E-COMMERCE
Alibaba buys soccer stake
E-commerce giant Alibaba (阿里巴巴) will pay 1.2 billion yuan (US$192 million) for a 50 percent stake in Guangzhou Evergrande, China’s top soccer club, the company said in a statement yesterday, in a frenzy of deal-making before it goes public. Evergrande, who won both the Chinese Super League and the AFC Champions League titles last year, said it had introduced Alibaba as a “strategic investor.”
MACROECONOMICS
S Korean GDP rises 3.9%
South Korea’s economic growth hit its highest level in three years in the first quarter, boosted by new home construction and electronics exports. The Bank of Korea yesterday said that Asia’s No. 4 economy expanded 3.9 percent over a year earlier, the fastest clip since the first quarter of 2011. It said production of tech devices and petroleum products lifted the manufacturing industry as well as exports. A jump in new housing was a boon for the construction industry.
AUTOMAKERS
GM China sales accelerate
General Motors Co (GM) said deliveries in China accelerated last month on demand for Buick and Chevrolet vehicles after posting the slowest growth in 14 months. Deliveries in its biggest market climbed 9.2 percent to 276,109 vehicles last month, compared with 6.3 percent in April, the Detroit-based automaker said in a statement on its Web site. Among its brands, Buick sales climbed 15 percent, while Chevrolet deliveries rose 13 percent and Cadillac sales climbed 59 percent, GM said.
FINANCE
Three big banks fined
The US Financial Industry Regulatory Authority said on Wednesday that it fined investment banks Barclays PLC, Goldman Sachs Group Inc and Merrill Lynch US$1 million each for providing incomplete and inaccurate information about trades the companies conducted. Finra said that the trading information is required to be submitted upon request, but it said the data was missing, had incorrect customer names and contact information or inaccurate details about the transactions. The regulator said the three banks neither admitted nor denied the charges by settling the cases.
CONSUMER GOODS
Henkel to buy Spotless
Henkel AG & Co KGaA, the German-based maker of Persil laundry detergent and Dial soap, yesterday said it was buying French laundry products company Spotless Group in a deal valued at 940 million euros (US$1.28 billion). Henkel said it signed an agreement yesterday with funds advised by BC Partners to buy all the shares in Spotless Group SAS, based in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. Spotless’ products include laundry sheets, stain removers and fabric dyes. Henkel expects to complete the deal by the first quarter next year.
PHARMACEUTICALS
GSK settles asthma suit
GlaxoSmithKline PLC (GSK) will pay US$105 million to dozens of US states to settle allegations that it unlawfully marketed its asthma drug Advair and the antidepressants Paxil and Wellbutrin. Under the settlement announced on Wednesday, the firm also agreed to rules that bar it from paying doctors to promote its products; providing financial incentives that encourage salespeople to market drugs for unapproved uses; marketing drugs using results from inadequate studies or making unapproved claims about a product, a statement from California Attorney General Kamala Harris said.
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
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
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],”
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