ELECTRONICS
Panasonic fined 7.7m euros
Japanese electronics giant Panasonic yesterday said it has been fined 7.7 million euros (US$10.3 million) for violating European competition law in connection with sales of refrigerator parts. The firm said it had been “fully cooperating” in a European Commission probe on compressors, which are used to cool refrigerators and freezers, that Panasonic and other manufacturers sold in Europe. On Wednesday, the commission said it had fined the firm and three others — Italy’s ACC, Denmark’s Danfoss and Brazilian firm Embraco — a total of 161.2 million euros for running a price-fixing cartel from April 2004 until October 2007. Panasonic said the fine would have no material impact on its financial forecast for the fiscal year ending in March.
CONGLOMERATE
McGraw-Hill plans to split
McGraw-Hill Companies Inc launched a new US$500 million accelerated share repurchase program and said it will cut about 550 jobs from its textbook unit as it proceeds to split into two companies. Chief executive Terry McGraw, a great-grandson of the founder, said he would head the new company, which will hold the ratings business, the S&P stock index business and market information and research services. The other company, to be called McGraw-Hill Education, will reduce its executive ranks by about 20 percent and its workforce by about a tenth, the company said in a statement on Wednesday. Most of the education reductions are expected to take place in the fourth quarter, the company said.
MACHINERY
Japan orders drop 6.9%
Japan’s core private-sector machinery orders, a leading indicator of corporate capital spending, fell 6.9 percent in October from the previous month, official data showed yesterday. The core data, which exclude volatile demand from power companies and for ships, was worse than the market expectation of a small rise. The drop followed an 8.2 percent fall in September. Meanwhile, Japan’s current account surplus fell 62.4 percent from a year earlier in October as the nation slipped into a trade deficit on weak exports, government data showed.
INTERNET
Facebook fixes picture bug
Facebook has fixed a bug that allowed the viewing of some private photographs of other members and which was reportedly used to access personal pictures of founder Mark Zuckerberg. The bug involved Facebook’s system of reporting inappropriate images on the social network. By reporting a member’s profile picture as inappropriate, a user was asked whether they had other photographs to report, providing access to other private pictures. The glitch was first revealed in a bodybuilding forum at bodybuilding.com.
SMARTPHONES
Rim denied use of ‘BBX’
Research In Motion Ltd was barred by a federal judge from using Basis International Ltd’s “BBX” trademark at an industry conference in Asia that began on Wednesday. US District Judge William Johnson in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on Tuesday ruled that RIM can’t use the BBX trademark at the DevCon conference in Singapore. Basis is likely to win its trademark-infringement claims against RIM, and consumers are “likely to be confused by RIM’s use of BBX in connection with RIM’s goods and services,” Johnson wrote in the ruling.
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