ENERGY
Russia told to pay Yukos Oil
Russia has been ordered to pay more than US$50 billion for expropriating what was once the nation’s largest oil producer, Yukos Oil Co, in a court ruling that said Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government used tax claims to destroy the company and its CEO, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a political opponent. The Permanent Court for Arbitration on Monday said that the Russian government owes the money to the former majority shareholders in Yukos. Moscow vowed to fight the decision, one of the largest commercial arbitration awards in history, raising the prospect of a new round of legal battles as the shareholders seek to enforce the decision.
TAXATION
‘Inversion’ deals hurt US
US Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew warned on Monday that the surge in companies moving offshore via mergers to skirt US taxes could weaken the nation’s finances. Taking aim at “inversion” deals, Lew said the US Congress needs to amend tax laws to eliminate takeovers of foreign companies by US firms with the primary aim of seeking an address in a cheaper tax jurisdiction. Lew said companies had touted up to US$1 billion in annual tax savings by moving their address offshore, which could impact the annual budget, US$3.8 trillion in the current year.
AUTOMAKERS
Honda posts US$1.4bn profit
Honda Motor Co yesterday reported an April-June fiscal first-quarter profit of ¥146.5 billion (US$1.4 billion), close to what analysts surveyed by FactSet had forecast. The company raised its annual profit forecast to ¥600 billion from ¥595 billion. Quarterly sales totaled ¥2.988 trillion, up 5 percent from a year earlier. Honda, which sold 1.06 million vehicles in April to last month, expects to sell 4.83 million vehicles for the fiscal year through March next year. The Tokyo-based company sold 4.32 million vehicles last fiscal year.
AVIATION
Airbus cancels order
Airbus has canceled an order for six A380 superjumbos from Skymark Airlines because the Japanese company is facing financial difficulties, the French daily Les Echos reported on Monday. The European aircraft manufacturer reportedly terminated a US$2.2 billion contract, signed in 2011, last week. Skymark posted its first net loss in five years of 13.5 million euros (US$18.1 million) last fiscal year.
SOUTH KOREA
Current account in surplus
Seoul logged a current account surplus of nearly US$8 billion last month, slightly down from the May figure as import growth outpaced exports, the Bank of Korea said yesterday. The current account, the broadest measure of foreign trade in goods and services, showed a surplus of US$7.92 billion compared with a revised figure of US$9.08 billion the previous month. In the first six months of the year, the surplus stood at a record US$39.2 billion, compared with US$31.3 billion a year earlier.
ENERGY
Total selling coal assets
French oil giant Total on Monday said it had inked a deal to sell its South African coal assets to mining company Exxaro Resources for US$472 million. Exxaro is South Africa’s second-largest coal producer, with seven coal mines that produce about 40 million tonnes annually. Last year Total Coal South Africa sold about 4.5 million tonnes of thermal coal, mainly to Asian markets, making it the fifth-largest producer in the country.
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