AIRPORTS
Athens auctions airports
Multinational companies from Argentina, France and Germany are competing to buy 14 Greek airports put up for sale to boost Athens’ depleted cash reserves, the country’s privatization agency said on Friday. Argentina’s Corporacion America, France’s Vinci and Germany’s Fraport have all placed fixed bids for the airports, which are being auctioned in two lots. The airports on offer include Thessaloniki, Corfu, Rhodes, Mykonos and Santorini.
CANADA
Jobless rate posts drop
The unemployment rate dropped to 6.8 percent last month, its lowest level since December 2008, as the country added 74,000 jobs, Statistics Canada said on Friday. Analysts were expecting a stable employment situation for the month, with the creation of only 16,000 jobs, following 11,000 losses in August. Last month, an additional 29,000 people were eligible to work, but only 66 percent of them were employed.
HUNGARY
Inflation lowest since 1968
Annual inflation has sunk to minus-0.5 percent, the lowest level since 1968, official data showed on Friday, mainly due to government-mandated household utility price cuts. While the country is not part of the eurozone, many EU member states have shared in the currency bloc’s drop to ultralow inflation that officials worry could turn into a dangerous deflationary spiral. In the case of Hungary, which just two years ago had the EU’s highest inflation rate at 5.6 percent, the drop in prices is mainly due to government measures.
ELECTRONICS
GTAT asks out of Apple deal
A supplier enlisted to make sapphire screens for Apple Inc’s mobile devices on Friday urged a bankruptcy court to free it from contracts it branded “oppressive and burdensome.” GT Advanced Technologies Inc (GTAT) “believes that it has many claims against Apple,” lawyers for the firm said in paperwork filed with the US Bankruptcy Court. The company also asked the court to let it wind down synthetic sapphire manufacturing facilities in two states to extinguish an “ongoing cash burn.”
ZAMBIA
Mining royalties raised
Minister of Finance Alexander Chikwanda on Friday announced a 33 percent hike in mining royalties, as the government seeks to ease budget shortfalls in the copper-rich country. Unveiling next year’s budget, Chikwanda said Lusaka would increase mineral royalties for underground operations from 6 to 8 percent. The country is Africa’s largest copper producer, with trade in the metal accounting for 70 percent of export earnings.
TECHNOLOGY
Infosys exceeds Q2 targets
Indian IT giant Infosys Ltd on Friday reported a better-than-expected 29 percent jump in second-quarter net profit, helped by a strong US dollar and cost reductions, while it announced a bonus stock issue, sending its shares soaring. The country’s second-largest IT services exporter said that its July-to-September net profit hit 30.96 billion rupees (US$506 million), up from 24.07 billion rupees in the same period last year and ahead of forecasts of 29.6 billion rupees.
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
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],”
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
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