INTERNET
Saverin no longer American
Eduardo Saverin, the billionaire co-founder of Facebook Inc, renounced his US citizenship before an initial public offering (IPO) that values the social network at as much as US$96 billion, a move that may reduce his tax bill. Saverin, 30, joins a growing number of people giving up US citizenship ahead of a possible increase in tax rates for top earners. The Brazilian-born resident of Singapore is one of several people who helped Mark Zuckerberg start Facebook in a Harvard University dormitory and stand to reap billions of dollars after the world’s largest social network holds its IPO. Saverin’s name is on a list of people who chose to renounce citizenship as of April 30, published by the Internal Revenue Service. Saverin made the move “around September” last year, said Tom Goodman, a spokesman for Saverin.
AUSTRALIA
Unions back ‘Buffett Rule’
Australia’s trade unions said yesterday they would call on the government to introduce a millionaires’ tax similar to US President Barack Obama’s so-called “Buffett Rule.” The Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) said it wanted to ensure mining billionaires such as Clive Palmer, Andrew Forrest and Gina Rinehart paid a minimum tax on their incomes regardless of how they were derived. “The income tax system is absurdly inequitable when it comes to taxing the mega-rich,” ACTU assistant secretary Tim Lyons said. Lyons said the ACTU policy would be similar to top-end tax changes debated recently in the US requiring those earning more than US$1 million per year to pay at least 30 percent in taxes. The ACTU proposal would be aimed at millionaires whose main income was from capital gains and would require them to pay at least as much tax, proportional to income, as ordinary working Australians, Lyons said.
JAPAN
Profits up post-tsunami
Publicly traded firms in Japan expect their combined pre-tax profit to rise 24 percent in the current fiscal year, leaving behind a year hit by natural disasters, a survey said yesterday. Overall sales are seen to rise 6 percent for the year to March next year, the sharpest gain since the global financial crisis of 2008 that followed the spectacular failure of US investment bank Lehman Brothers, the Nikkei newspaper said. Automakers should lead the gains, as they expect a rebound in production on growing demand in emerging economies and the key US market, the leading business daily said. The seven major automakers project a combined pretax profit of ¥2.74 trillion (US$34.27 billion), up about ¥1.3 trillion from the previous year, it said.
EUROZONE
Weidmann warns Hollande
Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann warned French president-elect Francois Hollande yesterday against tampering with the European Central Bank or the EU fiscal pact. “Any modification in the statutes [of the European Central Bank] would be dangerous,” Weidman said in an interview with the daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung, when asked about Hollande’s proposal during his electoral campaign to allow the ECB to take measures to support the economy or lend directly to states. With regard to Hollande’s campaign pledge to renegotiate the European fiscal pact, he said “it is clear that must be refused.” “There is a European custom that you keep to accords you have signed,” he said. His comments come ahead of Hollande’s visit to Berlin this week, when he is due to have talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Tuesday evening.
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],”
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
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