HONG KONG
Record Rolls-Royce sale
A Hong Kong tycoon has placed the biggest-ever order for Rolls-Royce cars, agreeing to buy 30 Phantoms to chauffeur guests at a luxury resort he is building in the global gambling capital of Macau. Stephen Hung’s (洪永時) US$20 million purchase surpasses the 14 Phantoms bought by Hong Kong’s Peninsula Hotel in 2006. Hung and Rolls-Royce executives signed the deal on Tuesday at the company’s Goodwood factory in England. The Extended Wheelbase Phantoms will be used for guests at Hung’s “ultra-luxury” Louis XIII hotel, which is scheduled to open in early 2016.
AUTOMAKERS
EU sales growth steady
European car sales rose a 12th consecutive month as price cuts by automakers and demand for compact models from Ford Motor Co and Volkswagen AG led to the longest stretch of growth on record. Registrations increased 1.8 percent last month to 701,118 vehicles from 688,464 a year earlier, the Brussels-based European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association, or ACEA, said in a statement yesterday. The growth, the slowest this year, pared sales gains in the first eight months of this year to 5.8 percent.
PHARMACEUTICALS
Endo eyes Auxilium
Endo International PLC says it is making an unsolicited offer for Auxilium Pharmaceuticals that values Auxilium at US$28.10 per share. The deal is worth US$1.41 billion in cash and stock, based on Auxilium’s shares outstanding. Endo values the offer at US$2.2 billion, including the assumption of Auxilium’s debt. It comes at a premium of 31 percent based on the Tuesday closing price of Auxilium shares. Dublin-based Endo said the two companies have complementary products and added that there are significant opportunities for savings.
AGRICULTURE
Drought impacts coffee crop
Coffee output in Brazil, the world’s chief exporter, will slide this year after the worst drought in decades, agricultural agency Conab said on Tuesday. The drought hampered the development of plants, causing the arabica crop to plummet 16.1 percent, Conab said. Latest forecasts are for an arabica crop of 32.1 million bags, the variety accounting for a three-quarter share of Brazil’s overall harvest. However, production of the harsher-tasting robusta crop should fill 13 million bags this year, Conab said.
INTERNET
Web continues to grow
The number of Web sites has burst above 1 billion and is growing apace, according to figures updated in real time on Tuesday by online tracker Internet Live Stats. Tim Berners-Lee, considered the father of the World Wide Web, touted the milestone on Twitter. It comes as the agency responsible for managing addresses on the Internet expands choices far beyond “.com” and “.net” to provide more online real estate for the booming ranks of Web sites. The World Wide Web turned 25 in April this year.
RETAIL
Christmas deliveries in focus
US logistics giant UPS, criticized for late deliveries of Christmas presents last year, said on Tuesday it has started to hire up to 95,000 temporary workers to avoid repeating the fiasco. UPS said it needed between 90,000 and 95,000 seasonal employees to handle an anticipated surge in holiday package shipments driven by online shopping that begins in October and runs through January.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to