PETROLEUM
OPEC output to hold: Iran
OPEC is unlikely to change its production ceiling when the group meets next month, Iranian Minister of Petroleum Bijan Zanganeh said yesterday, according to the semi-official Mehr news agency. “Lowering OPEC’s production ceiling requires consensus among all members ... under current conditions it seems unlikely that the OPEC production ceiling will change,” Zanganeh was quoted as saying. Last month, Zanganeh said the group should cut its target daily crude oil production by at least 5 percent, or approximately 1.5 million barrels per day. OPEC is to meet on June 5. At its previous meeting in November last year, OPEC decided against cutting output to defend its market share, resisting calls by members, such as Iran and Venezuela, to reduce production to shore up prices.
STEELMAKERS
Metinvest halts site output
Ukrainian steelmaker Metinvest yesterday said it has halted production at its Avdiivka facility in eastern Ukraine, one of Europe’s biggest coke plants, after heavy shelling caused major damage. Avdiivka produces 40 percent of Ukraine’s coke and any production outages would threaten output at steel plants, including two of the largest, in Mariupol, a strategic government-held port city in the southeast. On Thursday, one worker was killed and two wounded in what Metinvest described as the heaviest shelling of the plant since the declaration of a ceasefire. Metinvest on Friday said that damage to internal rail tracks at Avdiivka meant it was not able to bring in raw materials or ship out finished products.
BRAZIL
Minister’s outlook glum
Minister of Finance Joaquim Levy does not expect the economy to recover before next year, in contrast to Minister of Planning Nelson Barbosa’s more optimistic forecast of a comeback in the second half, a government official with knowledge of Levy’s view said. Levy considers suggesting that a recovery is just around the corner could hinder prospects of the National Congress taking needed fiscal steps to boost growth, said the official, who asked not to be named because the matter is not public. Barbosa on Friday told reporters that he expects an economic recovery to start in the second half. On Friday, South America’s largest economy announced it was freezing 69.9 billion reais (US$22.6 billion) in spending this year, while raising taxes on profits at banks, brokerage houses and credit-card processors to 20 percent from 15 percent.
NIGERIA
Fuel crunch hits business
Airlines grounded flights on Saturday and radio stations were silenced as a months-long fuel shortage aggravated by striking oil tanker drivers worsened in Africa’s biggest oil producer. Normally bustling roads in Lagos, a metropolis of 20 million, were half-empty and gas stations closed on Saturday. One station owner said he had fuel, but strikers are threatening to set fire to any stations selling it. Chaos reigned at bus stations, where vehicles stood idle and at Lagos’ Murtala Muhammad International Airport as one flight after another was canceled. Nigeria’s biggest mobile phone operator, MTN, said that its network faces shutdown due to crippling fuel shortages. The company said it needed a “significant quantity of diesel in the very near future to prevent a shutdown of services.”
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