TECHNOLOGY
Microsoft sets pop-up shops
Microsoft said on Monday it is launching more than 30 pop-up holiday shops in the US and Canada as it gears up to sell its new Surface tablet computer. The company released a list of 32 locations for the shops — known as pop-ups because they have short or seasonal commercial leases — including in New York, San Francisco, Vancouver and Toronto. The US tech giant on Monday had job listings seeking retail store managers and other personnel. The company offered no specifics on how long these shops would be operational or what they would sell.
TECHNOLOGY
Sharp mulls more pay cuts
Sharp Corp is in talks with its labor union to deepen salary cuts as it projects a second straight annual loss. It is also reducing managers’ salaries by 10 percent starting next month and will cut bonuses in half to save a total of ¥14 billion (US$179 million) in fixed costs, the Osaka-based company said in a statement yesterday. Japan’s biggest maker of LCD panels last week put up its Osaka headquarters and some factories as debt collateral after its credit ratings were cut to junk.
RETAIL
Burberry warns on profit
Luxury goods maker Burberry PLC said that full-year pretax profit would be at the lower end of market expectations following a flat retail performance in the past 10 weeks. Burberry said yesterday that retail sales in the period ending Saturday were 6 percent higher than a year ago, but all of the growth was due to new stores. Comparing stores open for at least a year, retail sales were unchanged and the company noted “a deceleration in recent weeks.” Retail accounted for about two-thirds of the company’s sales in the year ending March 31.
BANKING
Chinese bank loans surge
China ramped up bank lending last month, according to central bank figures released yesterday, as the government seeks to give a boost to the slowing economy. Chinese banks granted 703.9 billion yuan (US$112 billion) in new loans last month, up from 540.1 billion yuan in July, the People’s Bank of China said in a statement. Last month’s figure is higher than market expectations of 600 billion yuan, according to a forecast of 13 economists surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires.
GAMING
Another Zynga officer quits
Jeff Karp, the chief marketing and chief revenue officer at Zynga, has become the latest executive to leave the struggling online company behind FarmVille and other games. Last month, chief operating officer John Schappert left the company after less than a year and a half on the job. Schappert’s exit was followed by that of Mike Verdu, the company’s chief creative officer. San Francisco-based Zynga’s stock has dropped 72 percent from its December initial public offering price of US$10 to US$2.82 on Monday.
AIRLINES
Lion to set up budget carrier
Indonesia’s Lion Air yesterday said it would set up a low-cost airline in Malaysia that would take off in May next year as part of an aggressive regional expansion. The move will see Lion Air, which controls nearly half the air travel market in Indonesia, playing catch-up to the region’s top budget carrier AirAsia. Lion Air will own 49 percent of the new airline, Malindo Airways, and Malaysia’s National Aerospace and Defence Industries the remaining 51 percent.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
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
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the