GAMING
No more Wii for Japan
Japanese game console maker Nintendo said yesterday it would stop making Wii consoles for the Japanese market, but would keep producing them internationally. The move to abandon the home console, which competes with Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3, will allow Nintendo to focus its efforts on its successor. “Our new generation Wii U console is already on the market and allows users to play software originally designed for the Wii,” a spokesman said. “So this is part of the transition of our products to new models,” he said. The company will keep producing Wii for markets abroad, including its cheaper version Wii Mini, he said.
ENERGY
SE Asia oil demand to surge
Southeast Asia’s huge appetite for energy will see its bill for imported oil surge to US$240 billion by 2035, leaving nations exposed to price shocks, the International Energy Agency (IEA) warned yesterday. The region will guzzle more than 5 million barrels of oil per day — double current levels of consumption — to fuel its breakneck economic growth, the IEA said. Total energy demand is expected to increase by more than 80 percent over the same period, the agency said. ASEAN will need to invest a total of about US$1.7 trillion in energy supply infrastructure between now and 2035, it predicted.
SPAIN
Jobless rise reverses trend
The number of people registered as unemployed in Spain rose by 22,572 last month, bringing an end to a six-month streak of gradual declines. Labor ministry figures released yesterday showed the total number of people registered as out of work remained at a rounded 4.7 million. The ministry said that since September last year, the total number of people registered as unemployed has fallen by 124,368. Spain’s unofficial unemployment rate was 26.3 percent in the second quarter.
TECHNOLOGY
Apple urged to buy stock
Activist investor Carl Icahn is pressuring Apple Inc to spend US$150 billion buying back its own stock, a target that would more than double the amount that the company’s board authorized in a previous attempt to placate frustrated shareholders. Icahn took to the Internet and the TV airwaves on Tuesday to make it clear that he believes Apple is not doing nearly enough to boost its stock price, which has fallen by 30 percent from its peak in September last year. The slump has turned Apple’s stock into a bargain, Icahn said on the financial news channel CNBC, making it a “no-brainer” for the maker of the iPhone and iPad to pour more money into its shares.
PHARMACEUTICALS
Merck chops 8,500 jobs
Merck & Co plans to cut another 8,500 jobs as the drugmaker continues its struggle with competition from cheaper generic medications that have squeezed the pharmaceutical industry for several quarters now. The New Jersey-based company said on Tuesday the latest reductions were in addition to a total of 7,500 cuts it had previously announced, but has not carried out. That means it is slashing about 20 percent of its work force, currently at about 81,000 people. Merck, the world’s third-largest drugmaker, said the restructuring would cost a total of between US$2.5 billion and US$3 billion before taxes, mainly due to employee severance costs. However, it expects the moves to help generate annual savings of about US$2.5 billion by the end of 2015.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to