GERMANY
Business confidence falls
German business confidence unexpectedly fell from a 10-month high this month as Cyprus inflamed the euro region’s debt crisis. The Ifo institute in Munich said its business climate index, based on a survey of 7,000 executives, declined to 106.7 from 107.4 last month. That was the first drop in five months. Economists predicted a gain to 107.8, according to the median of 42 forecasts in a Bloomberg News survey. With the European Central Bank threatening to cut off emergency funding for Cyprus’ banks unless it agrees to the terms of an EU-led bailout, the Mediterranean island has reignited concerns about the euro and roiled financial markets. However, German investor confidence unexpectedly rose to a three-year high this month and the Bundesbank said the nation’s economic recovery remains on track.
TECHNOLOGY
Samsung mulls Dutch sale
Samsung Electronics Co, the world’s largest flat-panel maker, is trying to sell Dutch subsidiary Liquavista BV to Amazon.com Inc, according to a person familiar with the matter. Samsung is seeking a sale of the Eindhoven, Netherlands-based maker of electronic-reader display technology for less than US$100 million, said the person, who declined to be identified because the discussions are private. Samsung, based in Suwon, South Korea, acquired Liquavista in 2011. Liquavista, founded in 2006, specializes in a type of display technology known as electrowetting, mostly used in electronic readers, a shrinking market that is dominated by Amazon’s Kindle devices.
UNITED STATES
Steel firms urge China action
US steel companies on Thursday urged Congress and the White House to take action against what they said was a flood of unfairly traded steel from China, partly by reforming US trade laws to make it easier to win import protection. “The government of China’s continued subsidization of its steel industry and manipulation of its currency continues to threaten our future,” Edward Kurasz, an executive vice president at Allied Tube & Conduit, told a congressional panel. The plea came shortly before the US International Trade Commission approved steep punitive duties on stainless steel sinks from China that the US Department of Commerce had found were unfairly priced and subsidized. The decision was a victory for Elkay Manufacturing Co. The Illinois company has struggled in the face of rising imports from China, which totaled nearly US$118 million in 2011.
OIL
Rosneft closes BP deal
Russian state-owned oil company Rosneft closed a deal to buy TNK-BP from UK-based BP PLC and four tycoons on Thursday, releasing US$40 billion in cash to the sellers and making it a bigger oil producer than Exxon Mobil Corp. The US$55 billion deal, which also gives BP a near 20 percent stake in Rosneft, was announced last year after months of on-off negotiations. It is the biggest in Russia’s corporate history. It tightens the Russian government’s grip on the energy sector and is a victory for Rosneft chief executive Igor Sechin, a close confidant of Russian President Vladimir Putin, creating a business with annual production of about 4.6 million barrels of oil equivalent, more than Exxon Mobil, the world’s No. 1 investor-owned company. The deal gives Rosneft an expert international shareholder and extra oil output revenue it can put to work to explore Russia’s reserves and to replace aging and depleting fields.
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
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
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