ECONOMY
Japan posts surplus
Japan posted its 21st consecutive monthly current-account surplus, with cheap energy imports helping an economy that continues to struggle to stoke growth and inflation. The excess in the widest measure of the nation’s trade was ¥2.98 trillion (US$27.5 billion) in March, according to data released yesterday by the Japanese Ministry of Finance, compared with ¥2.43 trillion in February. It widened 6.9 percent year-on- year.
ELECTRONICS
Toshiba reports net loss
Toshiba Corp yesterday said that it suffered a US$4.4 billion full-year net loss as the troubled conglomerate booked a massive write-down of its US nuclear unit, but said the worst was over as it forecast profits for the current business year. The company said its net loss for the year to March soared to ¥483.2 billion (US$4.4 billion) from ¥37.8 billion a year earlier. Sales decreased 7.3 percent to ¥5.7 trillion for the fiscal year. Toshiba said it would return to the black for the year to March 2017, projecting a net profit of ¥100 billion, while sales are expected to edge down to ¥5.1 trillion.
SPAIN
Bond launch draws demand
The government on Wednesday said the launch of its first 50-year bond in two years drew strong investor demand, as the nation became the latest eurozone member to jump on the long-bond bandwagon. The Treasury sold 3 billion euros (US$3.4 billion) of the bond maturing in 2066 via a syndication that drew orders worth 10.4 billion euros, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said in a statement. The 50-year bond issued on Wednesday had a yield of 3.49 percent, down from a yield of 4.02 percent when 50-year government bonds were issued for the first time in September 2014.
FINANCE
Indian parliament passes bill
India’s parliament passed a bill to overhaul archaic bankruptcy laws, taking Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi a step closer to fulfilling his pledge to make it easier to do business in the world’s fastest-growing major economy. The upper house on Wednesday approved the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Act days after it was cleared in the lower house. The law is to unify more than four overlapping sets of rules, aiming to cut time taken to wind up a dying firm or recover dues from a defaulter.
STEEL
Firms weigh bid for Tata
Tata Steel Ltd’s UK assets have attracted interest from Hebei Iron & Steel Group (河北鋼鐵集團) as the company shortlists bidders for the money-losing operations, people familiar with the matter said. Indian producer JSW Steel Ltd is also weighing a bid, which would put it in competition with Liberty House Group and Excalibur Steel UK Ltd, a buyout team led by a Tata executive, said the people, who asked not to be named because the deliberations are private.
EUROZONE
Growth figure may be revised
Economic growth across the 19-nation bloc in the first quarter risks being revised lower after official figures showed industrial production fell by a greater-than-anticipated 0.8 percent in March. Eurostat yesterday said the monthly fall was broad-based, with only energy production posting an increase. The decline was more than the 0.2 percent fall predicted in markets and raises a possibility that the estimate for first-quarter growth would be trimmed in a revision due today.
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
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
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