BANKING
AIIB aims to lend this year
The head of the newly opened Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) said the China-led group is aiming to approve its first loans before the end of the year, part of Beijing’s efforts to weave together regional trade partners and solidify its global status. The AIIB officially opened at a ceremony on Saturday in Beijing after a formal ceremony led by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平). Representatives from 57 member countries attended the opening ceremony, where China announced it would pledge US$50 million to a special fund to prepare less-developed countries for infrastructure projects. AIIB’s inaugural president, Chinese banker Jin Liqun (金立群), yesterday said that Asia still faces “severe connectivity gaps and significant infrastructure bottlenecks.”
MEDIA
Toronto Star to close press
The Toronto Star newspaper has hired an outside printer and plans to shutter its press and lay off 285 workers, the company announced on Friday. Canada’s largest-circulation daily said in a statement that moving to an off-site printer, Transcontinental Printing, will allow it to save C$10 million (US$6.88 million) each year. No date has been set for the layoffs. The Toronto Star said that it would develop a transition plan with its employee union. The move is not expected to impact delivery of the newspaper, which boasts a circulation of 240,000 on weekdays, and 375,000 for its Saturday edition.
RETAIL
US shoppers head online
US holiday shoppers flocked online during the critical holiday shopping season, but overall sales in November and last month were disappointing. Sales rose 3 percent to about US$626.14 billion, according to The National Retail Federation. That is below the forecast for a 3.7 percent gain the group had expected. The shortfall came even as stores aggressively pushed discounts throughout the season. Online sales, which are included in the figure, rose 9 percent to US$105 billion. That is higher than the group’s original forecast of 6 percent to 8 percent growth.
LITIGATION
Woodford sues Olympus
Michael Woodford, the whistleblowing ex-chief executive officer of Olympus Corp, sued his former employer for breach of contract, more than four years after he alleged a US$1.7 billion accounting fraud and 13-year cover-up at the Japanese firm. Woodford, who settled a 2012 employment suit with the firm for an undisclosed sum, filed the claim on Thursday in the UK, according to court records. The UK Serious Fraud Office (SFO) dropped its case against Olympus in November last year citing “insufficient evidence” for a realistic chance of conviction, two years after charging the company with making false and misleading financial statements.
PHARMACEUTICALS
Enbrel gets EU nod
Samsung Bioepis Co, a South Korean developer of biotechnology medicines, received European Commission approval to sell a copy of Pfizer Inc’s Enbrel in the region. Benepali, a rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis arthritis treatment, is to be gradually rolled out across all 28 EU members as well as Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein, according to a statement from the Samsung Group unit yesterday. The drug is the first copy of Pfizer’s Enbrel, whose patent in Europe expired in August. The approval follows a November recommendation from the European Medicines Agency to grant marketing authorization for Benepali.
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