UNITED KINGDOM
Laziness to blame: Hague
There is only one way Britons can drag their country out of recession: “work harder,” Foreign Secretary William Hague said in an interview published yesterday. Hague said the national work ethic had been declining for decades, with people convinced they could “live on expanded debt forever, rather than having to earn what we spend.” The country sank back in recession last month after the economy shrank again in the first quarter, but the government has stuck by its deep spending cuts despite concerns they undermine growth. Hague told the Sunday Telegraph newspaper that grumbling business leaders “should be getting on with the task of creating more of those jobs and more of those exports, rather than complaining about it.” He urged people to “get on the plane, go and sell things overseas, go and study overseas.”
SAUDI ARABIA
Growth, surplus forecast
The economy would expand 3.9 percent this year and growth will quicken to 4.4 percent next year, National Commercial Bank said. The government would have a fiscal surplus of 317.4 billion riyals (US$84.6 billion), or 14 percent of GDP, with an average crude oil price of US$105 a barrel for Arab Light this year, the Jeddah-based bank said on Saturday. The country would produce an average of 9.4 million barrels a day of oil this year, it said. “Growth in non-oil sectors, particularly construction, manufacturing and wholesale and retail trade, will also remain robust this year, mainly due to strong private and public investment and consumption spending,” the bank said.
BANKING
Barclays eyes MENA sales
Barclays PLC, Britain’s second-biggest bank, is seeking to boost revenue from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) by as much as 25 percent annually over the next five years and will hire about 100 people in the region this year. Revenue “aspirations are in the range” of a 20 to 25 percent compound annual increase, helped by the wealth, investment management and trade finance businesses, John Vitalo, chief executive officer for the Middle East and North Africa, said in an interview in Dubai earlier this month. The bank will add about 100 people to its existing staff of a 1,000 in the region, he said.
UNITED STATES
California deficit grows
California Governor Jerry Brown said his state’s budget deficit grew to US$16 billion amid a tepid economic recovery that sapped tax collections even as actions by the federal government and courts blocked cost-cutting measures. The shortfall has widened from the US$9.2 billion Brown estimated in January, after last month’s income-tax revenue missed budget forecasts by US$2 billion. He is set to unveil a revised spending plan today and said he would need to make cuts even deeper than he has already proposed.
CHEMICALS
Man pleads guilty to theft
A scientist accused of stealing secret formulas from a Utah chemistry company has pleaded guilty to a US federal computer charge. Prabhu Mohapatra entered the plea on Friday in US District Court to one count of unlawful access to a protected computer, in exchange for prosecutors dropping 25 other charges against him, the Deseret News reported. Mohapatra, 42, had worked for North Logan-based Frontier Scientific Inc from 2009 to last year. He admitted to accessing a company chemical resource notebook and e-mailing the formula for meso-Tetraphenylporphine to his brother-in-law in India.
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