JAPAN
Jobless rate rises slightly
Japan’s unemployment rate rose slightly last month, official data showed yesterday, with analysts highlighting the struggling electronics sector as contributing to job losses. The jobless rate edged up to 4.6 percent from 4.5 percent in March, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications said. However, positive data showing household spending on the rise gave hope amid a lumbering economic recovery. Household spending last month rose an inflation-adjusted 2.6 percent from a year earlier, higher than an average 2.2 percent growth forecast by economists.
INVESTMENT
India mulls new measures
India is looking at ways to attract new capital flows from foreign investors as a way to bolster its ailing currency, a senior finance ministry official said on Monday. The Indian rupee hit an unprecedented string of all-time lows last week, falling as low as 56.38 rupees to the US dollar, but it rose on Monday to a one-week high of 55.18 rupees as investors took profits on the greenback. The government is expected to announce this week steps that could include easing rules for overseas retail investors to buy local shares or bonds, said the official, who did not wish to be named.
INVESTMENT
POSCO India mill completed
South Korea’s POSCO, the world’s third-largest steelmaker by output, yesterday said it had completed construction of its first steel mill in India. The mill in the west-central state of Maharashtra is capable of producing 450,000 tonnes of hot galvanized steel plate per year for cars and household goods for domestic and export sales. POSCO also plans to open a 300,000-tonne electric steel plate facility by October next year and a 1.8 million tonne cold-rolled mill in June 2014 in Maharashtra.
AUTOMAKERS
New York to use Nissan cabs
Nissan Motor Co is supplying New York City with fuel-efficient cabs, including six electric cars for testing, but acknowledged uncertainties about the ongoing war over charging standards for electric vehicles. Nissan yesterday said its gasoline-engine NV200 vehicles, painted yellow, will start operating as New York taxis in October next year. Six Leaf electric vehicles will be part of a pilot program this year.
TRADING
Marubeni to buy Gavilon
Japanese trading house Marubeni Corp is to buy US grains merchant Gavilon for US$3.6 billion excluding debt, the company said yesterday. Gavilon is the third-biggest US grain merchant in terms of the size of its marketing network, behind Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill, and also has large energy and fertilizer trading assets. Marubeni, Japan’s fifth-largest trading company, had been in advanced talks to buy Gavilon since early this month.
INSURANCE
Prudential names new chair
UK insurer Prudential PLC has named Paul Manduca as chairman, succeeding Harvey McGrath, who is retiring. Manduca has been an independent non-executive director of Prudential since October 2010 and became senior independent director in January last year. Prudential said on Monday that Manduca would assume his £600,000 (US$941,000) a year role on July 2, taking over from McGrath, who had weathered criticism over Prudential’s failed £22 billion bid for Asian insurer AIA in 2010.
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