UNITED STATES
Manufacturing output rises
Manufacturing output bounced back last month in the latest signal of strength in an economy that is showing clear momentum despite the headwind from government austerity. While other reports on Friday showed a surge in gasoline prices caused a spike in consumer inflation last month and eroded consumer sentiment earlier this month, the impact on the economy was likely to be limited and temporary. “It appears that real economic growth is on an upswing,” said John Ryding, chief economist at RDQ Economics in New York. Factory production increased 0.8 percent last month after falling 0.3 percent in January, the Federal Reserve said. The gain was broad based and double what economists had expected.
TECHNOLOGY
Zuckerberg top boss: survey
Facebook Inc’s Mark Zuckerberg on Friday was ranked top chief executive in a Glassdoor survey of what current and former employees think of how top bosses are leading companies. Zuckerberg had a near-perfect approval rating, with 99 percent of Facebook workers endorsing the way he is running the firm, according to Glassdoor, an online community devoted to careers and workplaces. Glassdoor gathered employee reviews during the past year for the annual ranking of chief executives. SAP AG co-chiefs Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe were ranked just a hair behind Zuckerberg, while Google Inc co-founder and chief executive Larry Page was in 11th place with a 95 percent approval rating. Amazon.com Inc chief executive Jeff Bezos and Apple Inc chief executive officer Tim Cook ranked 16th and 18th respectively, each endorsed by about 93 percent of their workers.
FINANCE
Drew blames staff for losses
Ina Drew, the former JPMorgan Chase & Co executive who earned millions while in charge of the unit that made the disastrous “London whale” trades, refused on Friday to accept responsibility for the US$6.2 billion in losses revealed last year. Testifying before a US Senate panel, the former chief investment officer instead pointed a finger at the traders and managers below her. Blame-shifting proved to be a theme of the hearing held by the US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, even as Chairman Carl Levin hit Drew and other current and former JPMorgan executives hard over past statements he believed to be inaccurate. Drew made US$29 million in 2010 and 2011, and Achilles Macris, who supervised the trading book at issue and reported to Drew, made US$32 million during the same period.
UNITED STATES
BP asks to halt spill payouts
BP PLC asked a judge to halt some payments under the US$8.5 billion Gulf of Mexico oil-spill settlement, claiming the administrator is misinterpreting damages claims and increasing the cost to the company. As a result of policy decisions on certain business economic-loss claims by court-appointed administrator Patrick Juneau, “BP is already exposed to hundreds of millions of [US] dollars in fictitious ‘losses’ that were never contemplated by the agreement,” London-based BP’s attorneys said in papers filed in federal court in New Orleans. “Although the ultimate exposure is at this time inestimable, it grows daily and could cost BP billions,” the lawyers said.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to