JAPAN
Cheaper telecom urged
The government plans to step up the pressure for the country’s largest mobile-phone carriers to offer cheaper plans as surging profits show they have room to reduce costs for customers, an official at the Ministry of Communications said. Minister of Internal Affairs and Communications Sanae Takaichi may make a new round of requests to carriers, according to the official. If successful, any cuts would build on previous recommendations by a panel the government formed to study lower fees, the official said.
INTERNET
Sell Pandora: stakeholder
An activist hedge fund on Monday revealed it owns nearly 10 percent of Pandora Media Inc and called for the sale of the Internet radio service. Corvex Management managing partner Keith Meister said in a letter to the Pandora board that his fund holds about 22.7 million shares, making it the Oakland-based company’s largest shareholder, with a stake of 9.9 percent. Pandora shares were up 3.51 percent to US$10.33 in after market trades on the New York Stock Exchange. Pandora explored a sale earlier this year, US media reports said.
COFFEE SHOPS
Starbucks issues bonds
Starbucks Corp is turning to the bond market to fund its sustainable-coffee efforts. The Seattle-based chain has issued a first-of-its-kind US$500 million US corporate sustainability bond, according to a statement on Monday. The 10-year, 2.45 percent senior notes will fund programs that ensure coffee is grown and distributed in a way that can be maintained over the long run, such as providing fair pay for workers and protection for wildlife, according to Starbucks.
INDONESIA
Investment firm mulled
The government is turning to Singapore’s Temasek Holdings Pte as a model to create a sovereign investment company to drive development in Southeast Asia’s biggest economy. The government is considering starting an investment holding company for four or five state-owned entities, which could then buy shares in the country’s companies, Minister of Finance Bambang Brodjonegoro said in an interview in Jakarta on Monday. If the fund is successful, it might over time invest in assets overseas, as Temasek did, he said.
SOCIAL MEDIA
Twitter expands limits
Twitter plans to let people fire off links or pictures without eating into the 140-character limit set for posts at the one-to-many messaging service, Bloomberg reported on Monday. The change could take place by the end of this month, according to a Blomberg report that cited someone familiar with the matter. Twitter declined to comment, but the move would come as it strives to ramp up the number of users along with how much people communicate at the service.
BANKING
BSI SA probes employees
BSI SA, the Swiss bank embroiled in global probes into 1Malaysia Development Bhd, is investigating employees and their dealings related to the embattled Malaysian state investment fund, according to people familiar with the matter. One of the employees the private bank is investigating in Singapore is Kevin Swampillai, according to the people. Swampillai, the managing director of wealth management services, has been suspended pending investigation.
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
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
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],”
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