E-COMMERCE
PayPal going in-store
EBay Inc’s PayPal e-commerce payment business plans to let shoppers pay with its service in more than 2,000 Home Depot Inc stores by March, part of an effort to win customers away from credit-card companies. The company began a trial with shoppers this week in 51 of Home Depot’s home-improvement stores, primarily in the San Francisco area, PayPal spokesman Anuj Nayar said. It intends to extend the offer to all national locations, about 2,200 stores, he said. PayPal, the fastest-growing part of eBay, aims to maintain that expansion by moving into the offline world, challenging Visa Inc and MasterCard Inc on their home turf. While eBay said payment volumes from in-store terminals will be “immaterial” to next year’s financial projections, it expects to profit from the shift during the next three to five years. The in-store service introduced this week lets consumers purchase items at checkout with a PayPal card or with a telephone number and pass code. PayPal will hold trials with 20 more retailers by the end of this year, Nayar said.
CHINA
Internet ads outpace print
China’s revenue from online advertising was higher than the equivalent in newsprint for the first time last year, a study by the market research firm iResearch said, quoted in the Global Times yesterday. Web advertising in the world’s second-largest economy generated 51.19 billion yuan (US$8.11 billion), while newsprint advertising brought in 45.36 billion yuan, iResearch said, a trend it predicted would continue this year. The three largest advertising platform providers last year in terms of revenue, according to Beijing-based iResearch, were Baidu (百度), dominant in the Chinese market, followed by Taobao’s (淘寶) e-commerce sites and search engine Google. At the end of last year, there were 513 million Internet users in China, up by 56 million over a year. About 194 million made purchases online — an increase of 20.8 percent, according to the China Internet Network Information Center.
UNITED STATES
More QE possible: analyst
The Federal Reserve may implement a third round of quantitative easing (QE) this spring to bolster the economy, Ira Jersey, director of US rates strategy at Credit Suisse in New York, said yesterday in a radio interview on Bloomberg Surveillance. The central bank has purchased US$2.3 trillion of mortgage and government bonds in two rounds of so-called QE. In September, it announced plans to sell US$400 billion of short-term debt and use the proceeds to buy an equal amount of longer-maturity securities to contain borrowing costs for companies and consumers. Jersey said a third stimulus effort may be more focused toward the housing market and buying mortgage-backed securities.
MANUFACTURING
GE posts profit rise
US conglomerate General Electric (GE) on Friday posted a 16 percent rise in profit for last year, but capped the year with a weak final quarter. GE reported full-year net profit of US$13.12 billion compared with US$11.34 billion in 2010. However, fourth-quarter profit fell 16 percent year-on-year to US$3.73 billion, the company said in a statement. Net revenues fell 2 percent to US$147.3 billion for the year and 8 percent for the quarter to $37.97 billion. Both figures were well below market expectations. Despite the tough October-December period, GE said its outlook for this year remained upbeat after winning record infrastructure orders of US$28.6 billion in the fourth quarter.
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
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts