European stocks declined this week, with the STOXX Europe 600 Index posting its worst start to a year since 2010, amid earnings results that missed analysts’ estimates and a rout in emerging-market currencies.
BG Group PLC plunged 19 percent after the UK oil and gas producer said 2013 earnings would be lower than forecast.
Diageo PLC lost 7.5 percent after the world’s biggest distiller reported sales growth that missed estimates.
Lanxess AG climbed 8.3 percent after the chemical maker named Merck KGaA’s finance chief as its chief executive officer. Merck tumbled 13 percent.
The STOXX 600 dropped 0.7 percent to 322.52 this week, bringing its monthly decline to 1.8 percent. The benchmark index fell for a second week as emerging-market currencies slid and the US Federal Reserve reduced the size of its monthly bond purchases for a second consecutive time.
“We are in risk-off mode as there are concerns that problems in some emerging markets could spill over,” said Thomas Muhlberger, a fund manager who helps oversee 400 million euros (US$540 million) at Johannes Fuhr Asset Management in Frankfurt. “This has resulted in selling, especially in oil companies.”
National benchmark indices fell in 13 of the 18 western-European markets this week.
Germany’s DAX lost 0.9 percent this week, and the FTSE 100 in the UK dropped 2.3 percent. France’s CAC 40 rose 0.1 percent.
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to