AUTOMAKERS
Honda issues further recall
Honda Motor Co yesterday announced it is recalling an additional 4.89 million vehicles worldwide for a new type of problem in Takata Corp airbags, for which Toyota Motor Corp and Nissan Motor Co have already carried out recalls. Honda also announced a global recall for 47,800 Acura and other model vehicles for a defect in the radar system designed to make cars safer to drive by stopping automatically before crashes.
COLOMBIA
US mining company charged
The government is set to file charges against a US mining company over the death of two workers, alleging violations of workplace safety standards, Ministry of Labor officials said on Wednesday. The two men working for Alabama-based Drummond in the north of the nation died in March while soldering inside a machine called a pneumatic vibrator. They were crushed by a load of coal. The officials said the US company’s facilities where the deaths occurred lacked proper safety controls.
BANKING
EBRD to invest in Belarus
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) on Wednesday announced an unprecedented deal with Belarus to participate in privatizing a state-owned bank in the ex-Soviet republic whose economy remains largely state-controlled. A preliminary deal providing for the Belarus government to sell its controlling stake in the country’s fourth-largest bank, Belinvestbank, by 2020 was struck during EBRD’s annual meeting in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi.
AUTOMAKERS
Toyota boosts directors’ pay
Toyota Motor Corp plans to boost directors’ pay by 20 percent after profit surged to a record high. The company is to pay an average of ¥54.6 million (US$457,900) to 14 directors, excluding external board members, for the fiscal year that ended in March, according to a statement posted yesterday on Toyota’s Web site.
BANKING
Standard to sell investments
Standard Chartered PLC, scaling back after two years of lower profit amid slower growth in Asia, is looking to sell part of its remaining private-equity investments, three people with knowledge of the matter said. The British bank is working with an adviser to sell the holdings, which include stakes in companies throughout Asia, the Middle East and north Africa, the people said. A sale could value the investments at about US$1.5 billion, two people said.
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