AUTOMAKERS
Union leader joins GM board
General Motors Co (GM) has named a union leader to its board of directors, a first for the US automaker and a rarity in US business. GM, which is paying a heavy price for the delayed recall of vehicles linked to 13 deaths, just published its worst quarterly results since emerging from bankruptcy just more than three years ago. In a statement on Friday evening, it said it was nominating United Auto Workers vice president Joe Ashton to its 12-member board. Ashton, who will represent GM’s employee pension fund, was expected to resign from his union position in June. If his nomination is approved by shareholders, he will begin his board term in August.
AUSTRALIA
State mulls power grid sale
New South Wales will consider selling its electricity network, a transaction analysts estimate could raise US$32 billion, to help fund infrastructure projects. “That is something the Cabinet and the government will consider,” New South Wales Premier Mike Baird said in an interview on Sky News in Australia yesterday. “Building the infrastructure is probably the critical issue we face.” The model of selling state assets to fund projects needed by local communities was “very compelling,” Baird said. There is a huge amount of the state’s capital tied up in the electricity network, he said.
TOBACCO
Packaging could break rules
Attempts by tobacco-producing nations to sink Australia’s landmark plain packaging law for cigarettes and cigars picked up pace on Friday, as WTO members approved a broad probe into whether Canberra has broken the rules of global commerce. Australia could learn by the end of the year whether its rules, which are widely praised by anti-smoking campaigners, fall foul of international trademark law. After facing off in Friday’s closed-door meeting of the WTO’s dispute settlement body, Australia and its adversaries — Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Indonesia and Ukraine — agreed to fold five separate challenges into a single case, sources said.
OIL
Iraq short of target
Iraq has exported an average of 2.5 million barrels per day (bpd) of oil so far this month, more than last month, but still well short of its this year’s target, due in part to repeated sabotage of a northern pipeline. Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister for Energy Hussain al-Shahristani on Saturday said exports could have reached 3.2 million bpd without the damage, and if Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region had pumped its share of oil. Iraq set an export target of 3.4 million bpd for this year, including 400,000 bpd from Kurdistan, which has not exported any oil via state infrastructure for more than one year, due to a row with Baghdad over resource rights and revenue sharing.
TRADE
UN lifts diamond embargo
The UN Security Council is set to lift a nearly decade-old embargo on Ivory Coast’s international diamond trade and plans to relax its arms embargo there, diplomats said on Friday. The 15 members of the council are set to vote on the resolution tomorrow, and they “are completely united” on the issue, one diplomat said. The diamond embargo was declared in 2005 because the stones were helping fund the Forces Nouvelles rebels that controlled the north of the country after a failed coup attempt in 2002 against then-Ivorian president Laurent Gbagbo.
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
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts