SOLAR PANELS
Suntech in bankruptcy court
Suntech Power Holdings Ltd (尚德電力), one of the world’s biggest solar panel manufacturers, was forced into bankruptcy court on Wednesday, becoming the latest casualty of a painful slump in the global solar industry. Suntech Power said eight Chinese banks asked a court to declare it insolvent after the company missed a US$541 million payment to bondholders last week. Suntech said it would not oppose the petition. “While we evaluate restructuring initiatives and strategic alternatives, we are committed to continuing to provide high-quality solar products to our global customer base,” Suntech chief executive officer David King (金緯) said in a statement.
CHINA
Manufacturing picks up
The nation’s manufacturing rebounded modestly this month after dipping during the country’s biggest public holiday the month before, a survey showed yesterday, in a sign of gradual recovery in the world’s second-biggest economy. HSBC’s preliminary version of its purchasing managers’ index for this month rose to 51.7 on a 100-point scale. A reading above 50 indicates expansion. The reading “implies that the Chinese economy is still on track for gradual growth recovery,” HSBC’s chief China economist Qu Hongbin (屈宏斌) said in a statement.
MINING
Rare earths found on seabed
Japanese researchers said yesterday they have found a rich deposit of rare earths on the Pacific seabed, with reports suggesting it could be up to 30 times more concentrated than Chinese reserves. Mud samples taken from 5,800m below the waves contained highly concentrated amounts of the precious minerals, which are vital for high-tech manufacturing and used in products including wind turbines and iPods. Scientists believe the seabed contains about 6.8 million tonnes of the materials, the equivalent of 220 to 230 years worth of rare earths used in Japan.
TECHNOLOGY
Oracle reports flat Q3
Oracle Corp on Wednesday reported flat earnings for its fiscal third quarter, hurt by a drop in sales of hardware systems and new software. Shares tumbled in after-hours trading on the weaker-than-expected results. Revenue from new software licenses and online subscriptions fell 2 percent year-on-year to US$2.3 billion. The company had predicted that number would rise by 3 percent to 13 percent. Sales of hardware systems products dropped 23 percent.
SHIPPING
FedEx cuts profit forecast
Global package delivery giant FedEx on Wednesday reported lower quarterly earnings and slashed its profit guidance for this fiscal year, citing weakness in the international freight market. FedEx reported net income of US$361 million for the third quarter that ended February 28, down 31 percent from a year earlier. Revenue rose 4 percent to US$11 billion, about US$100 million below the firm’s forecast.
AIRLINES
Lufthansa hit by strikes
German airline Lufthansa said yesterday it has canceled more than 670 European flights owing to warning strikes by ground staff and other divisions within the group. Already on Wednesday, Lufthansa had said it would cancel most of its domestic and short-haul flights between 5am and midday local time at the airports of Frankfurt, Munich, Dusseldorf, Berlin, Hamburg and Cologne as well as several other locations.
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