TRADE
China, India sign 26 deals
China and India signed 26 business deals worth more than US$22 billion in areas including renewable energy, ports, financing and industrial parks, an Indian official said yesterday. Namgya C. Khampa, of the Indian embassy in Beijing, made the remarks at the end of a three-day visit by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, during which he sought to boost economic ties and quell anxiety over a border dispute between the neighbors.
EMPLOYMENT
P&G shuts Puerto Rico plant
Procter & Gamble Co (P&G) said it is closing a manufacturing plant in Puerto Rico and laying off about 230 employees. A company statement issued on Friday said the plant in the southern town of Cayey would close in the next nine to 12 months. Officials said the company is set to move operations to a plant in North Carolina as part of an overall restructuring. Procter & Gamble manufactures Olay skin care products at the Cayey plant, which it bought in 1985.
RETAIL
Toys ‘R’ Us closes NY store
Toys “R” Us is closing its iconic FAO Schwarz store, citing the high and rising costs of running the retail space on New York’s pricey Fifth Avenue. The company on Friday said it would close the store on July 15 and it is looking for another location in midtown Manhattan. FAO Schwarz claims to be the oldest toy store in the US, as it has had a location in New York since 1870. It moved to its current Fifth Avenue location in 1986.
ENERGY
Petrobras numbers improve
Brazil’s state-run oil firm Petrobras, mired in a graft scandal, on Friday posted first-quarter revenue down 1.1 percent on the same period last year, indicating it might be turning a corner after a year of woe. The company reported net income of 5.33 billion reais (US$1.18 billion) on sales of 74.4 billion reais. Petrobras financial director Ivan de Souza Monteiro welcomed the result and said it put the company back on a “normal” path.
TECHNOLOGY
Applied Materials confident
Applied Materials Inc, which last month scrapped its bid for rival Tokyo Electron Ltd, forecast fiscal third-quarter sales might beat analysts’ estimates, helping bolster confidence it can grow as a stand-alone company. Revenue in the three months ending in July are set to rise 2 to 6 percent from the previous period, the semiconductor-equipment maker said on Thursday in a statement. That indicates sales of as much as US$2.59 billion, compared with an average analyst estimate of US$2.52 billion.
STOCKS
Silver Lake profits on selloff
Silver Lake Management reaped more than US$2 billion from selling 25 million shares in Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴). Silver Lake sold almost half of its stake in the Chinese e-commerce company, according to a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Meanwhile, in the first quarter billionaire Dan Loeb’s Third Point hedge fund sold 10 million shares in the Chinese technology company that was valued at US$1 billion at the end of last year according to a separate regulatory filing.
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