SOUTH KOREA
Industrial output resurging
The nation’s industrial output last month rose at its fastest pace in more than four years, boosted by robust production in memorychips and cars, official data showed yesterday. Production in the mining, manufacturing, gas and electricity industries rose 3.4 percent from the previous month and 2.6 percent from December 2012, according to the state-run Statistics Korea. Last month’s figure is the fastest month-on-month growth since June 2009. Meanwhile, the country’s current account surplus reached a record US$70.7 billion last year, helped by robust exports, the official figures showed. The nation’s economy grew 2.8 percent last year, up from 2 percent in 2012, and the central bank has forecast growth of 3.8 percent for this year.
UNITED STATES
Consumers more confident
Consumer confidence has risen to its highest point since August last year, on the strength of a brighter view of the job market and business conditions. The Conference Board, a business research group, on Tuesday said its consumer confidence index rose to 80.7 this month from last month’s reading of 77.5 in the measure’s second consecutive strong gain. Last year, the confidence gauge averaged 73.3, the highest level since 2007, and above the 45.2 average in 2009 when the national economy was in recession for half of the year. However, this month’s figure is still below the reading of 90 that economists view as consistent with a healthy economy.
AUTOMAKERS
Ford Q4 profits beat targets
US auto giant Ford Motor Co on Tuesday reported higher quarterly profits that beat expectations, but warned of a tougher pricing environment in North America and rising financial risk in South America. Ford, the second-biggest US automaker, notched a 90 percent rise in fourth-quarter earnings last year thanks largely to a number of tax gains, while its revenue rose 3.6 percent annually. Its net income for last year was US$7.2 billion on revenue of US$146.9 billion, up 26.3 percent from the company’s 2012 profit of US$5.7 billion on revenue of US$133.6 billion.
STOCKS
HK Electric has weak debut
The stock market debut of a utilty trust owned by Asia’s richest man, Li Ka-shing (李嘉誠), went off with a whimper, not a bang, in early trade yesterday, despite being Hong Kong’s biggest initial public offering of the year. Shares in HK Electric Investments (港燈電力投資) — carved out from Li’s Hong Kong-listed utilities firm Power Assets (電能實業) — dropped 4.04 percent to a low of HK$5.23 (US$0.67) in morning trade, after raising US$3.11 billion earlier this month ahead of debut. The firm sold 4.43 billion units at the low end of its HK$5.45 to HK$6.30 indicative price range. The benchmark Hang Seng Index rose 0.94 percent in morning trade.
INVESTMENT
Icahn boosts Apple holdings
Activist investor Carl Icahn on Tuesday fired off word that he has beefed up his Apple Inc stock holdings by half-a-billion US dollars as share prices dipped. “Just bought $500 mln more $AAPL shares,” Icahn said in a message on Twitter. “My buying seems to be going neck-and-neck with Apple’s buyback program, but hope they win that race.” Icahn last week revealed that he had invested about US$3 billion in Apple. He made another purchase later in the week, so Tuesday’s purchase would give him about US$4.1 billion worth of shares, or about 0.9 percent of the company’s market value.
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