INTERNET
Twitter boosts offering
Twitter boosted its public stock offering to as much as US$2 billion on Monday, suggesting strong demand for its stock and a higher overall value for the one-to-many messaging platform. The regulatory filing raises the share price for the popular messaging platform to a range of US$23 to US$25 from an earlier estimate of US$17 to US$20. The new share price range would give Twitter a market value between US$12.76 billion and US$13.87 billion.
CHINA
Fewer deals inked at show
Export contracts signed at a major trade fair in China hit their lowest in four years, state media reported, indicating foreign demand for the country’s goods is still weak. The value of export deals signed at the China Import and Export Fair reached 194.61 billion yuan (US$31.7 billion), the lowest since the depths of the financial crisis in 2009, Xinhua news agency said after the event closed on Monday. The figure also marked a fall of 3 percent from the autumn session last year and a 10.9 percent decline from the spring session this year.
UNITED STATES
Aircraft lead rise in orders
Led by aircraft orders, US factory orders rose 1.7 percent in September, ending two months of declines, the Department of Commerce said on Monday. The increase was totally due to transportation equipment, which rose 12.9 percent. Commercial aircraft orders soared 57.7 percent, and orders for ships and boats rose 29 percent. Orders for motor vehicles and equipment fell 0.7 percent. Excluding transportation, factory orders last month fell 0.2 percent from August.
INTEREST RATES
Australia maintains rates
Australia’s central bank yesterday decided to maintain interest rates at a record low of 2.5 percent, with previous cuts starting to impact on non-mining sectors. The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) kept rates on pause for a third consecutive month, as widely expected. RBA Governor Glenn Stevens said the bank’s board judged that “the setting of monetary policy remained appropriate,” with the full effects of earlier cuts “still coming through, and will be for a while yet.”
AUTOMAKERS
BMW profit up 3.2% in Q3
Luxury car maker BMW AG yesterday said its net profit increased 3.2 percent in the third quarter despite difficult market conditions and high spending on new technology. The company said it earned 1.33 billion euros (US$1.8 billion) in the July-September period, up from 1.29 billion euros a year earlier. The BMW Group, which includes Mini and Rolls-Royce, saw revenues decline 0.4 percent to 18.75 billion euros from 18.82 billion euros, though car sales rose 10.7 percent to 481,657 vehicles. Earnings before interest and tax declined 3.7 percent, with the company citing high spending on new technologies, personnel costs and growing competition.
RETAIL
Food sales lift M&S profit
British retailer Marks & Spencer (M&S) yesterday reported a rise in half-year net profit, as solid food sales helped offset further weakness for its clothing division. Britain’s largest clothing retailer said after-tax profit grew 13.5 percent to £249.6 million (US$398 million) in the six months to September compared with a year earlier. Overall revenue rose 3.9 percent to £4.88 billion in the first half, M&S said in a statement.
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