UKRAINE
IMF may still lend
IMF managing director Christine Lagarde on Friday said that the global lender could continue to lend to the country even if talks over restructuring Kiev’s debt fail and the nation determines it cannot meet its obligations. Kiev is at loggerheads with its creditors in talks to restructure the country’s sovereign debt. Early this week, Minister of Finance Natalia Yaresko said the government could call a moratorium on debt payments. She expects the IMF to release a US$1.7 billion tranche of aid to Kiev next month. “In the event that a negotiated settlement with private creditors is not reached and the country determines that it cannot service its debt, the fund can lend to Ukraine consistent with its Lending-into-Arrears Policy,” Lagarde said.
INDIA
Inflation, output rise
The inflation rate rose in line with analysts’ expectations as industrial output quickened, official figures showed on Friday, the latest data to suggest government reforms were helping to revive economic activity. Consumer prices increased to 5.01 percent last month from a year earlier and up from a four-month low of 4.87 percent in April. A poll of analysts by Bloomberg had predicted a 5 percent rise. Analysts said the inflation rise would reduce the chance of a fourth interest-rate cut this year, until at least the end of monsoon rains around September.
CHINA
IMF team to visit
A team from the IMF is visiting China as part of the global lender’s review over whether to include the Chinese yuan in its basket of currencies, an IMF official said on Friday. An official said the IMF’s review of the Special Drawing Right (SDR) basket was “under way and the technical work is still at an early stage.” “As part of the review, an IMF team is visiting China to have technical discussions,” the official said in an e-mail.
PETROLEUM
No waiving of Exxon fine
US officials have rejected Exxon Mobil Corp’s request to reconsider a US$1 million penalty imposed against the oil giant over a 238,481 liter crude spill into Montana’s Yellowstone River. The US Department of Transportation on Friday ordered the Texas company to pay the penalty within 20 days. Safety regulators said Exxon Mobil failed to adequately heed warnings that its 20-year-old Silvertip Pipeline was at risk from flooding. They said the company lacked procedures to minimize the spill when the line broke. The 2011 spill left oil along a 137km stretch of the Yellowstone, killing fish and wildlife and prompting a cleanup that took months.
INDIA
4G rollout in December
The country’s maiden 4G mobile services will be rolled out in December, the country’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, said on Friday, five years after Reliance Industries first received spectrum for the project. Ambani also said the multi-billion-dollar telecommunications network called Reliance Jio Infocomm would be up and running by the end of the year. Jio is already present in all of India’s 29 states, including 18,000 cities and more than 100,000 villages, Ambani said. He added that the network would cover 80 percent of India’s population initially, before aiming to extend to everybody within three years.
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