AIRCRAFT
Berlin urged stump up aviation
Airbus on Saturday urged the German government to pay out a promised final loan instalment of 600 million euros (US$830 million) for the construction of the A350, after the aircraft manufacturer said it had created German jobs in return. Airbus chief operating officer Guenter Butschek told the German daily Tagesspiegel that the firm was offering 4,000 jobs — 250 percent more than originally planned — in a bid to unfreeze the last loan tranche, which has been blocked for months by Berlin pending agreement on German-based manufacturing and research jobs. Butschek said that Airbus, a subsidiary of France-based EADS, was capable of completing the A350 development program even without the outstanding loan amount.
BANKING
CCB posts Q3 profit
China Construction Bank Corp (CCB, 中國建設銀行), the nation’s second-largest lender, posted a 9.4 percent gain in third-quarter profit as it boosted lending and fee income. Net income climbed to 56.8 billion yuan (US$9.3 billion), or 0.23 yuan a share, from 51.9 billion yuan, or 0.21 yuan, a year earlier, the Beijing-based lender said in a Shanghai stock exchange filing yesterday. That compared with the 57.2 billion yuan average estimate of 10 analysts compiled by Bloomberg. Construction Bank pledged in August to direct more lending to small and micro-sized businesses, which offer fatter lending margins, as it battles a slowdown in the world’s second-largest economy. While expansion accelerated for the first time in three quarters July to last month, China may still post its slowest full-year growth since 1999, according to a Bloomberg survey of economists.
ECONOMY
Portuguese angry about cuts
Thousands of demonstrators protested in Portugal on Saturday against salary cuts and public sector reforms imposed by the government under the country’s international bailout deal. Crowds rallied in the old center of the capital Lisbon and marched toward parliament, while rallies were also staged in the northern city of Porto and 12 other towns, in demonstrations called by a citizens’ collective known as “Get lost, troika.” The word troika refers to the three international bodies that agreed Portugal’s 78 billion euro (US$108 billion) rescue deal in 2011 — the EU, the European Central Bank and the IMF. In return for the bailout money to prevent the country from financial collapse, the troika demanded economic reforms to get Portugal’s public deficit down to 4 percent of output by next year.
MINING
Mongolia and Rio make up
Mongolia and Rio Tinto Group have resolved some of the disputes that have stalled the expansion of their US$6.6 billion Oyu Tolgoi copper mine, a Mongolian board member of the venture said. “Within the last 10 days we could resolve certain issues; we have reduced the state of urgency,” Davaadorj Ganbold, one of three Mongolians on the Oyu Tolgoi LLC board, said in an interview in Ulan Bator on Saturday, adding that some points remain to be agreed on. “Issues related to cost overruns, the feasibility study and project financing are large and broad issues that cannot be resolved in four or five days,” said Ganbold, a board member since last month and also executive director at Erdenes Oyu Tolgoi LLC, the company that holds the government’s 34 percent stake in the project. While open-pit work continues, the dispute has led to the suspension of underground construction and the layoff of about 1,700 workers.
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