EMPLOYMENT
S Korea jobless rate at high
South Korea’s jobless rate rose to a five-year high last month as more college graduates and cash-strapped retirees flooded the increasingly tight job market, state data showed yesterday. The jobless rate of 4.6 percent last month — up from 3.8 percent in January and 4.5 percent a year ago — was the highest since February 2010, according to state-run Statistics Korea. The seasonally adjusted jobless rate also rose from 3.4 percent in January to 3.9 percent last month, when most college students graduate. The seasonally adjusted jobless rate remained the same from a year ago.
BANKING
Citi unit to exit Argentina
Citigroup Inc on Tuesday said that it plans to exit its custody business in Argentina “soon,” following a US ruling last week barring it from handling payments on Argentine bonds. The big US bank wants to “exit the custody business in Argentina as soon as possible,” it said in a letter to US Judge Thomas Griesa, who last week prohibited the payments in a long-running legal battle between Argentina and a pair of US hedge funds. The company’s next steps could include the sale of the custody business, or simply terminating it, Citi attorneys at Davis Polk & Wardwell said in the letter.
INTERNET
Adobe unveils cloud service
Adobe Systems Inc, which helped to make the portable file format ubiquitous, is rolling out a suite of Web-based tools for people to create, store and manage documents online. Called Adobe Document Cloud, the service will cost US$15 per month and also give users access to digital signatures, mobile applications and other software for tracking documents, the company said on Tuesday. The new product joins Adobe’s cloud-based marketing and creative-design tools and is part of the company’s push to generate more sales from Internet-based subscriptions.
GREEN ENERGY
China raises solar estimate
China will push this year to install almost two-and-a-half times as much solar capacity as the US added last year in a race to clear its increasingly polluted air. The world’s biggest emitter of carbon aims to install as much as 17.8 gigawatts of solar projects this year, according to a Chinese National Energy Administration planning document seen by Bloomberg. The administration previously estimated 15 gigawatts would be added this year, a person familiar with the matter said. The more ambitious goal might attract as much as 21 billion yuan (US$3.4 billion) of additional investment to solar projects compared with the earlier plan, Bloomberg estimates.
AUTOMAKERS
Tesla plans to lead segment
Tesla Motors Inc CEO Elon Musk on Tuesday said that people will “take autonomous cars for granted” in a short period of time and signaled that the automaker plans to be a leader in the nascent market. “Tesla is the leader in electric cars, but also will be the leader in autonomous cars, at least autonomous cars that people can buy,” Musk said at a technology conference in San Jose, California. “We’re going to put a lot of effort into autonomous driving. It’s going to be the default thing, and it will save a lot of lives.” Musk plans to announce details of the latest software update to its current Model S customers today.
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