FINANCE
US sends UK trader to jail
A former top Credit Suisse trader was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison on Friday in New York for inflating subprime mortgage-related bond prices during the housing market collapse. British citizen Kareem Serageldin, 40, was extradited by Great Britain to the US in April and pleaded guilty. The fraud allegedly took place between late 2007 and early 2008, as the collapsing US housing bubble sent millions of home mortgages into default and wiped off hundreds of billions of US dollars in value from mortgage-backed securities widely held by banks and other institutional investors.
ENTERTAINMENT
Duo eye Time Warner Cable
Comcast Corp and Charter Communications Inc, aiming to reshape the cable industry, have discussed a joint bid to buy Time Warner Cable Inc and divvy up its customers, people with knowledge of the matter said. Each company’s coverage area could be enhanced by adding parts of Time Warner Cable’s network, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private. The talks between Comcast and Charter have been preliminary, and a Time Warner Cable breakup is one option amid several under consideration, the people said. Time Warner Cable, the second-largest US cable company, is emerging as an acquisition target amid renewed attempts to consolidate the industry.
CARBON emissions
California sells permits
California, the second-largest carbon-emitting state in the US, sold 16.6 million carbon allowances at auction for US$11.48 each, roughly in line with analysts’ expectations. Units of Chevron Corp, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Morgan Stanley and PG&E Corp were among the companies that qualified to buy permits in the Nov. 19 auction, a report posted on the state Air Resources Board’s Web site on Friday showed. The agency does not disclose the names of winning bidders. The state received 1.82 offers for every permit put up for sale. Tehe credits, each approving the release of a metric tonne of carbon, are traded as part of the world’s second-largest carbon market, established by California last year in an effort to cut greenhouse-gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. The auction results were “kind of right in line with expectations,” Mark Struk, senior vice president of environmental trading and advisory for Alpha Inception LLC, a Houston-based consulting firm, said by telephone.
AUTOMAKERS
Fisker files for bankruptcy
Fisker Automotive Inc, whose US$103,000 luxury hybrid car was driven by celebrities including Justin Bieber and Leonardo DiCaprio, filed for bankruptcy with plans to sell itself to Hybrid Tech Holdings LLC. The Anaheim, California-based company listed assets of as much as US$500 million and debt of as much as US$1 billion in a Chapter 11 petition filed on Friday in US Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Delaware. Assets include a shuttered General Motors Co factory in Wilmington that Fisker had planned to reopen. Safety recalls, a battery supplier that went bankrupt and shipments lost to Hurricane Sandy all contributed to the company’s financial woes, Henrik Fisker, the auto designer who co-founded the company, told the US Congress in a hearing on April 24.
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