BANKING
Thiam to lead Credit Suisse
Credit Suisse Group AG named Prudential PLC’s Tidjane Thiam to replace Brady Dougan as chief executive officer as the bank grapples with regulations that have hurt profit and weakened capital. Dougan is to step down at the end of June, Credit Suisse said in a statement on its Web site yesterday. In a separate statement, Prudential said a successor to Thiam has been found and would be named once the regulatory approval process has been completed. The switch puts an Ivory Coast-born French national who has spent the past decade running insurance businesses atop Switzerland’s second-biggest lender. Dougan, who has led Credit Suisse since 2007, has contended with pressure to shift strategy away from investment banking as the company’s stock posts one of the worst performances among European banks this year. Thiam has run Britain’s largest insurer by market value since 2009, almost tripling its stock price while successfully betting on Asia to drive up profit.
SOCIAL MEDIA
Twitter opens HK office
Twitter Inc has opened a Hong Kong office, its first in the region, the company whose microblogging services are blocked elsewhere in China said yesterday. The office, to be headed by Twitter executive Peter Greenberger, is intended to allow the San Francisco-based company to tap China for advertising revenue, the company said, even if Internet users on the mainland cannot see those ads. Twitter collected US$479 million in fourth-quarter revenue from advertisers who paid to inject their ads, known as “promoted tweets,” into Twitter users’ timelines. The company has 288 million users worldwide. China’s censors have blocked Twitter since 2009 along with US social media platform Facebook Inc and Google Inc’s YouTube. Beijing officials say this censorship is necessary to maintain social order.
TRANSPORTATION
Uber touts women’s work
Uber Technologies Inc said it will create 1 million jobs for women within the next five years in a partnership with the UN aimed at advancing gender equality. The alliance with UN Women also marks the 20th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration on women’s rights and economic empowerment, the San Francisco-based company yesterday said in a blog. Driving for Uber offers “flexibility and optionality that are particularly attractive for women,” Uber general counsel Salle Yoo said in an interview. Uber counts 160,000 active drivers in the US, and given that just 14 percent of those drivers are women, “there is still room to grow,” Yoo said.
AUTOMAKERS
Audi profit slowed last year
Audi AG’s profitability slipped last year as the luxury vehicle division of Volkswagen AG invested in adding manufacturing capacity and developing new models like the revamped Q7 sport-utility vehicle. Operating profit narrowed to 9.6 percent of sales last year from 10.1 percent in 2013, Audi said yesterday in a statement. The margin this year will be within the manufacturer’s 8 percent to 10 percent target corridor, it predicted. To underpin expansion plans, Audi is spending about 4.8 billion euros (US$5.2 billion) a year through 2019, a 9 percent increase from its previous rolling five-year budget. With models ranging from the US$18,400 A1 hatchback to the US$165,000 R8 sports car, the world’s No. 2 maker of luxury autos is pushing to overtake No. 1 BMW by the end of the decade.
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