AUTOMAKERS
Jaguar mulls outsourcing
Jaguar Land Rover, the British luxury car unit owned by Tata Motors, is considering manufacturing vehicles from scratch in India, a report said. Jaguar Land Rover currently assembles a number of cars in India with parts shipped from Britain. Manufacturing the whole car in India would make it cheaper, as it would save on government import taxes and labor costs. “Like Brazil, India is one of the possibilities for Jaguar Land Rover to fully manufacture cars,” a person close to the development told the Wall Street Journal on Sunday.
INDUSTRY
Rusal reports net loss
Russian aluminum giant Rusal yesterday reported a net loss of US$55 million for last year, compared with a net profit of US$237 million in 2011. Revenue fell 11.4 percent to US$10.89 billion. Rusal said it expects to cut approximately 270,000 tonnes of aluminum production capacity at its “less efficient aluminum smelters” by the end of this year to improve efficiency. The price of aluminum, which is used in industries including automotive and construction, is trading at about US$1,975 a tonne on the London Metal Exchange, down 15.2 percent from a year ago.
SOUTH KOREA
Inflation slows to 1.4%
South Korea’s inflation rate slowed slightly to 1.4 percent last month, well below the central bank’s target band and offering more room for monetary easing, government data showed yesterday. The figure, which compares with a rate of 1.5 percent in January, is below the Bank of Korea’s inflation target band of between 2.5 percent and 3.5 percent, and offers the central bank the option of a further interest rate cut to help spur growth. The central bank kept the key rate unchanged at 2.75 percent last month for a fourth straight month. Core inflation, which excludes volatile energy and food prices, was at 1.3 percent, compared with 1.2 percent the previous month.
BANKING
Banks to reduce bonuses
HSBC and Standard Chartered are to report a reduction in their bonus pools, reflecting separate settlements with US authorities over probes into money laundering and sanctions violations, Sky News reported on Sunday. HSBC’s bonus pot will fall to about £2 billion (US$3 billion) from £2.8 billion paid out in 2011, Sky News said on its Web site, with HSBC chief executive officer Stuart Gulliver expected to take home between £6 million and £7 million, including a bonus of just under £2 million. His counterpart at Standard Chartered, Peter Sands, will take home less than £2 million in bonus payments, with the bank’s overall bonus pool cut to US$1.4 billion from US$1.54 billion pounds last year, Sky News said.
EUROZONE
Rehn hints at Cyprus exit
European Economic Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn has warned that debt-riven Cyprus could exit the eurozone without a bailout in an interview with a German news weekly published on Sunday. New Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades has vowed to save the nearly bankrupt Mediterranean island from financial meltdown saying he will seek to secure an “earliest possible” bailout. Euro finance ministers were due to resume discussions on a Cyprus bailout package yesterday. German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble told Sunday’s Tagesspiegel newspaper that the Cypriot problem was “not easy to solve,” but insisted an “appropriate” solution would be found.
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