BANKING
Japan mulls tighter rules
Japanese banking minister Tadahiro Matsushita said yesterday that Tokyo may usher in tighter insider trading laws amid a widening criminal probe into the practice, which is commonplace in the nation’s finance sector. Matsushita, head of Japan’s Financial Services Agency, made the comments a day after prosecutors arrested former SMBC Nikko Securities executive Hiroyoshi Yoshioka and three others on insider trading allegations. Yoshioka, 50, is suspected of leaking material information to the head of a Japanese finance company and his son, with the trio reportedly netting more than ¥2 million (US$25,000) from illegal trades.
SOFTWARE
Microsoft to buy Yammer
Microsoft is paying US$1.2 billion to buy Yammer, an Internet startup that has built a social network similar to Facebook for the business world. The deal announced on Monday comes nearly two weeks after word of Microsoft’s negotiations with Yammer first leaked out in published reports. Yammer, which is based in San Francisco, provides ways for companies to create private social networks for their employees. It has more than 5 million corporate users.
SOFTWARE
Quest receives larger bid
Quest Software Inc said on Monday that it received a higher buyout offer worth about US$2.32 billion from an unnamed buyer, continuing a battle for the technology services provider. The most recent offer of US$27.50 per share follows a string of increasing bids that began after the company announced in March that it was being bought by investment firm Insight Venture Partners for US$23 per share.
GERMANY
Confidence holds steady
German consumer confidence is continuing to hold up, even if fears are growing that Europe’s top economy will not remain unscathed by the debt crisis, a poll found yesterday, after a key Ifo business climate index last week fell to its lowest level in more than two years. Market research company GfK said its household confidence index was forecast to edge slightly higher to 5.8 points next month from 5.7 points for this month, a statement said.
REAL ESTATE
Housing business plummets
French new housing starts plummeted by 19.8 percent in the three months from March to last month from the level for same period last year, official data showed yesterday. The data indicates that an important part of the economy is flagging. On a sliding three-month basis, the result nonetheless represented an improvement from the February-April period, when housing starts fell by 22.5 percent, the housing ministry data showed. A total of 72,020 units were granted permits this time around.
ELECTRONICS
Panel to revisit Apple ruling
The US International Trade Commission (ITC) said on Monday it would revisit an initial ruling that Apple Inc infringed one of four patents asserted by Motorola Mobility, now a Google Inc unit. ITC judge Thomas Pender had said in a preliminary ruling that Apple infringed on a patent for eliminating noise and other interference during voice and data transmissions. Motorola Mobility had originally accused Apple of violating three other patents — including one for touchscreen technology — but the ITC judge found that the company infringed just one. The full commission is expected to issue a final ruling in August.
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