MANUFACTURING
Panasonic expecting losses
Panasonic is expected to suffer a US$4 billion net loss in the year to March next year, despite an initial forecast of profit, after being hit by a global business downturn and a stronger yen, a report said yesterday. The Japanese company’s plan to scale back its money-losing television and semiconductor divisions is incurring restructuring costs which also hurt its balance sheet, the business daily Nikkei Shimbun reported. The electronics giant is now forecast to post a group net loss of ¥300 billion (US$3.96 billion) in the fiscal year, reversing a net profit of ¥74 billion for the preceding year, the report said. It would be the company’s first net loss in two years. Panasonic had earlier forecast a group net profit of ¥30 billion for the current fiscal year. The company is due to announce its April-September earnings today.
CHINA
New officials named
Beijing has appointed new chiefs for its three main financial regulators, state media reported, in a periodic shuffle of officials by the Chinese Communist Party. The moves comes as Beijing struggles with slowing economic growth and persistently high domestic inflation, which has prompted the government to keep a tight grip on credit. Shang Fulin (尚福林) will become head of the China Banking Regulatory Commission, shifting from his former post as chief of the market watchdog, the China Securities Regulatory Commission, Xinhua news agency reported late on Saturday. Guo Shuqing (郭樹清) would take over as boss of the securities regulator. He was most recently chairman of China Construction Bank, one of the nation’s top four state banks. Guo is also a former head of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, which helps oversee the country’s massive hard currency reserves, now standing at about US$3.2 trillion.
ISRAEL
Thousands march in Tel Aviv
Police say tens of thousands of people marched in Tel Aviv to express anger over the high cost of living. A wave of social protests swept the country this summer as people held mass rallys to protest a wide range of social issues, especially high housing costs. About 500,000 people demonstrated two months ago, but the movement has died down somewhat and protest encampments have been removed from major cities. Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said more than 30,000 people marched in Tel Aviv on Saturday night and thousands of others protested in Jerusalem. Another protest planned for the southern city of Beersheba was canceled when Gaza militants fired dozens of rockets at southern Israel.
PETROLEUM
Iran rules out meeting
Current OPEC president Iran does not envisage holding an emergency meeting of the oil producers’ group ahead of a scheduled session in December, Iran’s OPEC governor Mohammed Ali Khatibi was quoted as saying by the student news agency ISNA yesterday. “I find it improbable to have an OPEC emergency meeting because there is no emergency matter and the market is balanced,” he was quoted as saying. Price hawk Iran, along with African countries and Venezuela, blocked a Saudi-led proposal to increase output targets at OPEC’s last meeting on June 8, but Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates boosted output unilaterally afterward — a move Tehran criticized. On prices, Khatibi said: “The fall in the oil price is detrimental for all oil producers and exporters.”
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