BANKING
Bosses give up bonuses
Bosses at British banking group Standard Chartered PLC have given up their bonuses after profits at the Asia-focused bank fell by more than a third last year. Standard Chartered, which last week said chief executive Peter Sands would step down in June followed by chairman John Peace next year amid various troubles at the bank, saw net profit slide 37 percent last year, the second consecutive year of decline. The lender said that after-tax profit was US$2.51 billion for last year — down from US$3.99 billion in 2013 — and described the result as “disappointing.” Peace said that “in light of the disappointing performance of the group, those executive directors on the PLC board throughout the year came to the conclusion that they should show leadership by not taking any variable compensation for 2014.” The bank’s overall bonus pot was down 9 percent from 2013.
CHINA
Railway plans unveiled
The nation is to invest more than 800 billion yuan (US$128 billion) in railway construction this year, the same as last year’s final target, while pledging to increase its railway makers’ overseas market share. In his annual state-of-the-nation report, Premier Li Keqiang (李克強) included rail equipment makers as one of seven sectors the government will promote overseas. In addition to pushing for high-profile overseas contracts, 8,000km of railway lines will be opened to traffic this year, Li said. “We will encourage Chinese companies to participate in overseas infrastructure development projects and engage in cooperation with their foreign counterparts in building up production capacity.” Beijing is competing aggressively for overseas rail projects, targeting emerging markets in Africa, Eastern Europe, Latin America and Southeast Asia, while also pitching for high-profile contracts in the developed world, including the US.
COMPUTING
Alibaba to open US center
Chinese online giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴) will open a data center in Silicon Valley, California, the firm said on Wednesday, challenging US rival Amazon.com in the field of cloud computing. The company’s Aliyun unit, which already competes with Amazon Web Services in China, is to offer cloud services to US firms in what was described as a gradual rollout. “For the time being, we are just testing the water,” said Sicheng Yu (喻思成), vice president of the unit, in a statement on the company’s corporate Web site Alizila. “We know well what Chinese clients need and now it’s time for us to learn what US clients need.” The new Silicon Valley data center will offer several services, including cloud computing on demand. “The market is quite crowded in the US, but we offer some unique value and there’s room for us,” Yu said.
RETAILERS
Carrefour plans turnaround
Carrefour SA, France’s largest retailer, plans to spend as much as 2.6 billion euros (US$2.9 billion) this year on projects to cement a turnaround under CEO Georges Plassat, who is to return next month after surgery. Projects to be undertaken include modernizing stores and revamping the supply chain in France, Carrefour’s largest market, the company said yesterday. The plans show the grocer’s resolve to build on progress achieved with Plassat at the helm. The CEO, who has led a revival of the company since joining in 2012, is to return to work before the end of April following surgery that has kept him away from the office since early last month, Carrefour said on Wednesday.
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
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
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],”
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