INDIA
Inflation easing slowly
Inflation eased marginally last month to 7.18 percent year-on-year, data showed yesterday, raising expectations of an interest rate cut when the Reserve Bank of India meets later this month. Inflation was down slightly from 7.24 percent in November last year and has been on the decline since October, government figures show. The latest reading in the Wholesale Price Index — the nation’s most widely watched inflation measure — was lower than the 7.44 percent market forecasts, a survey by Dow Jones Newswires showed. The easing of inflation is likely to encourage the central bank to start shifting its focus from an anti-inflationary to a pro-growth stance.
ELECTRONICS
Galaxy hits 100mn sales
Samsung Electronics Co says global sales of its Galaxy S smartphone series surpassed 100 million units since the first model was launched less than three years ago. The South Korean firm yesterday said it sold more than 25 million Galaxy S smartphones, 40 million Galaxy S II smartphones and 41 million Galaxy S III smartphones over the past three years. Samsung rolled out the first Galaxy S model at the end of May 2010, but Galaxy S series achieved the 100-million-sales milestone faster than Apple Inc’s iPhone. It took about four years for Apple to sell more than 100 million iPhones.
AUTOMOBILES
Jaguar to create UK jobs
Upmarket carmaker Jaguar Land Rover, owned by India’s Tata Motors, on Sunday announced that it plans to create 800 jobs in Britain after reporting record global sales. More than 200 of the new jobs at its Solihull plant in the West Midlands will be backed by the British government’s regional growth fund, the carmaker said. The extra staff is required to meet increased demand after the company announced global sales of 357,773 vehicles last year, a leap of 30 percent. Jaguar Land Rover has created about 8,000 jobs over the past two years and employs 25,000 people worldwide.
CHINA
Lenders told to be vigilant
The Banking Regulatory Commission told lenders to “strictly” supervise the design, sale and investment of their wealth management products as it seeks to curb rising risks from banks’ off-balance sheet businesses. Banks are banned from selling wealth management products without authorization and should stop selling private-equity related products or misleading customers into buying such products, the banking regulator said in a statement yesterday. Lenders are also required to separate accounting and management of products that offer fixed and floating returns, the regulator added.
TECHNOLOGY
Java gets emergency update
Oracle Corp released an emergency update to its Java software for surfing the Web on Sunday, but security experts said the update fails to protect computers from attack by hackers intent on committing cybercrimes. Oracle said on its security blog on Sunday that its update fixed two vulnerabilities in the version of Java 7 for Web browsers. It said that it also switched Java’s security settings to “high” by default, making it more difficult for suspicious programs to run on a personal computer without the knowledge of the user. The software maker released the update just days after the US Department of Homeland Security urged PC users to disable the program because of bugs in the software that were being exploited to commit cybercrimes.
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
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
FUTURE PLANS: Although the electric vehicle market is getting more competitive, Hon Hai would stick to its goal of seizing a 5 percent share globally, Young Liu said Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), a major iPhone assembler and supplier of artificial intelligence (AI) servers powered by Nvidia Corp’s chips, yesterday said it has introduced a rotating chief executive structure as part of the company’s efforts to cultivate future leaders and to enhance corporate governance. The 50-year-old contract electronics maker reported sizable revenue of NT$6.16 trillion (US$189.67 billion) last year. Hon Hai, also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), has been under the control of one man almost since its inception. A rotating CEO system is a rarity among Taiwanese businesses. Hon Hai has given leaders of the company’s six