BRAZIL
Official warns on GDP target
The government has said it is unlikely to meet an economic growth forecast of 4.5 percent because of concerns about the eurozone. “If the crisis worsens or continues to worsen, if they do not resolve the problem of Greece, then it will be difficult to achieve a growth rate of 4.5 percent,” Finance Minister Guido Mantega said at a press conference on Monday. Mantega declined to make a new prediction for this year’s growth, but said he anticipated economic growth of between 4.5 percent and 5 percent in the second half of the year. Market analysts polled in a weekly central bank survey on Monday forecast a growth of between 3.09 percent and 3.2 percent. The country’s growth slumped to 2.7 percent last year after expanding by 7.5 percent the previous year.
INTERNET
YouTube marks seven years
YouTube celebrated its seventh birthday by saying it has hit fresh milestones in terms of its offerings and the amount of time spent on the video-sharing Web site. “Today 72 hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute,” the Google-owned Web site said in a blog post on Sunday. “All 800 million of you all over the world have shown us we’re on the right track by increasing subscriptions 50 percent and watching over 3 billion hours a month,” the blog added. Google bought YouTube in 2006 for US$1.65 billion.
TECHNOLOGY
Kodak patent suit fails
A US judge on Monday said a Kodak patent allegedly infringed upon by Apple and BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion (RIM) was not valid, dealing another blow to the struggling photography pioneer. Kodak planned to appeal the ruling to the full commission, with a decision expected in September. The patent was the subject of a complaint Kodak filed with the International Trade Commission in early 2010 that focused on the technology allowing users to preview pictures on LCD screens before snapping digital photographs.
COMPENSATION
Tim Cook is best-paid CEO
Apple chief executive Tim Cook topped the list of the best-paid CEOs in the US last year thanks to stock options that put him more than US$300 million above his next rival, a Wall Street Journal survey showed on Monday. Cook clocked in total compensation of US$378 million. He earned US$900,000 for his annual salary, US$900,000 for his annual incentives and US$376 million in restricted stock grants. Another Silicon Valley big gun, Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison, came in second place with less than a fifth of Cook’s pay, at US$76 million. The study, conducted by Hay Group for the Journal covered the 300 largest US public companies by revenue.
RETAIL
Marks & Spencer profit down
Bellwether British retailer Marks & Spencer posted a 1.2 percent fall in full-year underlying profit, its first decline in three years, as even its relatively older and more affluent customers were touched by the economic downturn. Britain’s biggest clothing retailer yesterday said it made a profit before tax and one-off items of £705.9 million (US$1.12 billion) in the year to March 31. That was down from the £714 million made in 2010-2011 and compares with analyst forecasts of between £675 million and £706 million. Full-year sales at the 128-year-old group rose 2 percent to £9.9 billion.
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