AUTOMKAKERS
VW to recall 1 million cars
German automaker Volkswagen AG (VW) plans to recall more than 1 million cars in China and the US due to a defect in the rear axles, a company spokesman said. The company’s US unit informed the National Highway Transport Safety Administration that it would recall more than 400,000 Jetta sedan models and nearly 42,000 Beetle cars manufactured between 2011 and last year, the spokesman said. Meanwhile, the firm’s Chinese joint venture is set to recall more than 500,000 cars in the nation, state media said.
TRADE
Seychelles to join WTO
The Seychelles on Friday sealed its entry to the WTO. The Indian Ocean island, which has spent 18 years negotiating to join, is set to win formal approval in December from the WTO’s ruling body to become the organization’s 161st member.
ECONOMY
IMF head touts overreaction
IMF managing director Christine Lagarde on Friday said that market turmoil this week might have been an “overreaction,” as leading economic figures met to discuss the global economy and worries about another recession in Europe. Reforms in France were also on the agenda at Friday’s meeting in Paris, in a nation crippled by flat growth and high unemployment.
INTERNET
Twitpic to shut down
Twitpic on Friday said that the service is shutting down after all, apologizing for a “false alarm” that a merger would be its salvation. Twitpic announced early last month that it was shutting down because its bid to trademark its name was being opposed by San Francisco-based Twitter.
SOCIAL MEDIA
Twitter to ‘curate’ feeds
Twitter on Friday said it would start reconfiguring its users’ timelines with “relevant” messages from people they have not followed on the service. Based on a positive response from its tests, the popular one-to-many messaging service is inching toward the Facebook model of using software to “curate” what users see based on their interests or activities, Twitter said in a blog post.
ADVERTISING
Snapchat app to use ads
Snapchat on Friday said it plans to begin weaving advertisements into the popular service for sending ephemeral smartphone messages, but promised not to be “rude” to its members. The first Snapchat advertisements were due to appear in the US this weekend in a section of the service devoted to “recent updates,” the Los Angeles-based startup said in a blog post.
BANKING
Credit Suisse changes board
Credit Suisse said on Friday that it had shaken up the leadership of its investment banking and Asia-Pacific divisions. James Amine and Timothy O’Hara have been appointed to the company’s executive board and are scheduled to head the Swiss lender’s investment banking division, alongside Gael de Boissard, who leads its fixed-income business and is chief executive for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. O’Hara is set to continue overseeing the equities business, and Amine is set to continue his responsibility for the investment banking department.
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
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day