UNITED STATES
Duties imposed on gum
The US Department of Commerce on Friday said it had set preliminary duties up to 154 percent on imports of a food additive and thickening agent from China and Austria to offset what it said were unfairly low prices. The ruling is a victory for CP Kelco, a family-owned Atlanta-based company which filed a petition last year asking for anti-dumping duties on xanthan gum from the two countries. The US imported US$25 million of the gum from Austria and US$64 million from China in 2011. The department set a preliminary duty of 17.18 percent on imports from Austria and duties ranging from 21.69 percent to 154.07 percent on imports from China. The department will issue final duty determinations in May.
TECHNOLOGY
Hulu CEO to leave in April
Hulu LLC chief executive officer Jason Kilar said he is leaving the online video service two months after receiving a multimillion-dollar payout. Kilar, 41, will step down by April and is working with Hulu’s board on a transition, according to a statement yesterday on the company’s Web site. Chief technology officer Rich Tom will also exit. “The loss of Jason is a negative for all the media companies involved,” BTIG LLC analyst Rich Greenfield wrote in an e-mail. “Consumers lost one of the few executives who really understood how to put the consumer experience and user interface ahead of the business model.”
RETAIL
Bookseller’s sales fall flat
Barnes & Noble Inc posted a decline in retail sales in the holiday season as the largest US bookstore chain’s efforts to take on Apple Inc’s iPad with tablet-style Nooks fell flat with shoppers. Sales sank 11 percent to US$1.2 billion, the New York-based company said yesterday in a statement. Revenue at the Nook unit, which includes devices, accessories and content, fell 13 percent to US$311 million. The retailer released two new versions of the Nook tablet for the holidays, around the same time Apple introduced a smaller version of the iPad designed to keep customers from buying low-cost tablets from competitors. “Success of the iPad mini likely pressured sales of Nook tablets,” Stifel Financial Corp analyst David Schick wrote in a note yesterday. “It’s a challenging marketplace for them to compete with the likes of Apple and Amazon,” Michael Souers, an analyst at Standard & Poor’s in New York, said today in an interview. “It looks pretty bleak, long-term.”
AIRLINES
Pilots offered unpaid leave
Singapore Airlines (SIA) has asked its captains to volunteer for unpaid leave amid a global economic slowdown that has dented long-haul travel demand, the airline said yesterday. The move came nearly a year after the company — considered a bellwether for the full-service airline industry — made a similar offer to its first officers. The airline has also frozen its intake of cadet pilots as part of a slew of cost-cutting measures. SIA has “a temporary surplus of pilots and are managing it through this scheme, which is entirely voluntary,” company spokesman Nicholas Ionides said. “The surplus of captains is limited and we regard it as temporary,” he added. SIA has more than 2,400 pilots — mostly captains and first officers. The global financial crisis had led to excess capacity and slower growth than anticipated, Ionides said.
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