INVESTMENT
Madoff aides found guilty
Five former aides to investment manager Bernard Madoff were convicted on Monday of charges that they helped their boss conceal his multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme for years. A federal jury in New York found back-office director Daniel Bonventre, portfolio managers Annette Bongiorno and Joann Crupi, and computer programmers Jerome O’Hara and George Perez guilty on all counts, including securities fraud and conspiracy to defraud clients. The five defendants are to be sentenced in late July. Madoff, 75, is serving a 150-year prison sentence after pleading guilty in March 2009 to running the Ponzi scheme.
ENERGY
Oil services boss detained
Mexican authorities have detained the owner of an oil services company who allegedly defrauded Citigroup and may have used his professional soccer team to launder money. Amado Yanez showed up for questioning in the case on Saturday. He has been held since Sunday pending a prosecutors’ request that a judge authorize a form of house arrest for him for up to 40 days. He is suspected of committing fraud through the oil services company he heads, Oceanografia SA de CV. Yanez also owns a soccer team in Mexico’s first division.
AUTOMAKERS
Toyota to restart production
Japanese firm Toyota said yesterday it has hired 1,000 contract workers to help restart production, after its employees in India refused to return to work following an end to a eight-day company lockout. The Toyota workers and management at two plants near the southern high-tech city of Bangalore are at loggerheads over pay issues, which they have been negotiating for 10 months. The employees refused to resume work after the company lifted an eight-day lockout on Monday.
TRADE
Australia to ink Japan pact
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott yesterday said substantial progress had been made in securing free-trade agreements with its three largest export markets and a pact with Japan should be finalized within weeks. Canberra in December last year announced a free-trade agreement with Asian giant South Korea after four years of negotiations and Japan is expected to be next, followed by China, with Abbott visiting all three countries in the next two weeks. Australia has previously said it also hopes to conclude an agreement with China, its top export market, this year.
BRAZIL
S&P cuts credit rating
Standard & Poor’s (S&P) cut the nation’s credit rating on Monday by one notch, citing the government’s unclear policy signals as it faces a weaker fiscal situation and slower growth. S&P put Brazil’s rating at “BBB-,” the lowest level for investment grade debt, and called the outlook stable. S&P said the rating cut reflects “slippage” in the government’s fiscal balance.
POSTAL SERVICES
Royal Mail to axe 1,600 jobs
Britain’s Royal Mail yesterday said it plans to axe 1,600 jobs under a fresh cost-cutting drive six months after the group was partly privatized. Royal Mail said in a statement that most of the jobs to go would be in management, with no delivery staff losing their positions. It added that it would create “300 new or enhanced roles,” resulting in a net loss of 1,300 jobs. The changes are expected to deliver annualized cost savings of about £50 million (US$82.5 million), it said.
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