ECONOMY
S Korea CPI increases 2.4%
Consumer prices in South Korea increased the most since August 2014 as the impact of the oil market rout began to wash out of year-on-year comparisons and the cost of food and clothing rose. Consumer price index rose 1.3 percent last month from a year earlier, beating estimates for a 1.1 percent gain, according to figures released by Statistics Korea yesterday. Core CPI, which excludes oil and agricultural products, increased 2.4 percent. The improvement last month still leaves inflation well below the Bank of Korea’s new target of 2 percent. The annual rate for last year was 0.7 percent, the lowest on record since the agency started compiling data in 1965.
TRADE
Tadawul plans IPO
Saudi Arabia’s stock exchange, the Arab world’s largest, aims to sell shares in an initial public offering in 2018. The Saudi Stock Exchange, or Tadawul, seeks to offer shares after completing a “readiness exercise and obtaining the necessary approvals,” a statement issued yesterday said. The planned listing follows the worst year for Saudi stocks since 2008, even after the bourse allowed foreign investors to trade stocks directly for the first time in June. The kingdom’s finances have been under pressure after its main source of revenue, oil, sank to the lowest level in 11 years and as the nation leads an expensive war in Yemen.
ECONOMY
Brazilian wages to increase
The Brazilian crisis-hit government on Wednesday said it would raise the minimum wage by more than the rate of inflation in the new year, despite the delicate state of its public accounts. The office of leftist President Dilma Rousseff said in a statement the minimum wage would rise by 11.67 percent to 880 Brazilian reais a month — still equivalent to only about US$227. That was higher than this year’s forecast inflation rate of 10.57 percent, which is aggravating hardship in the world’s seventh-largest economy.
INVESTMENT
Australian real-estate slows
Home loans to Australian landlords grew at the slowest pace in 17 months as a regulatory crackdown forced lenders to raise interest rates and tighten lending standards. Investor housing credit expanded 9.1 percent in the 12 months to Nov. 30, the weakest pace since June 2014, according to data from the Reserve Bank of Australia. Growth has slowed for the fifth consecutive month, the data showed. An increase in home loans to owner occupiers partially offset the slowdown in loans to landlords, the data showed. The measure climbed 6.5 percent in November, the most since February 2011, and marked the sixth consecutive month of increase.
MOBILE PHONES
India hits 1 billion users
India notched up its 1 billionth mobile phone subscriber in October, the nation’s telecoms regulator said, underscoring the importance of its fast-growing mobile market, the world’s second-largest after China. The number of mobile subscribers rose by nearly 7 million in October from the previous month to surpass 1 billion, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India said on Wednesday, hitting a milestone that China reached in 2012. However, the figures do not indicate that India has 1 billion individual mobile phone users as many people have more than one connection.
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