GERMANY
Unemployment rises
Headline unemployment rose last month, as is usual in the winter, but was unchanged in adjusted terms, official data showed yesterday. The jobless rate, which measures the proportion of people registered as unemployed against the working population as a whole, edged up to 7.4 percent last month from 7.3 percent in January. The data was provided on a raw or unadjusted basis by the Federal Labor Agency in Nuremberg. In raw terms, the total number of people out of work was up by 25,717 last month from January to stand at 3.11 million, the agency said in a statement.
BANKING
SC bank earnings rise
Standard Chartered (SC) bank notched up a ninth consecutive year of record earnings last year on the back of strong economic growth in Asia, though rising competition for staff pushed up its wages bill. London-based Standard Chartered, which makes more than three quarters of its profit in Asia, said yesterday that strong growth in Hong Kong and Singapore helped offset a 15 percent rise in staff costs and a fall in profits in two of its biggest markets, India and Korea. Total staff costs were US$6.6 billion, up from US$5.8 billion in 2010, but that was swelled by costs for a voluntary retirement plan in Korea, foreign exchange effects and the addition of 1,400 staff during the year. Standard Chartered reported a pretax profit of US$6.8 billion for last year, an increase of 11 percent from US$6.1 billion a year earlier.
TELECOMS
Samsung to splash cash
Samsung Electronics Co, the world’s second-largest handset maker, plans to “significantly” increase investment to bolster its mobile-phone operating system, pitching it as an alternative to Google Inc’s Android. “We want to have a full range of portfolio for Bada [operating system], from high-end to mass--volume segments,” Samsung’s senior vice president of product strategy Park Ju-ha said in an interview in Barcelona on Monday. The South Korean company has so far used Bada on models priced lower than the Galaxy range of devices. “It’s quite meaningful as a niche segment,” said Thomas Kang, a Seoul-based director of wireless smartphone strategies at Strategy Analytics. Samsung sold between 8 million and 9 million Bada phones last year, compared with 2 million a year earlier, Kang said. The company sold 97 million smartphones last year, topping 93 million for Apple’s iPhone, according to an estimate by Strategy Analytics.
HOUSING
UK mortgages increase
UK mortgage approvals rose to the highest level in more than two years in January as first-time buyers rushed to take advantage of a -property-tax exemption before it ends next month. Lenders granted 58,728 loans to buy homes, compared with 55,019 the previous month, the Bank of England said today in London. Economists predicted 54,000, according to the median of 18 forecasts in a Bloomberg News survey. It was the fourth successive monthly increase and the biggest since June 2009. The figures reflect the March 24 expiration of a two-year stamp-duty holiday for first-time buyers purchasing a home for less than £250,000 (US$396,000). Rising unemployment and weak consumer confidence could yet dampen demand in coming months. The ending of the stamp-duty holiday, introduced by the previous Labour government in an effort spur the property market, will add as much as £2,500 to the cost of purchasing a home for many new buyers.
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
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],”
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day