INDONESIA
Regulator arrested for graft
The head of the Special Task Force for Upstream Oil and Gas Business was arrested for allegedly receiving bribes from a private oil company, anti-graft officials said yesterday. The Corruption Eradication Commission on Tuesday confiscated US$400,000 in cash and arrested an unidentified man handing it over at the home of Rudi Rubiandini, chair of the task force, commission spokesman Johan Budi said. The raid also led to the arrests of an oil company official in western Jakarta along with Rubiandini’s driver and two security guards, Budi said without naming the oil company. An additional US$300,000 and a luxury motorbike were later confiscated from Rubiandini’s house in southern Jakarta, anti-graft commissioner Bambang Widjojanto said.
FOOD
Fonterra manager resigns
A senior manager at New Zealand dairy giant Fonterra resigned yesterday in the wake of a botulism scare. Fonterra said Gary Romano had already left the company. In his role as managing director of New Zealand Milk Products, Romano oversaw the tainted product line that sparked a global recall. Fonterra announced this month that hundreds of tonnes of infant formula could be tainted after tests found bacteria in whey protein concentrate that can cause botulism. Fonterra said last week that a recall of the products had been successful, with no reported cases of people contracting the disease.
ELECTRONICS
Samsung faces Brazil suit
A labor group said Samsung Electronics Co is facing a lawsuit from Brazil’s government, which is seeking damages over poor working conditions at the company’s assembly lines. Reporter Brasil, a labor rights group, said on its Web site that Brazil’s labor ministry found “serious” labor violations, including up to 15 hours of work per day and insufficient breaks, at Samsung’s Manaus factory. The group said the lawsuit is seeking US$108 million in damages. Prosecutors allege more than 2,000 workers suffered from health problems such as back injuries last year that were related to working conditions, the group said. Samsung yesterday said it would cooperate with Brazilian authorities.
INDIA
Inflation rises sharply
Inflation accelerated sharply to close to 6 percent last month as a weak rupee pushed up import costs, data showed yesterday, deepening worries about the slowing economy. The wholesale price index, the nation’s closest watched cost-of-living gauge, rose to 5.79 percent from a year earlier, up nearly a percentage point from 4.86 percent the previous month. Last month’s reading far outstripped market forecasts of a 5 percent year-on-year rise. The increase was driven by higher fuel imports and other costs after the rupee hit new lifetime lows against the US dollar in the past month.
AIRLINES
Cathay Pacific posts profit
Cathay Pacific Airways says it has eked out a small first-half profit as weak global demand continues to batter its air cargo business. The carrier yesterday said it earned HK$24 million (US$3.1 million) in the January-June period. That is a turnaround from the restated HK$929 million it lost in the same period last year, but less than analysts were forecasting. Hong Kong’s biggest airline said air cargo revenue fell 5 percent from the year before, while its passenger business saw some improvement. The airline said high jet fuel prices continued to have an “adverse” effect.
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