COSMETICS
Kanebo complaints rise
Japanese cosmetics maker Kanebo yesterday said the number of complaints about skin discoloring from using its whitening products has reached a total of 7,266 from customers at home and abroad. The latest figure is more than triple the number of complaints announced last month. The company last month announced a recall of 54 of its products that contained a substance called 4HPB, a synthetic version of a natural compound developed by the firm. The recall, involving almost 4.75 million products on retail shelves affected Japan, Taiwan, the UK, Hong Kong and eight other Asian nations.
REAL ESTATE
UK home prices up 5.5%
Asking prices for homes in Britain are 5.5 percent higher than a year ago, property Web site Rightmove said yesterday, as it urged the government to boost the supply of new homes to avoid an asset bubble. Rightmove figures, which are not seasonally adjusted, show the price of property coming on to the market has risen 8.8 percent in the first eight months of the year. The rally has been most marked in London, where prices are up 10.2 percent on the year, Rightmove said. With house prices already rising faster than inflation, the government is under pressure from some quarters to abandon plans to offer state-backed guarantees to riskier homebuyers.
ENERGY
Statoil selling assets
Statoil ASA, Norway’s biggest energy company, agreed to sell assets, including stakes in the Gudrun and Gullfaks fields, to Austria’s OMV AG for US$2.65 billion as it frees up cash for new projects. The company will reduce its stake in the two Norwegian fields from more than 70 percent to 51 percent, the Stavanger-based company said yesterday. Statoil will also sell all its holdings in the Schiehallion and Rosebank fields, west of the Shetlands in the UK. Statoil said it expects to book gains of US$1.3 billion to US$1.5 billion from the transaction. The sale will allow the company to redeploy about US$7 billion of capital expenditure, it said.
ETHIOPIA
Ethio Telecom, ZTE ink pact
The government signed an US$800 million agreement with Chinese telecom giant ZTE (中興) on Sunday to expand its telecommunications network, national operator Ethio Telecom said. The agreement is part of a telecommunications expansion project worth US$1.6 billion, which is shared with China’s Huawei Technologies (華為). Huawei and ZTE have split the cost of the scheme. The project aims to increase mobile phone and 3G Internet access throughout the country and introduce 4G broadband Internet in Addis Ababa.
METALS
Rusal posts net loss
Rusal, the world’s largest aluminum producer, yesterday reported a net loss of US$439 million for the first half of this year, citing falling prices, an excess global supply and economic uncertainty. The Russian aluminum giant, which is listed in Hong Kong, also said revenue for the six months to June 30 fell 8.8 percent year-on-year to US$5.2 billion. The net loss compared with a US$1 million net profit in the first half of last year, and the company said it was partly related to a one-off sale of shares in its stake of Norilsk Nickel, with the proceeds used for prepayment of debts.
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