APPAREL
Gap sales slid 6% in May
Gap Inc says sales at established stores fell 6 percent last month. That was better than the 7 percent decline forecast by Thomson Reuters. Sales in stores open at least a year is a key metric of a retailer’s health. By division, same-store sales fell 3 percent at Gap stores, 11 percent at Banana Republic and 7 percent at Old Navy. The San Francisco-based retailer on Thursday said the entire month was challenging, but performance improved toward the Memorial Day weekend. For the four weeks ended May 30, Gap said total sales fell 5 percent to US$1.18 billion.
AUTOMOTIVE
UCI files for bankruptcy
UCI International LLC, the US auto-parts maker owned by New Zealand billionaire Graeme Richard Hart, filed for bankruptcy after losing business from three of its biggest customers. Units of UCI make pumps and filters for automakers, including Ford Motor Co and General Motors Co, and until last year had sold many aftermarket parts through retailers AutoZone Inc and Advance Auto Parts Inc. The company also has private-label deals to make products for brands, including Napa, STP and Motorcraft. UCI has 1,800 employees in the US. Its assets total about US$435 million and liabilities run to about US$717 million.
FINANCE
Traders indicted over LIBOR
The US Department of Justice on Thursday indicted two former Deutsche Bank traders for involvement in a scheme to manipulate the LIBOR US dollar interest rate, crucial to financial contracts around the world. The department said that between 2005 and 2011, Matthew Connolly of New Jersey and Gavin Campbell Black of London, worked with at least eight others to artificially fix the daily benchmark rate to benefit their own and their banks’ derivative positions. Connolly was the bank’s supervisor of the Pool Trading Desk in New York, and Black was a derivatives trader in London when the manipulation took place.
MACROECONOMICS
Eurozone to grow 1.6%: ECB
The European Central Bank (ECB) has raised slightly its forecasts for economic growth and inflation in the 19-country eurozone this year. The bank increased its inflation outlook for this year to 0.2 percent from 0.1 percent previously. It sees growth at 1.6 percent, up from 1.4 percent. The bank has been trying to raise inflation from the current dangerously low level of minus-0.1 percent toward its goal of just under 2 percent. Plunging oil prices have been one factor, and their recent recovery may help inflation higher. The bank has cut its benchmark rate to zero and is purchasing 80 billion euros (US$89 billion) a month in bonds to pump newly created money into the economy.
INTERNET
Snapchat outpaces Twitter
Snapchat Inc has 150 million people using the service each day, people familiar with the matter said. That makes the four-year-old messaging app more popular than Twitter Inc by daily active users. Snapchat had 110 million daily users in December last year, the people said. Twitter, which was founded in 2006, has less than 140 million users interacting with the service daily, according to an average of analysts’ estimates surveyed by Bloomberg. The short-messaging service was once the largest social network after Facebook Inc, but has since been surpassed by Facebook’s other apps, including Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp.
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