FINANCE
KDB looks to buy HSBC unit
South Korea’s state-funded KDB Financial Group is interested in buying the local unit of global giant HSBC in a bid to expand its retail business before privatization, a bank official said yesterday. Yonhap news agency reported on Sunday that the group has been in talks to buy HSBC’s South Korea unit, which has 11 branches. HSBC plans to continue its corporate financing and investment banking businesses in South Korea, but hopes to end retail financing and sell local branches, Yonhap said. HSBC in May launched plans to save up to US$3.5 billion by 2013 and to axe 30,000 jobs globally over the next two years to streamline its operations.
GERMANY
Trade surplus grows
The nation’s trade surplus grew in August as exports rose for the first time in three months, official data showed yesterday. Europe’s biggest economy exported goods worth a total of 90.5 billion euros (US$122 billion) in August, 3.5 percent more than in July, the national statistics office Destatis said. Imports, on the other hand, stagnated at 76.7 billion euros, resulting in an increase in the trade surplus to 13.8 billion euros from 10.6 billion euros in July. Taking the eight months to August as a whole, the surplus has increased 3.5 percent to 101.5 billion euros.
UNITED STATES
Household income falls
Household incomes fell more in the two years following the end of the recession than during the downturn itself, according to a New York Times report published on its Web site late on Sunday. A study by two former Census Bureau officials said -inflation--adjusted income fell 6.7 percent, to US$49,909, between June 2009 — when the recession ended — and June this year, the newspaper said. During the recession — from December 2007 to June 2009 — household incomes fell just 3.2 percent, according to the report. The bigger drop in the two years since the recession officially ended suggests why many feel a growing sense of anxiety about the nation’s economic prospects even as the economy has been growing.
BRAZIL
Inflation to slow: Tombini
Inflation will begin to slow this month, central bank Governor Alexandre Tombini told a newspaper two days after official data disproved his previous forecast that rising prices would start slowing last month. Annualized inflation was 7.31 percent last month, a six-year high and well above the central bank’s upper limit of 6.5 percent, the government’s IPCA index showed on Friday. Prices rose 0.53 percent from August to last month because of a sharp rise in fuel prices. Tombini had been saying a few months ago that he expected inflation would peak in August.
RETAILING
China punishes Wal-Mart
Wal-Mart says it was ordered to close some of its 10 stores in the Chinese city of Chongqing (重慶) for 15 days following an investigation into the mislabeling of pork. The company said yesterday in a statement that it believed the closure was due to what it called the “green pork” incident, in which regular pork was labeled as organic, “by which the rights of consumers were infringed.” Some Wal-Mart employees were detained by police in Chongqing, a massive metropolis of more than 30 million people. Wal-Mart did not say exactly how many stores were told to close. It has 189 outlets in more than 100 Chinese cities.
ISSUES: Gogoro has been struggling with ballooning losses and was recently embroiled in alleged subsidy fraud, using Chinese-made components instead of locally made parts Gogoro Inc (睿能創意), the nation’s biggest electric scooter maker, yesterday said that its chairman and CEO Horace Luke (陸學森) has resigned amid chronic losses and probes into the company’s alleged involvement in subsidy fraud. The board of directors nominated Reuntex Group (潤泰集團) general counsel Tamon Tseng (曾夢達) as the company’s new chairman, Gogoro said in a statement. Ruentex is Gogoro’s biggest stakeholder. Gogoro Taiwan general manager Henry Chiang (姜家煒) is to serve as acting CEO during the interim period, the statement said. Luke’s departure came as a bombshell yesterday. As a company founder, he has played a key role in pushing for the
China has claimed a breakthrough in developing homegrown chipmaking equipment, an important step in overcoming US sanctions designed to thwart Beijing’s semiconductor goals. State-linked organizations are advised to use a new laser-based immersion lithography machine with a resolution of 65 nanometers or better, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said in an announcement this month. Although the note does not specify the supplier, the spec marks a significant step up from the previous most advanced indigenous equipment — developed by Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment Group Co (SMEE, 上海微電子) — which stood at about 90 nanometers. MIIT’s claimed advances last
CROSS-STRAIT TENSIONS: The US company could switch orders from TSMC to alternative suppliers, but that would lower chip quality, CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), whose products have become the hottest commodity in the technology world, on Wednesday said that the scramble for a limited amount of supply has frustrated some customers and raised tensions. “The demand on it is so great, and everyone wants to be first and everyone wants to be most,” he told the audience at a Goldman Sachs Group Inc technology conference in San Francisco. “We probably have more emotional customers today. Deservedly so. It’s tense. We’re trying to do the best we can.” Huang’s company is experiencing strong demand for its latest generation of chips, called
EUROPE ON HOLD: Among a flurry of announcements, Intel said it would postpone new factories in Germany and Poland, but remains committed to its US expansion Intel Corp chief executive officer Pat Gelsinger has landed Amazon.com Inc’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a customer for the company’s manufacturing business, potentially bringing work to new plants under construction in the US and boosting his efforts to turn around the embattled chipmaker. Intel and AWS are to coinvest in a custom semiconductor for artificial intelligence computing — what is known as a fabric chip — in a “multiyear, multibillion-dollar framework,” Intel said in a statement on Monday. The work would rely on Intel’s 18A process, an advanced chipmaking technology. Intel shares rose more than 8 percent in late trading after the