INVESTMENT
Loeb urges Sony spinoff
Sony Corp is considering evaluating a proposal from top shareholder Third Point LLC to spin off part of its movie and music business, Japanese daily Nikkei reported. Billionaire hedge fund investor Daniel Loeb last week called on the company to spin off its lucrative entertainment arm, setting the stage for a clash between his activist Wall Street fund and management at the Japanese electronics maker. Sony declined to comment when contacted by reporters. Loeb’s Third Point hedge fund has accumulated a little more than 6 percent of Sony’s shares, making it the largest stakeholder in the inventor of the company.
FINANCE
Dimon keeps JPMorgan jobs
Shareholders at JPMorgan Chase voted to let Jamie Dimon, chief executive officer and chairman of the board, keep both his jobs. At the bank’s annual meeting, just 32 percent of shareholders voted for a non-binding measure that would have advised the bank to split the roles. That is less than the 40 percent vote that a similar proposal received last year. JPMorgan’s stock gained 1.4 percent, or US$0.73, to US$53.02 in Tuesday trading.
WEALTH
Rineheart tops rich list
Mining magnate Gina Rinehart had A$7 billion (US$6.8 billion) wiped off her fortune in the past year, but remains Australia’s wealthiest person, an annual rich list showed yesterday. Rinehart led the respected BRW Rich 200 list for a third year in a row with a personal fortune of A$22.02 billion. However, she also lost more money than anyone else thanks to plunging iron ore prices, giving up a quarter of her estimated wealth from last year of A$29.17 billion. That means she lost more than A$19 million every day in the past 12 months, and takes her out of contention for world’s richest woman.
CYPRUS
Minister bearish on GDP
Minister of Finance Haris Georgiades said on Tuesday the island could suffer a double-digit contraction in GDP this year as a result of swingeing cuts adopted in return for a eurozone bailout. “Yes, it could be double-digit,” Georgiades told a group of reporters from fellow EU member Lithuania. An IMF report published on Friday last week forecast that GDP would contract by 8.7 percent this year and 3.9 percent next year, before growing by a modest 1.1 percent in 2015.
INTERNET
PayPal opens data center
PayPal has opened a new data center to help the online payment division of Ebay Inc handle its rapid growth, company president David Marcus said on Tuesday. The addition means PayPal now has four primary data centers, which it runs from network operation centers at its headquarters in San Jose, California, and Scottsdale, Arizona. Marcus declined to say where the new data center was located for security reasons. However, he said it has new technology that integrates well with some of PayPal’s new initiatives.
AUTOMAKERS
Ford to add capacity
Ford Motor Co, gaining more US market share than any other automaker this year, is to add capacity to build 200,000 more vehicles annually in North America on demand for F-Series pickups and Fusion sedans. Most of its North American assembly plants also will be idled for one week this summer instead of two, increasing production by about 40,000 units, the Michigan-based company said in a statement yesterday.
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