MALAYSIA
Economy grows by 6.4%
Malaysia’s economy grew a better-than-expected 6.4 percent in the second quarter on the back of stronger exports and robust domestic demand, the Malaysian central bank said yesterday. Southeast Asia’s third-largest economy said exports jumped 14.2 percent in the three months through June compared with the same quarter last year, which saw slack external demand for Malaysian goods. Private investment, especially in the services and manufacturing sectors, surged 12.1 percent, while private consumption grew 6.5 percent in the quarter year-on-year, the bank said.
COMMUNICATIONS
Samsung to buy US startup
Samsung Electronics Co said yesterday it had reached a deal to buy US home automation startup SmartThings, as the South Korean electronics giant aims to expand beyond the increasingly saturated smartphone market. The world’s top smartphone maker said it had entered into a deal to buy the US app maker, which allows people to monitor and control their home appliances via mobile devices. Samsung gave no details of the value of the deal. SmartThings is to continue to operate independently under its founder and CEO Alex Hawkinson and is set to become part of Samsung’s Open Innovation Center, Samsung said in a statement.
APPLIANCES
GE mulls sale of division
General Electric Co (GE) said that it is considering the sale of its appliance division, part of its effort to focus on selling more complex and profitable industrial equipment. The confirmation came after Swedish appliance maker Electrolux released a statement on Thursday that it was in discussions to buy the business from GE, which is based in Fairfield, Connecticut. GE’s appliance division, which includes a much smaller lighting business that is not being discussed as part of this transaction, earned US$381 million of US$8.3 billion in sales last year, for a profit margin of 4.6 percent. The company’s industrial division as a whole earned US$16.2 billion on sales of US$103.6 billion, for a far more robust margin of 15.7 percent.
BEVERAGES
Coke buys stake in Monster
Coca-Cola Co announced on Thursday it plans to pay US$2.15 billion for a 16.7 percent stake in Monster Beverage, cementing a distribution-based link between the two that had added significantly to Coca-Cola’s profits. The deal would lock in for the soft-drink giant a share of the energy-drink market, where its own brands have lagged far behind Monster Energy and rival Red Bull. Coca-Cola plans to transfer ownership of its energy drink unit — brands including NOS, Full Throttle and Burn — to Monster, and take over Monster’s non-energy brands like Hansen’s Natural Sodas, Peace Tea and Hubert’s Lemonade.
INTERNET
Yahoo Stores relaunched
Yahoo Inc announced on Thursday the relaunch of its e-commerce platform, which allows small businesses to easily set up online retailing. The new Yahoo Stores system, a post on a company blog said, allows users to “turn your idea into a business in less than two minutes.” Yahoo Small Business head Amit Kumar said the new platform was “a completely reimagined, next-generation version” of a service Yahoo began 16 years ago. The move should help Yahoo regain a foothold in online retailing, in a market expected to grow to US$304 billion this year, according to the research firm eMarketer.
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