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.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by