SECURITIES
Nomura raises base salaries
Nomura Holdings Inc said it would raise pay for about 3,700 employees at its domestic brokerage unit to attract and retain staff and support the economy. Base pay at Nomura Securities Co is set to climb an average 2.3 percent from April, Nomura Holdings spokesman Kenji Yamashita said by telephone yesterday. The increase is aimed at employees who are mainly in their 20s, he said. Nomura and Daiwa Securities Group Inc are among financial firms that have been reviewing compensation as Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe urges companies to help defeat deflation. Japanese have been facing rising living costs following a sales tax increase last April and monetary easing designed to spur prices. The workers at Japan’s biggest brokerage would get ¥7,000 (US$60) more pay on average each month, Yamashita said. It raised pay for 4,000 employees as part of a similar initiative last year.
TECHNOLOGY
Uber CEO conciliatory
Uber chief executive officer Travis Kalanick stuck a newly conciliatory tone on Sunday, promising to create 50,000 new jobs this year across Europe in cities that are willing to reach deals to help his firm operate. “We want to make 2015 the year where we establish a new partnership with EU cities,” Kalanick told attendees at the Digital-Life-Design conference in Munich, Germany’s largest annual gathering of media and tech leaders. Four-year-old Uber, which helps users summon taxi-like services on their smartphones, has drawn a firestorm of criticism, even as it has continued to expand rapidly into more than 250 cities worldwide. In Europe, where it offers a range of local transportation options from professional limousine services to informal ride-sharing options, Uber has been hit with court injunctions in Belgium, France, Germany, Netherlands and Spain for violating taxi licensing rules. Kalanick said Uber had created thousands of full and part-time driving jobs in cities where it is running.
COMMUNICATIONS
DTAG to invest in networks
Deutsche Telekom AG (DTAG), Europe’s largest phone company, plans to increase spending on networks in its home market of Germany to ward off rivals including Vodafone Group PLC and Telefonica SA. The carrier earmarked 23.5 billion euros (US$27 billion) in the next five years for its German landline and mobile networks, small cells and the digitalization of infrastructure, Deutsche Telekom chief executive officer Timotheus Hoettges said in Munich on Sunday. The company budgeted 23 billion euros for 2010 to this year.
ELECTRONICS
Sharp shares plummet
Japan’s Sharp Corp saw its shares plunge in Tokyo yesterday following a report that said the consumer electronics giant would fall back into the red, reversing company forecasts for an annual profit. The firm’s shares dropped 8.73 percent to ¥230 by the close of trading. Japan’s Nikkei business daily said the Osaka-based firm would report a loss that could amount to hundreds of millions of US dollars for the fiscal year through March owing to a slump in its struggling television business. The company declined to comment on the report but said its full-year earnings would fall below earlier forecasts due to a “deterioration” in sales at home and “severe competition” in the liquid crystal display business. It did not give new figures. Sharp had earlier said it was on track to report a ¥30 billion (US$256 million) annual net profit.
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],”
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
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained