TELECOMS
Nokia to slash jobs
Nokia Oyj is to cut more than 1,000 jobs in Finland, the company announced on Friday, as part of cost-cutting measures following its merger with Alcatel-Lucent SA. Nokia last month said it expected about 1,300 jobs to go in Finland, but the number announced in a statement on Friday was slightly lower, at 1,032. The company is targeting 900 million euros (US$1 billion) of savings per year starting in 2018 and further redundancies are expected around the world.
BANKING
Goldman package snubbed
Goldman Sachs Group Inc’s pay package for senior executives got a thumbs-down from a third of the investment bank’s shareholders at an annual meeting on Friday. Of Goldman’s shareholders, 34 percent voted against the compensation package, according to preliminary results announced at the meeting in Jersey City in the state of New Jersey. A proposal to split the role of chairman and chief executive garnered support from 30 percent of shareholders, according to the preliminary results. Goldman chief executive Lloyd Blankfein last year received compensation totaling US$30 million.
PORTUGAL
Government uses tax haven
The Ministry of Finance on Friday said it is looking at ways of preventing government departments from using tax havens after the Treasury debt agency was found to have held an investment in Jersey. The ministry said that the agency held 133 million euros of bonds in a Jersey-based company last year. It said in a statement that the bonds resulted from a financial operation involving a state-owned rail company. The bonds matured in July last year. The statement said the government is studying the adoption of new procedures ensuring no public institutions have investments in offshore tax havens.
MEXICO
Growth forecast trimmed
The government is lowering its economic growth forecast for this year, citing what it calls “adverse” international conditions including sluggish industrial production in the US. The Treasury Department is predicting GDP expansion of 2.2 to 3.2 percent this year. That is down from its previous forecast of 2.6 to 3.6 percent. Deputy Treasury Secretary Fernando Aportela on Friday said that the economy is also being hurt by volatility in financial markets and low prices for oil, a key export. About 80 percent of the exports go to the US. Mexico’s central bank also lowered its growth forecast recently, to between 2 percent and 3 percent.
BRAZIL
Budget deficit to double
The projected budget deficit for this year will be nearly twice as big as forecast when Dilma Rousseff was president, the new Finance Minister Henrique Meirelles told a news conference on Friday. Rousseff’s government had calculated the primary deficit — the government’s deficit excluding debt payments — at 96 billion reals (US$27 billion). However, the figure is more likely to be about 164 billion reals, Meirelles said. Meirelles said the deficit estimate does not take into account economic reform measures that are under consideration, such as renegotiating the terms of debt owned by Brazilian states.
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
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