UNITED STATES
Home resales surge
Home resales surged last month to a 6.5-year high and factories grew busier in the Mid-Atlantic region this month, signs that rising borrowing costs are weighing only modestly on the economy. Last month, sales of existing homes grew 1.7 percent, the National Association of Realtors said, while a survey conducted by the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank showed factory activity in the mid-Atlantic region increased by the most in more than two years this month and firms’ optimism about the future hit a 10-year high. In yet another indication the economy is shrugging off higher borrowing costs, an index of US leading indicators advanced by a greater-than-expected 0.7 percent last month.
UNITED KINGDOM
Storm in a D-cup
The country’s three biggest department stores colluded with a garment manufacturer to fix the price of one of the nation’s leading sports bra brands, the competition watchdog alleged yesterday. The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) alleged that manufacturer DB Apparel UK Ltd entered into nine anti-competitive agreements with department stores John Lewis, Debenhams and House of Fraser between 2008 and 2011. It believes they infringed competition law by entering into resale price maintenance agreements that set a fixed or minimum resale price on numerous products within the Shock Absorber sports bra range. The OFT said that during the three years in question the Shock Absorber range had a market share of about 15 percent.
OIL
Firms line up for auction
Eleven oil firms paid more than US$900,000 each to enter an auction next month for rights to explore Brazil’s huge deepwater Libra field, authorities said on Thursday. The list features several titans of the industry, including Anglo-Dutch Shell, Petrobras, France’s Total, China National Offshore Oil Corp (中國海洋石油) and Chinese-Spanish Repsol/Sinopec, according to National Petroleum Agency (ANP) chief Magda Chambriard. The enormous Libra oil prospect, found in 2010, marked the largest oil discovery in Brazilian history. It is believed to hold between 8 billion and 12 billion barrels of recoverable oil, and covers an area of 1,500km2 in ultra-deep oil fields.
SPORTING GOODS
Adidas cuts forecasts
Adidas AG, the world’s second-largest maker of sporting goods, cut the low end of this year’s profit forecast by 7.9 percent, citing the euro’s strength, a glitch in a Russian distribution site and weakness in the global golf market. Net income this year will be 820 million euros (US$1.1 billion) to 850 million euros, the German company said in a statement on Thursday. Adidas had previously forecast net income of 890 million euros to 920 million euros. Adidas also cut its operating margin forecast to about 8.5 percent from a previous forecast of 9 percent.
MEDIA
Newspaper ends agreement
The Wall Street Journal, part of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, said on Thursday it would split with the technology news Web site AllThingsD by the end of the year. The news comes amid a major reorganization in Murdoch’s holdings, following a split of his News Corp into two separate groups. A statement from Dow Jones, the operating unit for the Wall Street Journal, said the agreement between the newspaper and Web site would be terminated.
ISSUES: Gogoro has been struggling with ballooning losses and was recently embroiled in alleged subsidy fraud, using Chinese-made components instead of locally made parts Gogoro Inc (睿能創意), the nation’s biggest electric scooter maker, yesterday said that its chairman and CEO Horace Luke (陸學森) has resigned amid chronic losses and probes into the company’s alleged involvement in subsidy fraud. The board of directors nominated Reuntex Group (潤泰集團) general counsel Tamon Tseng (曾夢達) as the company’s new chairman, Gogoro said in a statement. Ruentex is Gogoro’s biggest stakeholder. Gogoro Taiwan general manager Henry Chiang (姜家煒) is to serve as acting CEO during the interim period, the statement said. Luke’s departure came as a bombshell yesterday. As a company founder, he has played a key role in pushing for the
China has claimed a breakthrough in developing homegrown chipmaking equipment, an important step in overcoming US sanctions designed to thwart Beijing’s semiconductor goals. State-linked organizations are advised to use a new laser-based immersion lithography machine with a resolution of 65 nanometers or better, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said in an announcement this month. Although the note does not specify the supplier, the spec marks a significant step up from the previous most advanced indigenous equipment — developed by Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment Group Co (SMEE, 上海微電子) — which stood at about 90 nanometers. MIIT’s claimed advances last
CROSS-STRAIT TENSIONS: The US company could switch orders from TSMC to alternative suppliers, but that would lower chip quality, CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), whose products have become the hottest commodity in the technology world, on Wednesday said that the scramble for a limited amount of supply has frustrated some customers and raised tensions. “The demand on it is so great, and everyone wants to be first and everyone wants to be most,” he told the audience at a Goldman Sachs Group Inc technology conference in San Francisco. “We probably have more emotional customers today. Deservedly so. It’s tense. We’re trying to do the best we can.” Huang’s company is experiencing strong demand for its latest generation of chips, called
EUROPE ON HOLD: Among a flurry of announcements, Intel said it would postpone new factories in Germany and Poland, but remains committed to its US expansion Intel Corp chief executive officer Pat Gelsinger has landed Amazon.com Inc’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a customer for the company’s manufacturing business, potentially bringing work to new plants under construction in the US and boosting his efforts to turn around the embattled chipmaker. Intel and AWS are to coinvest in a custom semiconductor for artificial intelligence computing — what is known as a fabric chip — in a “multiyear, multibillion-dollar framework,” Intel said in a statement on Monday. The work would rely on Intel’s 18A process, an advanced chipmaking technology. Intel shares rose more than 8 percent in late trading after the