Nestle SA chief executive officer Paul Bulcke said Switzerland is losing business appeal because of the country’s referendum to restrict immigration and the strength of its currency.
“If we would have to expand something here, I would think twice,” the Belgian CEO said on Thursday during a press conference on full-year results at the food company’s Vevey headquarters.
Swiss voters last year approved a plan to restrict immigration, while more recently the Swiss National Bank unleashed a surge in the country’s currency by abruptly abandoning an exchange-rate cap.
Photo: Bloomberg
Bulcke said Nestle might not have picked the Swiss town of Romont as the site for a new Nespresso factory if it was making the decision now.
“The Swiss franc is part of it,” Bulcke said in an interview. “But there are other dimensions in my eyes that are even more important: immigration. I have people here that run a multinational. I need people who understand these countries.”
Nestle began almost 150 years ago making infant formula on the shores of Lake Geneva. Bulcke’s comments highlight the challenge Switzerland has in continuing to attract business investment. The Swiss economy has outperformed the neighboring euro area every quarter since 2012.
“Switzerland needs to think about that,” Bulcke said.
Nestle does not intend to move businesses out of the country and is not planning job cuts, he said. However, he was not sure if Nestle will replace all employees in the nation when they leave.
More than half of the company’s research costs are in Switzerland, Bulcke said. The KitKat maker has opened research centers elsewhere in the world in past years to avoid concentrating too much in one country, he said.
Nestle has 10 plants in Switzerland, which export about two-thirds of their production. The company gets less than 2 percent of total revenue from its home country, and has about 10,000 employees in Switzerland, out of a total of 339,000.
“We’re going to work on that to see how we can soften the impact of the Swiss franc’s revaluation,” Bulcke said.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
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
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
FUTURE PLANS: Although the electric vehicle market is getting more competitive, Hon Hai would stick to its goal of seizing a 5 percent share globally, Young Liu said Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), a major iPhone assembler and supplier of artificial intelligence (AI) servers powered by Nvidia Corp’s chips, yesterday said it has introduced a rotating chief executive structure as part of the company’s efforts to cultivate future leaders and to enhance corporate governance. The 50-year-old contract electronics maker reported sizable revenue of NT$6.16 trillion (US$189.67 billion) last year. Hon Hai, also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), has been under the control of one man almost since its inception. A rotating CEO system is a rarity among Taiwanese businesses. Hon Hai has given leaders of the company’s six