CHINA
City’s Uber offices ‘visited’
Authorities in Chengdu visited the offices of Uber on Wednesday as part of a new investigation into the online taxi-hailing service, a spokeswoman for Chengdu’s transportation commission said. The visit is the second made by authorities to Uber’s China offices in the past week. Xinhua news agency on Friday last week said that Guangzhou authorities raided Uber’s office there on suspicion of an “unlicensed operation.”
EUROPEAN UNION
Online news tax cut planned
The EU executive will propose cutting the bloc’s sales tax on online newspapers, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said on Wednesday, in a move that would bring them into line with print media. Addressing Germany’s newspaper publishers federation BDZV in Brussels, Juncker said the commission would put forward draft legislation in the first half of next year to extend national governments’ right to set reduced rates of value-added tax on newspapers to their digital versions.
VIDEO GAMES
Nintendo tops own estimate
Nintendo Co reported a net profit of ¥41.8 billion (US$350.6 million) for the fiscal year through March, a reversal from deep losses the previous year. The results reported yesterday by the Kyoto-based company were better than its own forecast for a ¥30 billion profit. It was in line with the forecast in a FactSet survey of analysts. Nintendo reported a loss of ¥23.2 billion the previous fiscal year.
AUTOMAKERS
Tesla shipments on target
Luxury electric car maker Tesla on Wednesday said it was on track to deliver 55,000 cars this year, even as its losses widened on accelerated research spending. The Silicon Valley automaker reported a first-quarter loss of US$154 million, compared with US$108 million in losses a year ago. Revenues fell by 1.7 percent from the year before to US$940 million. Tesla said the company produced 11,160 Model S cars in the January-March quarter and expected to begin delivering the long-awaited Model X SUV late in the third quarter.
BANKING
NAB to spin off UK unit
National Australia Bank (NAB) yesterday announced the nation’s biggest-ever rights issue to raise A$5.5 billion (US$4.37 billion) while detailing plans to demerge its British banking business. The nation’s fourth-biggest lender outlined its proposals as it posted a net profit of A$3.44 billion in the six months to March 31, a 20.4 percent jump from the previous year. Its cash profit, the industry’s preferred measure which strips out volatile items, rose by 5.4 percent to A$3.32 billion, with its six-monthly dividend remaining at A$0.99.
ENGINEERING
Siemens to expand layoffs
Siemens AG, Europe’s largest engineering company, is to cut another 4,500 jobs after second-quarter profit fell more than analysts estimated, burdened by declining oil prices. Profit from industrial operations fell by 4.9 percent to 1.66 billion euros (US$1.88 billion), the Munich-based company said in a statement. That missed the 1.71 billion euro average estimate of analysts surveyed by Bloomberg. The latest round of job cuts brings the total announced since December last year to 13,100 as the executive seeks to achieve 1 billion euros in annual savings by next year.
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
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