SHIPPING
Hyundai to sell assets
Hyundai Group, owner of South Korea’s second-biggest shipping company, plans to raise at least 3.3 trillion won (US$3.1 billion) by selling assets to boost cash. Hyundai Group will sell Hyundai Securities Co and two other financial units to raise as much as 1 trillion won, it said in an e-mailed statement yesterday. Hyundai Merchant Marine Co, the biggest shareholder of Hyundai Securities, plans to sell stakes in its terminal business and restructure bulk-carrier operations for about 1.5 trillion won. The group also expects to reap 340 billion won by selling the Banyan Tree Hotel in Seoul, it said in the statement.
INVESTMENT
Cuba to approve new law
Cuba will approve a new foreign investment law in March, Cuban President Raul Castro said on Saturday, without elaborating on specific changes. Cuba’s National Assembly will be convened “in March for a special session to handle this issue and others,” the president, 82, said at the closing session of the legislature. Foreign direct investment “is of unparalleled importance to energize the country’s social and economic development,” Castro said.
RETAIL
Fraud incidents few: Target
US retailer Target, which revealed this week that 40 million customers’ credit and debit cards may have been compromised, said on Saturday that few incidents of fraud had occurred. The popular chain store announced on Thursday that hackers broke into its payment system between Nov. 27 and Dec. 15, stealing debit and credit card data during the height of Christmas shopping. Among the information potentially pilfered was the name, card number, expiration date and three-digit security code on the back of the cards.
OUTSOURCING
Eighth Infosys exec quits
A top executive of Infosys, tipped as a future chief executive of the outsourcing giant, has resigned, the latest in a string of departures since co-founder Narayana Murthy returned to lead the company. Infosys said in a statement posted on its Web site on Saturday that V. Balakrishnan, who headed the business process outsourcing division, had quit and would leave the firm at the end of the year. It marked the eighth high-profile exit the company has seen in the past six months as Infosys undergoes an organizational restructuring, the reports said.
NUCLEAR
Urenco sale stalled
Efforts to sell Urenco Ltd have stalled as Dutch politicians argue over the future of the multinational nuclear-fuel processor, according to three people familiar with the situation. A sale of Urenco, which is owned by the governments of the UK, the Netherlands, and German utilities EON SE and RWE AG, will probably not occur until at least the second half of next year and may be delayed to 2015, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing private deliberations.
SERVERS
Sales grew 1.9 percent
Worldwide server shipments grew 1.9 percent year-on-year in the third quarter of the year, but revenues declined 2.1 percent from the same quarter last year, according to Gartner Inc. “The worldwide server market remains in a relatively weak performance mode as we move through the second half of the year,” Gartner research vice president Jeffrey Hewitt said. Only Canada, the Middle East and Africa, and the US exhibited positive vendor revenue growth, Hewitt said.
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
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],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained