ELECTRONICS
Apple to build data centers
Apple Inc plans to invest 1.7 billion euros (US$1.9 billion) in new data centers in Ireland and Denmark to help run services such as iTunes and maps for users of its devices. The centers, located in County Galway, Ireland, and Denmark’s central Jutland, will be powered by renewable energy, Cupertino, California-based Apple said in a statement yesterday. The investment represents Apple’s biggest-ever project in Europe, with the facilities set to begin operations in 2017. Apple joins rivals including Google Inc and Facebook Inc in building data centers in northern Europe, whose chilly climate helps save on equipment cooling costs.
JAPAN
Rengo seeks raises
The country’s peak body for labor unions said it will seek the biggest increase in monthly wages in more than two decades as it makes inflation the key point in annual spring pay negotiations. The Japanese Trade Union Confederation, known as Rengo, will call for a bump of more than 4 percent in monthly pay, excluding overtime and bonuses, said the group’s president, Nobuaki Koga. More than 2 percent of this figure will be for base pay, with the remainder linked to seniority or time served at a company, Koga said. “We know our request is ambitious, but Japanese society will be thrown into chaos unless people’s incomes rise by that much,” he said in an interview on Feb. 20 in Tokyo. Salaries adjusted for inflation have dropped for 18 straight months as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda pump record stimulus to reflate the economy and spur price gains.
PETROLEUM
Oil slips to US$60
Oil traded near US$60 a barrel in London after the first weekly decline in a month as Libya restarted a crude pipeline after a fire and Oman said it will increase production by as much as possible. Futures swung between gains and losses after a 2.1 percent drop last week. Oil fields in eastern Libya resumed pumping to Hariga port after a pipeline was repaired, according to state-run National Oil Corp. Oman, the biggest Middle East producer outside of OPEC, plans to raise output to 980,000 barrels a day this year, a government official said. Rising supply is contributing to a global surplus that drove crude into a bear market last year. OPEC, whose 12 members ship about 40 percent of the world’s oil, has signaled that it is prepared to let prices fall to a level that would force record US output to slow.
FURNITURE
DFS returns to London listing
DFS Furniture Ltd will be valued at as much as about £654 million (US$1 billion) when the British sofa retailer returns to the London stock market for the first time in more than a decade. The company, owned by private-equity firm, Advent International Corp, will offer shares at a price of £0.245 to £0.310 apiece, it said in a statement yesterday. At the mid- point of the range, DFS will be valued at £585 million, according to the statement. DFS is the latest retailer seeking to sell shares in the UK, on the heels of a year when companies raised about US$6 billion from London IPOs, the most in over a decade, data compiled by Bloomberg show. DFS’ IPO will raise about £98 million for the company, which will be used to reduce debt and provide access to cheaper financing.
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
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts