BANKING
RBS profits surge
Royal Bank of Scotland PLC (RBS) said on Friday that its second-quarter pretax profit nearly doubled as the bank benefited from a decline in loan impairments. The results were better than expected and prompted the bank to issue them a week early. However, the bank, which is based in Edinburgh, warned that litigation and other legacy issues could drag down its results in future quarters. On a pretax basis, the bank, which is 81 percent owned by the UK government, posted a profit of £1.01 billion (US$1.72 billion) for the second quarter, compared with £548 million in the second quarter of last year. The bank said its preliminary net profit was £230 million, compared with a profit of £142 million in the same period last year. In the quarter, the bank was able to release £93 million that it had set aside for bad loans. In the same quarter last year, the company posted loan impairments of £1.12 billion.
INTERNET
Google ramps up buyouts
Google Inc more than tripled spending on acquisitions in the first half of the year to US$4.2 billion, as the company ramps up investments to expand its services. The world’s largest online advertiser spent US$3.2 billion for thermostat company Nest Labs Inc in February and an additional US$1 billion on other purchases in the first six months of this year, the California-based company said in a filing on Friday. That was up from US$1.3 billion for the same period a year ago, according to a previous filing. The numbers for this year exclude the more than US$1 billion that Google has announced it is paying for home-camera company DropCam Inc and satellite service Skybox Imaging Inc. Google’s scale of deal spending is climbing as it works to bolster its core search-advertising business and extend its reach into new markets such as mobile, telecommunications and driverless cars.
MINING
Freeport inks Indonesia deal
Freeport-McMoRan Inc clinched a deal with the Indonesian government on Friday allowing the miner to resume copper concentrate exports from the country, effectively ending a six-month tax dispute and paving the way for more miners to follow suit. Freeport, which is expected to export 756,000 tonnes of copper concentrate in the second half of this year, received its permit from the trade ministry on Friday after signing a memorandum of understanding with the government, Freeport Indonesia said. With its export permit in the bag, Indonesia’s top copper miner said it would resume full operations immediately, with concentrate shipments expected to resume next month.
TECHNOLOGY
Bose sues Beats Electronics
Bose Corp on Friday sued Beats Electronics LLC over patented technology for canceling noise in earphones. The suit filed in a US federal court in the state of Delaware pits the 50-year-old firm against an Internet-age youngster which is being bought by Apple Inc in a deal valued at US$3 billion. Attorneys said they had also filed a complaint with the US International Trade Commission, which has the power to block imports of headsets found to infringe on patented technology. Bose accused Beats of infringing on five of its patents for cutting out unwanted noise in headphones, particularly by canceling it out with other sound waves.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by