by 2014, up from about 100 million now. With just 8 percent of its 1.2 billion population online, India is already the third-largest Internet market by users, behind China and the US. However, for India to increase Internet use, it is also crucial that mobile handset makers bring out smartphones at prices which India’s masses can afford, Anandan said.
INVESTMENT
Stockholder sues HP
Hewlett-Packard (HP) is being sued by a stockholder, who accuses executives of painting a deceptively rosy picture of the computer company’s prospects. Richard Gammel filed a suit in the federal court in southern California and asked a judge to give it class-action status to represent everyone who acquired HP stock between Nov. 22 last year and Aug. 18. The world’s largest computer maker “issued materially false and misleading statements regarding the company’s business and financial results,” lawyers representing Gammel charged in court documents available online on Thursday. The suit specifically targeted HP chief executive Leo Apotheker and chief financial officer Catherine Lesjak.
AVIATION
Air France-KLM buys planes
Air France-KLM said it had ordered 50 long-haul planes from Airbus and Boeing and had the option to buy another 60. Europe’s largest airline by passengers said yesterday that the order was for 25 Airbus’ A350-900 and 25 Boeing’s 787-9 planes. None of the companies involved would say how much Air France-KLM agreed to pay, but the catalog prices for the planes would make the order worth US$12.1 billion.
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
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last
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