MINING
Rio Tinto stays positive
Rio Tinto Group maintained its optimistic outlook for steel production in China into the next decade, just a week after rival BHP Billiton Ltd trimmed its forecast by as much as 15 percent. After “rigorous analysis,” Rio, the world’s second-biggest miner, reaffirmed Chinese crude-steel output could reach about 1 billion tonnes by 2030. BHP now forecasts production to peak in the mid-2020s at between 935 million tonnes and 985 million tonnes, down from as much as 1.1 billion tonnes. “I want to reaffirm my commitment and belief that the about a billion tonnes by 2030 is a damn good estimate,” Rio chief executive of iron ore Andrew Harding said yesterday at an investor briefing. “It’s the best one out there.”
BANKING
Barclays’ Portugal unit sold
Bankinter SA, Spain’s seventh-largest lender, agreed to buy Barclays PLC’s banking operations in Portugal for about 100 million euros (US$112 million) to expand its international business. The sale includes the retail, private and business banking of Barclays in Portugal, Bankinter said on Wednesday. The price represents about 40 percent of the book value of the activities acquired. Separately, Bankinter and Mapfre SA, through a joint venture, are buying Barclays’s life insurance and pensions operation in Portugal for about 75 million euros.
AGRICULTURE
Syngenta appeasment bid
Syngenta AG plans to buy back more than US$2 billion of shares and sell its vegetable seeds business to appease shareholders after fending off Monsanto Co’s US$47 billion takeover attempt. The stock gained as much as 3 percent yesterday. The Swiss company plans to return “significant levels of capital” to shareholders through buybacks, beginning with the initial US$2 billion program that is to start in the coming weeks, it said yesterday in a statement. Syngenta also said it aims to divest its vegetable seeds business.
ENTERTAINMENT
Sony reaches hacking deal
Sony Pictures has reached an undisclosed agreement in principle with eight former employees who had sued over inadequate protection of their personal data during last year’s major hack against the studio. A document filed on Wednesday in a Los Angeles court said Sony and the former employees “reached an agreement in principle to settle all of the claims” of the proposed class-action lawsuit. In November last year, a group of hackers stole large amounts of personal data from about 47,000 current and former employees of the studio. The court has yet to validate the agreement, whose terms are unlikely to be disclosed.
ECONOMY
Australian retail in decline
Australian retail sales unexpectedly fell in July, the first drop since May last year, as highly indebted consumers put away their pocketbooks. Sales fell 0.1 percent from a month earlier, when they rose a revised 0.6 percent — lower than first reported, government data showed yesterday. The data corresponds with a rise in the household savings rate and suggests little improvement in the economy at the start of the third quarter after growth slowed to an anemic 0.2 percent in the second quarter. The weaker than expected sales could add to the case for the central bank to lower interest rates further from a record-low 2 percent.
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
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