INTERNET
EU charges Google
EU regulators have brought a third antitrust charge against Alphabet Inc’s Google, accusing it of blocking rivals in online search advertising, a move that raises the pressure on the company to modify its practices or face hefty fines. The European Commission on Thursday also reinforced an existing charge against the world’s most popular Internet search engine that its search results favor Google’s own shopping service over those of rivals. Google has 10 weeks to respond to the AdSense charge and eight weeks to the shopping service case. The company could face fines up to 10 percent of its global turnover for each case if found guilty of breaching the bloc’s antitrust rules.
WATCHES
Swatch profit plummets
Swatch Group AG said first-half profit fell by more than half — the most in at least 15 years — as demand for its watches in Hong Kong, France and Switzerland collapsed. Sales fell about 12 percent, the Biel, Switzerland-based maker of Omega and Tissot timepieces said in an unscheduled statement on preliminary results. Analysts expected a 22 percent drop in net income and a 7 percent revenue decline. Swatch said its strategy of maintaining headcount, investment and marketing exacerbated the profit decline. Switzerland’s watch exports have dropped for 11 consecutive months. In the five months through May, they declined 9.5 percent.
PAYMENTS
Samsung plans Rio launch
Samsung Electronics Co is introducing its mobile payments app in Brazil, a bet that the Olympics Games in Rio de Janeiro can be a springboard to more markets in Latin America where phones have become a key gateway to the Internet. Samsung Pay, which debuted in South Korea in August last year and became available in the US in September last year, will be the only payments system available to mobile-phone users at the Games, according to Haley Kim, the unit’s vice president. The service is also available in China, Spain, Australia, Singapore and Puerto Rico, Kim said.
AUTOMAKERS
Ford funds Civil Maps
Ford Motor Co is among five investors providing US$6.6 million in seed funding for Civil Maps, a California startup that creates 3D maps for autonomous cars. The company, which has 16 full-time employees, is based in Albany, California, and grew out of an accelerator program sponsored by Stanford University. Civil Maps said its format uses less data, reducing the cost of transmission over cellular networks. That lets the technology provide more real-time road data gathered through crowd-sourcing traffic information from other cars. Ford declined to say how much it contributed to the seed funding.
FINANCE
Buffett donates US$2.86bn
Warren Buffett, the billionaire chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc, has donated another US$2.86 billion of his holdings in the company’s stock to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and four family charities, as part of his plan to give away nearly his entire fortune. Buffett’s 11th annual donation to the five charities comprised 19.61 million Class “B” shares of Berkshire, according to a regulatory filing on Thursday. The donations were made on Wednesday, and brought Buffett’s total contributions to the charities to more than US$24.3 billion since 2006.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
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
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
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],”