CURRENCY
Switzerland, China ink pact
The Swiss National Bank on Wednesday said it had signed a pact with the People’s Bank of China to set up clearing arrangements for yuan trading in a move hailed by the Swiss banking lobby. The Chinese central bank also agreed to a pilot scheme for foreign investors in Switzerland with a quota of 50 billion yuan (US$8 billion), the Swiss National Bank said in a statement.
WATCHES
Swatch to increase prices
Switzerland’s Swatch group on Wednesday said it would raise the price of its luxury watches by up to 10 percent in Europe after a shock move by the Swiss National Bank last week to lift an enforced franc-euro maximum cap of 1.20 to the European common currency that has seen the Swiss franc soar by as much as 30 percent. “We will adjust prices in Europe for some brands between 5 to 7 percent, to 10 percent,” Swatch chief executive officer Nick Hayek told Bloomberg news agency.
VENEZUELA
GDP to contract 7%: IMF
The IMF said that Venezuela’s troubled economy could shrink by 7 percent this year, possibly making it the worst performer in Latin America. The figure is a dramatic downgrade from October last year, when the IMF said Venezuela’s economy would shrink by 1 percent. In a post published on Wednesday, the IMF said Venezuela would be clobbered by falling oil prices, which have declined by half in the past six months. Oil accounts for more than 95 percent of the South American country’s export earnings.
AIRLINES
Virgin cuts fuel surcharges
Virgin Australia yesterday said it would cut fuel surcharges on flights to the US and reduce air fares in response to plunging oil prices and after the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission said last week it had launched an investigation into whether airlines are making misleading, deceptive or false representations about fuel charges. Virgin Australia said fuel surcharges would be bundled into base fares. At the same time, ticket prices will be lowered by up to A$50 (US$40.50) on the four daily flights between Sydney and Brisbane and Los Angeles, the carrier said.
AUTOMAKERS
Hyundai expects weak sales
Hyundai Motor Co suffered a decline in quarterly earnings and is forecasting weak sales growth this year. South Korea’s largest automaker yesterday said that its net income for September to December dropped 22 percent from a year earlier to 1.66 trillion won (US$1.53 billion). Sales rose 8 percent to 23.6 trillion won. Hyundai blamed foreign exchange rates and forecast that annual sales would grow just 1.8 percent, the weakest growth rate in recent years.
ENTERTAINMENT
Wanda up 44% on debut
Shares in Wanda Cinema Line Corp (萬達院線) yesterday surged 44 percent on their trading debut. The company raised 1.28 billion yuan (US$210 million) by issuing 60 million new shares, or 10.71 percent of its enlarged share capital, exchange filings showed, as investors bet on strong growth in film viewers. On its first day of trading on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, Wanda Cinema shares rose by the maximum allowed for new listings to close at 30.74 yuan, valuing the company as a whole at more than 17 billion yuan.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by