BANKING
Bank CEO bonus jumps 77%
Bank of America chief executive Brian Moynihan saw his compensation jump 77 percent last year as the company’s fortunes improved. Moynihan’s total compensation was US$13.1 million, according to an Associated Press calculation based on a filing made by the company on Friday. The bulk of his pay was US$11.1 million worth of stock awards granted in February last year. He also had a base salary of almost US$1.5 million. Company perks totaled US$497,751, most of which was for personal use of the company plane. Bank of America’s finances have been improving. Last year its profit more than tripled to US$10.08 billion, and it has been cutting staff and focusing on its core businesses. Its balance sheet has been improving as well. Bank of America’s board cited its improving balance sheet as a factor in Moynihan’s pay, saying the company cut long-term debt by US$25 billion last year.
CREDIT RATINGS
Moody’s lifts Dutch outlook
Moody’s raised its credit outlook for the Netherlands and Belgium on Friday, elevating both to stable from negative as the eurozone economy improves. The Netherlands kept its top-level “Aaa” rating, while Belgium was three levels down at “Aa3.” Moody’s said the Netherlands outlook improved because it was less likely to be called on to help fund rescues of weaker eurozone countries, including troubled Italy and Spain. It also said there were signs that the country’s own domestic problems, such as weak growth and high household debt, have peaked “and are likely to evolve in a positive direction.” In addition, Moody’s said, the country’s fiscal situation has stabilized. For Belgium, Moody’s said the risk that the government would have to shoulder more liabilities in the weak banking sector had declined. Bank asset quality “should improve going forward as the Belgian economy is expected to recover, especially in light of the banks’ strong re-focus on the domestic market.”
MULTINATIONALS
Bombardier freezes wages
Bombardier Inc, whose delayed CSeries jet is weighing on profits, is freezing salaries for about 38,000 nonunion workers in its aerospace and transportation units worldwide as well the head office. Employees who are covered under certain local contracts, about half of Bombardier’s 76,400 workers, will not be affected. The company has already been tightening its belt, announcing in January that it was eliminating 1,700 jobs at its aerospace division, mostly in and around its headquarters in Montreal. It is also reducing training budgets and restricting business travel, encouraging employees to use videoconferencing instead, Bombardier spokeswoman Isabelle Rondeau said.
SMARTPHONES
Samsung offers free music
Samsung on Friday unveiled a free music service for users of its Galaxy smartphones, entering a crowded market that includes Pandora, Spotify and Apple’s iTunes. The service, dubbed “Milk Music,” will offer about 200 ad-free radio stations to US customers with Samsung Galaxy devices. The company said the service will be offered with no log-in required and no need to browse for a specific artist or song. It will have 200 genre-based and curated stations and about 13 million songs, and like other services, it will allow six song skips per hour per station.
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