AUTOMAKERS
BMW net profit falls 28.1%
German luxury carmaker BMW yesterday said its net profit dropped sharply in the second quarter of the year despite strong sales growth in Asia, especially in China. Net profit was 1.28 billion euros (US$1.58 billion) in the April-to-June period, BMW said, a decline of 28.1 percent from the same period a year earlier. That was despite a 7.3 percent rise in revenue to 19.2 billion euros. The firm blamed high staff costs, greater expenditure on research and “intense market conditions” for the fall in net income.
BANKING
SG profit plummets 42%
Societe Generale SA (SG) yesterday said its net profit slumped sharply in the second quarter as the French bank continued its efforts to meet new international banking capital requirements. SG’s net income fell to 433 million euros in the three months to June, down 42 percent from 747 million euros a year earlier. The bank, which gained notoriety as the victim of convicted fraudster Jerome Kerviel, said in a statement that it expected business conditions to “remain uncertain and challenging over the next few quarters.”
ENERGY
ENI disappoints in Q2
Italian oil major ENI yesterday reported worse-than-expected results for the second quarter, but said it was confident on its outlook thanks to an increase in production and a new discovery in Mozambique. The adjusted net profit for the second quarter went up by just 2 percent to 1.46 billion euros. Over the first half of the year, the adjusted net profit went up by 8 percent to 3.94 billion euros, the company said in its earnings report.
INTERNET
Amazon offers more storage
Amazon.com Inc has updated its cloud music player to mimic Apple Inc’s iTunes Match, but is offering 10 times more storage space for the same price. Songs purchased on Amazon.com have always been stored for free on its servers for playback on mobile devices. Now the online retailer will scan a person’s computer and automatically match songs found there on the person’s storage space in the cloud. Like iTunes Match, Amazon will upgrade songs of lesser quality found on computers or existing cloud lockers to files encoded at 256 kilobits per second. The price is the same as iTunes Match at US$25 a year.
INDONESIA
Food drives CPI up 4.56%
Indonesia yesterday said that inflation rose slightly to 4.56 percent last month because of higher food prices at the start of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. The consumer price index rose to 4.56 percent last month, up from 4.53 percent in June, the Central Statistics Agency said. On a monthly basis, it was up 0.7 percent, compared with June’s rise of 0.62 percent. Core inflation, which excludes volatile food prices, was 4.28 percent last month, from 4.15 percent the previous month.
INTERNET
Google buying Wildfire
Google said on Tuesday it was buying Wildfire, a startup specializing in advertising on social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Terms were not disclosed, but the Dow Jones Web site AllThingsD said it was US$250 million. Cofounders Victoria Ransom and Alain Chuard launched Wildfire in 2008, initially to promote a New Zealand travel agency they managed. The firm is now based in Silicon Valley.
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
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