BANKING
UBS shifts strategy
Swiss bank UBS will slash risky assets by almost half and shift focus back to wealth management as it pledged its first dividend since the financial crisis. UBS cut its return-on-equity target to between 12 percent and 17 percent for 2013, from the 15 percent to 20 percent it abandoned in July in the face of tough new capital rules and turbulent markets. UBS said it would cut staff at its investment bank to 16,500 by the end of 2013 and 16,000 by the end of 2016 from 18,000 now, mainly through attrition and restructuring. A UBS spokeswoman said that meant a net 400 to 500 more jobs would go on top of the 3,500 staff the bank said it would cut in August.
EQUITY MARKETS
Merger proposal revised
Stock market operators NYSE Euronext and Deutsche Boerse yesterday said they would sell parts of their derivatives activities in a bid to gain approval from the EU Commission for their merger. “NYSE Euronext and Deutsche Boerse today confirm that they have submitted a remedy proposal to the European Commission ... to divest the portions of their respective businesses in which they overlap,” the two groups said in a joint statement yesterday. The proposal was designed to address the commission’s remaining concerns about derivatives trading and clearing and would “eliminate the existing overlap in European single equity derivatives,” the statement said.
FINANCE
Iceland to make payment
Iceland is preparing to make its first payment to cover about US$11 billion in depositor losses in the UK and the Netherlands, as it moves closer to ending a three-year dispute with the two countries. Failed lender Landsbanki Islands hf, which sold the Icesave Internet accounts outside Iceland, has enough ready cash to pay about a third of the total owed “as soon as possible,” said Kristinn Bjarnason, a spokesman for the bank’s winding-up committee. “We believe that the value of the first interim payment could be 432 billion kronur [US$3.3 billion], using the exchange rate from April 22, 2009,” Bjarnason said late on Thursday.
BANKING
Lone Star told to cut stake
South Korea’s financial watchdog yesterday ordered US buyout fund Lone Star to sell the bulk of its stake in Korea Exchange Bank (KEB) within six months, clearing the way for the country’s biggest bank takeover. The Financial Services Commission said the Texas-based firm should lower its 51.02 percent holding in KEB to less than 10 percent by May 18, in a long-running case in which Lone Star’s former Seoul head was convicted of stock price manipulation. Yesterday’s decision paved the way for Lone Star to quit its investment in South Korea and expedite the sale of KEB, the country’s fifth-largest lender, to South Korea-based Hana Financial Group.
CAMERAS
Kodak selling photo site
US camera maker Eastman Kodak is seeking to sell its online photo sharing Web site as the company teeters on the verge of bankruptcy, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. The paper cited someone approached about the purchase as saying Kodak was seeking “hundreds of millions of dollars” for Kodak Gallery. The 131-year-old company has tapped photo-sharing Web sites, competitors, private-equity firms and retailers about a possible purchase of the online business said to boast 75 million users worldwide. Users can store their photos on the Web site and share them.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to