INTERNET
Yahoo marketing on Google
Yahoo is counting on rival Google to help accelerate its revenue growth. As part of an arrangement announced on Tuesday, Yahoo’s Web site will begin drawing upon Google’s massive online advertising network to show marketing messages related to the content that is being perused. Google already distributes similar ads to thousands of Web sites. It retains part of the revenue generated from the ads shown on its partners’ sites. The revenue split with Yahoo was not disclosed.
TELECOMS
Alcatel-Lucent CEO quits
Alcatel-Lucent CEO Ben Verwaayen is leaving the loss-making French-US telecoms equipment maker after a failed four-year bid to turn the business around. Verwaayen’s surprise departure comes as Alcatel-Lucent reported losing 1.37 billion euros (US$1.85 billion) last year, compared with a gain of 1.1 billion euros a year earlier. Investors cheered the news, with shares jumping 7.7 percent in early trading to 1.40 euros.
SOFTWARE
Fujitsu unveils cuts, merger
Fujitsu Ltd, Japan’s biggest corporate software services provider, will eliminate 5,000 jobs and merge its large-scale integration (LSI) chip business with that of Panasonic Corp to boost global competitiveness. The venture will design LSI chips and contract out their manufacture, a joint statement the companies released yesterday said. Development Bank of Japan has been asked to help finance the venture, the firms said.
COURIERS
FedEx lays off US execs
FedEx Corp, the world’s second-biggest package delivery company, said on Wednesday that it would lose more than 10 percent of its US-based executives under a voluntary buyout plan. The Memphis, Tennessee company says its personnel will leave the company in stages through May 2014. In December, FedEx offered employees up to two years’ pay to leave. It is seeking to reduce annual costs by US$1.7 billion by 2016.
AUTOMAKERS
EADS sale aids Daimler
A one-off gain from a stake sale helped offset a slight drop in operating profit for Germany’s Daimler AG in the final quarter of last year. The Stuttgart-based company yesterday said that fourth-quarter net profit was 2.3 billion euros, up from 1.79 billion euros in the same quarter last year, thanks to the sale of 7.5 percent in European defense company EADS. That sale, which reaped a gain of 709 million euros, masked a 2 percent fall in Daimler’s operating profit in the period to 8.6 billion euros.
EMPLOYMENT
Australia jobless rate steady
Australia’s jobless rate held steady at 5.4 percent last month, data showed yesterday, with the economy creating a net 10,400 jobs. The Australian Bureau of Statistics said an increase in part-time employment offset a decline in full-time positions, with the total number of jobs created in the month slightly short of expectations.
MACROECONOMY
No rate cut for India: IMF
India’s central bank should refrain from cutting interest rates until inflation is contained even as the nation faces a subdued economic recovery, the IMF said in a statement released on Wednesday. GDP will climb 5.4 percent in the 12 months through March this year, and 6 percent the following fiscal year, while inflation will ease to 7.2 percent by March next year from 7.8 percent in March this year, the IMF 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
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