PROPERTY
Commercial sales double
Japan’s commercial property sales more than doubled last year to ¥3.54 trillion (US$34 billion), the highest since 2007, driven by real estate investment trusts acquisitions, DTZ Research said in a report yesterday. Property sales climbed near the record high of ¥3.61 trillion in 2007 and rose from ¥1.72 trillion in 2012, DTZ Japan research head Kayoko Hirao wrote.
MACROECONOMICS
S Korea jobless rate up
South Korea’s unemployment rate inched up last month from the previous month, although the number of people employed grew by more than half a million from a year earlier. The seasonally adjusted jobless rate stood at 3 percent last month, compared with 2.9 percent in November, the state agency Statistics Korea said yesterday. The total number of employed people last month stood at 24.96 million, up 560,000 from a year earlier, the agency said.
VIETNAM
Hanoi plans privatization
Vietnam plans to sell stakes in a slew of state-owned companies this year, including its national airline and auto manufacturer. State media reported that Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung last week ordered stock market listings for 11 companies under the control of the transport ministry. Among the companies slated for partial sale are Vietnam Airlines, Vietnam Automobile Industry Corp and Waterway Transportation Corp.
MACROECONOMICS
Argentina prices up 28.4%
Inflation in Argentina soared 28.4 percent last year, unofficial estimates released by private research institutes on Tuesday showed. The government was due to release its official statistics yesterday, but these are largely ignored by the business community in favor of private estimates. The government is regularly accused of underplaying inflation figures, claiming a rate of 11 percent for 2012 in contrast to private figures that put it at 25 percent.
RETAIL
US sales beat estimates
US retail sales rose slightly last month due to holiday sales, beating what had been gloomy expectations, US Department of Commerce data released on Tuesday showed. Retail and food services sales totaled US$431.9 billion, up 0.2 percent from November, the data showed. Excluding auto sales, retail sales last month rose 0.7 percent, according to the adjusted data that does not take into account price changes.
FINANCE
More called in LIBOR probe
Several former Barclays PLC traders suspected of involvement in LIBOR manipulation were ordered to report to UK fraud prosecutors for interviews, a person with knowledge of the case said. The Serious Fraud Office sent notices to the people in the US and UK over the last six weeks, telling them to come in to be questioned under caution as part of a global investigation into rate-rigging, the person said.
ENERGY
Toshiba buying UK firm
Japan’s Toshiba yesterday said it would buy a controlling interest in British nuclear firm NuGeneration, as it tries to rekindle an atomic business hammered by the 2011 Fukushima crisis. The engineering giant said it had reached a deal with NuGeneration’s owners — France’s GDF Suez and Spain’s Iberdrola — to take a 60 percent stake in the firm for £102 million (US$167 million), which plans to build nuclear power plants in northwest England.
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],”
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
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