Chinese server maker Inspur Group Ltd (浪潮集團) started a campaign to lure clients from IBM Corp as China studies whether domestic banks’ reliance on IBM technology threatens national security.
Jinan-based Inspur this week unveiled its “IBM to Inspur” campaign, said an Inspur marketing employee who asked not to be named, citing company policy.
The move could help Inspur capitalize on a dispute with the US after prosecutors there charged five Chinese military officers in the alleged hacking of US companies.
Inspur’s reported 36.7 billion yuan (US$5.9 billion) of revenue in 2011 equaled 5.5 percent of IBM’s sales.
“There aren’t that many alternatives for high-end banking servers, so it’s quite hard to find replacements,” Taiwan-based UBS analyst Arthur Hsieh (謝宗文) said by telephone.
The People’s Bank of China, China’s Ministry of Finance and other Chinese agencies are reviewing domestic banks’ use of IBM servers and expanding a trial program to replace them with homegrown ones, four people familiar with the matter said on Tuesday.
China Postal Savings Bank Co (中國郵政儲蓄銀行) is using Inspur servers in the trial, which began in March last year, the people said.
Inspur International Ltd shares rose 9.9 percent to HK$1.67 in Hong Kong trading yesterday, compared with a 0.6 percent increase in the benchmark Hang Seng Index. A unit trading in Shenzhen climbed by the 10 percent daily limit.
China is issuing rules because Internet and information safety are important parts of its security, Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang (秦剛) said on Wednesday in Beijing.
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