AUTOMAKERS
VW workers reject union
The United Auto Workers (UAW) union suffered a major defeat on Friday when workers at Volkswagen Inc’s Tennessee plant rejected its organizing efforts. The closely watched vote came as the US labor movement is fighting for its survival after decades of shrinking membership rolls. The German auto giant’s workers voted 712 to 626 against unionization. The unionization efforts faced stiff opposition from local politicians, who said that a UAW victory would make it harder to attract new jobs to Tennessee and even threatened to withhold tax credits that would help VW expand production.
INTERNET
Spain seeks to charge Google
News media companies in Spain would be able to charge search engines such as Google for displaying copyrighted content under a new law proposed by the Spanish government on Friday. The measure echoes similar drives around Europe. Publishers in Portugal, France, Belgium and Germany have pushed for compensation in some form or another for links, snippets, headlines and lead paragraphs that appear in news search engines and aggregators such as Google News and Yahoo News. The search engines draw revenue from advertising placed near news content and media companies have fought for a share of it. Under the proposed changes, the search engines would not have to seek permission to publish brief fragments, but would have to pay “an equitable remuneration for the use.”
TECHNOLOGY
Apple to open Rio outlet
Apple Inc was set to open its first Latin America store yesterday in Rio de Janeiro, featuring the highest-priced iPhone of all nations listed on its Web site. Apple’s 16-gigabyte, contract-free iPhone 5s will sell for 2,799 reais (US$1,170) in Brazil. That compares with US$649 in the US and 5,288 yuan (US$872) in China. The price of the iPhone 5s in Brazil, offered by authorized resellers, has jumped 17 percent since September last year on Apple’s Web site. Brazil marks the 15th country where Apple operates its own stores. Having lost market share to rivals including Samsung Electronics Co, Apple is expanding into Latin America, driven by saturation in the US and the desire for growth in one of the world’s biggest smartphone markets, Strategy Analytics director of global wireless practice Neil Mawston said.
FINANCE
SAC compliance chief quits
SAC Capital Advisors LP, the hedge fund manager that US prosecutors have called a “veritable magnet for market cheaters,” said chief compliance officer Steve Kessler is stepping down after nine years at the firm. John Casey, the compliance department’s chief operating officer, will be interim head of the unit, according to an employee memo obtained on Friday last week by Bloomberg News. The US said in July that the firm’s compliance unit had identified only one example of suspected insider trading in its history. SAC, run by billionaire Steven Cohen, agreed in November last year to pay a record US$1.8 billion to settle insider-trading charges. Six former employees have pleaded guilty to insider trading, and another two money managers, Mathew Martoma and Michael Steinberg, were found guilty of securities fraud.
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
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
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