AGRICULTURE
DuPont chooses Wilmington
Delaware government and business officials are celebrating the decision by the DuPont Co and Dow Chemical Co to locate in Wilmington, Delaware, the corporate headquarters of the agriculture company, to be spun off after their planned merger. The companies announced on Friday that Wilmington will be home of the agriculture company’s chief executive officer and key corporate support functions. Leadership of business lines and support functions, research and development are to be based in Indiana.
ECONOMY
Interest rates increased
Colombia became the second Latin American nation this week to raise interest rates, cut government spending and announce steps to shore up its currency, as commodity prices tumble. A majority of the seven-member board on Friday voted to increase the policy rate one-quarter point to 6.25 percent, bank governor Jose Dario Uribe told reporters in Bogota after the meeting. The Colombian central bank cut this year’s growth forecast to 2.7 percent this month, the slowest pace since 2009.
BRAZIL
Budget spending cut
President Dilma Rousseff’s economic team is stepping up efforts to contain spending this year, as the recession crimps tax collection and threatens to inflate Brazil’s record budget deficit. The government is freezing 23.4 billion real (US$5.8 billion) in spending from this year’s budget, Minister of Planning Valdir Simao said on Friday. A government official said early this month the administration was studying proposals to cut expenditures by as much as 50 billion real to ensure it achieves a so-called primary budget surplus equivalent to 0.5 percent of GDP this year.
BANKING
Citigroup selling units
Citigroup Inc plans to sell retail-banking and credit-card operations in Brazil, Argentina and Colombia. The businesses are to be moved into the Citi Holdings unit, which houses the company’s unwanted assets, effective this quarter, the New York-based company said on Friday in a statement. Citigroup operated branch networks in 24 nations at year-end, down from 40 as recently as March 2012.
INTERNET
Yandex to buy in Moscow
Yandex NV agreed to buy its Moscow headquarters after surging rent payments that are linked to the US dollar curbed profits, as the ruble lost half of its value in the last two years. The company, which operates Russia’s largest search engine, will finance the purchase of seven buildings from Cyprus-based Krasnaya Roza 1875 Ltd by issuing 12.9 million new Class A ordinary shares and approximately US$490 million of debt, the company said in a statement on Friday.
UNITED STATES
Fannie Mae to pay Treasury
Fannie Mae, a government-controlled mortgage company, is to pay the Department of the Treasury US$2.9 billion after reporting net income of US$2.5 billion for the fourth quarter. The company will have returned US$147.6 billion in dividends to the federal government, a regulatory filing on Friday showed. Washington-based Fannie Mae has received US$116.1 billion from the Treasury since 2008.
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],”
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
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained