A senior Japanese politician hinted yesterday that a government bailout was not on the cards for the nation’s struggling electronics giants, after embattled Sharp cast doubt on its own survival.
Japanese Economy Minister Seiji Maehara said the likes of Panasonic and Sharp, on track to book combined annual losses of more than US$15 billion, should not expect the kind of taxpayer-funded rescue handed to once-bankrupt Japan Airlines or Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO), operator of the crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant.
“In this society of capitalism, I believe companies in general should rebuild themselves through their own efforts,” Maehara told a press briefing in Tokyo.
Photo: AFP
US President Barack Obama came under fire in some quarters over his administration’s bailout of the US auto industry, but the issue is a sensitive one in Japan, where there is a general reluctance to let failing companies go under.
Japan’s electronics industry has suffered from a long list of problems, including a high yen, slowing demand in key export markets, fierce overseas competition and strategic mistakes, which have left the industry’s finances in ruins.
Neither Sharp nor key rivals Panasonic and Sony have sought bankruptcy protection as they undergo massive corporate restructurings.
However, Sharp, which makes Aquos-brand electronics, recently warned of a US$5.6 billion annual loss, its credit rating has been reduced to junk, and the firm itself has raised questions over its viability.
Yesterday, Maehara said that Japan Airlines (JAL), which went bankrupt in one of Japan’s worst-ever corporate failures, was the nation’s flagship carrier and letting it fail would have left rival All Nippon Airways as the overwhelmingly dominant carrier in the domestic market.
Now-profitable JAL went through a court-supervised restructuring and has re-listed its shares on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
TEPCO will receive billions of dollars in public money amid huge bills stemming from last year’s tsunami-sparked reactor meltdowns at Fukushima Dai-ichi, the world’s worst atomic crisis in a generation.
Taiwanese firms have increased investment in the Philippines in recent years as Manila’s ties with Washington deepen and global supply chains continue to shift away from China, an expert at the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) said yesterday. The Philippines had not been among Taiwanese investors’ top choices in Southeast Asia, CIER Taiwan ASEAN Studies Center director Kristy Hsu (徐遵慈) said at a seminar in Taipei. However, Taiwan’s investment in the country has grown significantly since the COVID-19 pandemic, reaching US $257 million last year, a high in recent years, she said. Although Taiwan’s total investment in the Philippines still lags
Intel Corp regards Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) as a longstanding partner, as the US chipmaker would continue outsourcing production of advanced chips to TSMC, Intel chief executive officer Lip-Bu Tan (陳立武) said yesterday. “I don’t look at people as competitors. I look at the collaboration... Nvidia is also, you know, a good friend,” Tan told a news conference following his keynote speech at the Computex trade show in Taipei. “It’s a very trusted partnership for us... We are a big, top customer for them, and we’re going to continue doing that,” he said, referring to TSMC, the world’s largest foundry
Artificial intelligence (AI) agents would supplant smartphones as the center of people’s digital lives, fundamentally reshaping personal devices and driving a major computing upgrade cycle, Qualcomm Inc CEO Cristiano Amon said yesterday. In his keynote speech for this year’s Computex trade show in Taipei, Amon said that the rise of "agentic AI" — AI systems capable of reasoning, planning and carrying out tasks autonomously — would transform how people interact with technology across phones, PCs, vehicles and wearable devices. Describing the technology as the next major evolution in computing, Amon said that "2026 is the year of agents.” For decades, smartphones have sat
Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday said it would work with US chipmaker Intel Corp to jointly develop and deploy next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure and intelligent computing platforms in a move to capture booming demand for AI computing systems. Hon Hai, also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康), said in a statement that the partnership would combine its global manufacturing scale, system integration expertise and AI data center deployment capabilities with Intel’s strengths in processor architecture, silicon technologies and software ecosystem. The companies said they plan to work on equipment used in AI data centers, including server racks powered by
RSS