SOUTH KOREA
Louis Vuitton no chicken
A court has ordered a fried chicken restaurant owner to pay 14.5 million won (US$12,500) for refusing to comply with a ban on using the Louis Vuitton brand name for his outlet, a report said yesterday. The owner, identified by his surname, Kim, had called his restaurant in Seoul “LOUIS VUITON DAK” — a play on the word tongdak, which means whole chicken in Korean. He also used a logo very similar to that of the French fashion house. Louis Vuitton filed a suit in September last year, saying the use of its name to sell fried chicken was damaging to the brand. A district court in Seoul agreed and in October ordered Kim to desist. Kim responded by tinkering with the restaurant name and came up with chaLouisvui tondak, which he argued was different enough to comply with the ruling. The judge disagreed. “Although he changed the name with different spacing, the two names sounded almost the same,” the Korea Times quoted the judge as saying.
CONSUMER GOODS
PepsiCo revamping line-up
PepsiCo chief executive officer Indra Nooyi on Monday said that the company is reshaping its product lineup to better reflect the growing interest in healthy eating and has reduced its reliance on colas for sales. The maker of Frito-Lay snacks, Mountain Dew, Naked juices and Quaker Oats now gets less than 25 percent of its global sales from soda, Nooyi said. Just 12 percent of global sales comes from its namesake soda, she said. The remarks underscore PepsiCo’s recent shift in tone as the world’s biggest soda brands have been pressured by intensifying competition and a bad image for fueling weight gain in markets such as the US.
COSMETICS
L’Oreal Q1 sales up 1.8%
French cosmetics maker L’Oreal says its sales edged up 1.8 percent in the first three months of the year to 6.55 billion euros (US$7.41 billion) as gains in its main markets in Western Europe and North America offset a decline in Latin America. Shifts in currency values weighed on the reported value of the sales. Sales were up a much stronger 4.6 percent. Chairman and chief executive Jean-Paul Agon on Monday said that the company “made a solid start in the first quarter” and that online sales had grown by a strong 35 percent.
CHINA
Pony Ma donating shares
Tencent Holdings Ltd (騰訊) founder Pony Ma (馬化騰) said he plans to donate 100 million company shares, worth more than US$2 billion, to the firm’s charity foundation in one of the nation’s biggest philanthropic pledges ever. Ma, whose fortune is estimated to be about US$18.8 billion, said the donation would support medical, educational and environmental causes in China. “After 10 years of exploration and participation in philanthropic activities, I increasingly feel that there is a need for a more longer-term, efficient and organized way to give back to society,” he said on Monday.
INVESTMENT
Experian buying CSIdentity
Credit data company Experian PLC said it would buy CSIdentity Corp, a provider of consumer identity management and fraud detection services, for US$360 million. The deal, subject to regulatory approvals in the US, will add revenue of about US$120 million and earnings before interest and tax of about US$30 million in the year ended March 31, Experian said. Experian said it would report one-off integration costs of US$8 million in the first 12 months after closing.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to