EUROZONE
Manufacturing shrinks
Manufacturing output contracted more than initially estimated in November last year, adding to signs a recession in the bloc may extend into this year as leaders struggle to tackle the sovereign debt crisis. A gauge of manufacturing in the 17-nation euro area fell to 46.1 from 46.2 in November, London-based Markit Economics said yesterday. A reading below 50 indicates contraction. The euro-area economy has shrunk for two successive quarters and economists foresee a further decline in GDP in the final three months of last year. The European Central Bank forecast contractions of 0.5 percent and 0.3 percent for last year and this year respectively.
SPAIN
Consumer prices rise
Consumer prices rose by 3 percent over last year to December as a sales tax rise hit shoppers in the pocket, provisional figures showed yesterday. The inflation rate was unchanged from November, said a report by the National Statistics Institute, which gave no breakdown of prices in the month. Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s right-leaning government raised the top level of sales tax to 21 percent from 18 percent on Sept. 1, as part of an effort to curb the bulging public deficit.
FRANCE
New Year’s thieves hit Apple
Armed robbers targeted an Apple Inc store in central Paris on New Year’s Eve, taking thousands of euros worth of goods, a police official said on Tuesday. The robbery took place at about 9pm on Monday, three hours after closing time at one of Apple’s flagship stores behind the Paris Opera, which sells products ranging from iPhones and iPads to Mac computers. The police official declined to comment on reports the thieves walked away with about 1 million euros (US$1.32 million) of goods, saying the company was still evaluating the loss. Christophe Crepin from the police union UNSA told reporters that four masked and armed individuals forced their way into the shop and afterward escaped in a van.
MACAU
Gambling revenue soars
Gambling revenue jumped 13.5 percent to a record US$38 billion last year, official figures showed yesterday, despite the pace of growth in the world’s largest gaming hub slowing from a year earlier. Gaming revenue rose to 304.14 billion patacas (US$38 billion) from 267.87 billion patacas in 2011, according to statistics posted on the official Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau Web site. However, the pace of growth slowed from 2011, when revenues surged 42 percent year-on-year to US$33.47 billion. Casino operators have plans to build new multibillion-dollar resorts on the Cotai Strip, a former swamp which has been reclaimed and transformed into a glittering center for gamblers.
AUTOMAKERS
Hyundai expects mild growth
South Korea’s top automaker, Hyundai Motor Group, yesterday forecast a modest 4.1 percent increase in car sales this year to 7.4 million units, with a strong won harming competitiveness. “Market environments at home and abroad in 2013 will be very difficult due to the impact of the years-long European debt crisis and global slowdown,” group chairman Chung Mong-Koo said in his New Year message to employees. Hyundai, together with its smaller affiliate Kia, is the world’s fifth-largest automaker. The group sold 7.12 million cars worldwide last year, up 8.0 percent from 2011. However, the firm has seen growth slow with weakening demand in key US and European markets.
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