TELECOMS
Canada probing Apple
Canada’s Competition Bureau on Friday said it is poring over Apple Inc’s contracts with local wireless carriers to determine if the company illegally stifled competition when it first introduced the iPhone. Spokesman Greg Scott said the bureau sought a court order this week to force Apple to hand over its records relating to the supply of iPhones sold in Canada. “At this time, the investigation is ongoing and no determination has been made yet as to whether any laws have been broken,” Scott said.
ENERGY
BP must cut jobs: CEO
BP PLC is dealing with the lowest crude prices in five years and so must cut jobs because its costs are higher than those of its global competitors, chief executive officer Bob Dudley told staff this week. That means that, along with certain positions being removed, some sites or plants may also be shut or sold, Dudley said. BP, Europe’s third-largest oil company by market value, plans to cut between US$1 billion and US$2 billion from a previous capital spending budget for next year of between US$24 billion and US$26 billion, it said this week.
TECHNOLOGY
Liberty Reserve head jailed
The former technology chief for payment processing company Liberty Reserve was sentenced to five years in prison in New York on Friday by a judge who rejected arguments that the firm popular with criminal enterprises was merely aspiring to compete with eBay Inc’s PayPal payments business before it was shut down. Mark Marmilev, a 35-year-old Israeli citizen, pleaded guilty earlier this year to conspiring to operate a money transmitting business that failed to comply with federal registration requirements. Prosecutions are still pending against two company founders.
BANKING
China Construction selling
China Construction Bank Corp (中國建設銀行), the country’s second-largest lender, plans to raise as much as 80 billion yuan (US$12.9 billion) by selling preferred stock to comply with more stringent capital requirements. Construction Bank is to sell as much as 60 billion yuan of preferred shares on the domestic market and as much as 20 billion yuan overseas, the Beijing-based lender said in a Shanghai stock exchange statement on Friday. All proceeds will be used to replenish the company’s Tier-1 capital, it said.
SOUTH AFRICA
Fitch keeps “BBB” rating
The country’s credit rating was kept unchanged by Fitch Ratings, six months after the agency put the nation on a negative outlook, raising expectations of a downgrade. The country’s foreign currency rating remains at “BBB,” the second-lowest investment grade, in line with Brazil and Russia, Fitch said in an e-mailed statement. The outlook on the rating was kept negative and the local currency rating was kept at “BBB+.”
FASHION
Gucci heads to step down
Gucci creative director Frida Giannini and chief executive Patrizio di Marco are leaving their posts next year, the luxury brand’s parent company said on Friday. Giannini will step down after showing her fall/winter 2014-2015 collections for men in January and women in February.
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