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.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by