BANKING
World Bank bans firms
The World Bank on Friday announced it had barred four companies from future contracts after finding serious misconduct in projects around the world. The development lender said Daewoo Information Systems, a former branch of the sprawling South Korean conglomerate Daewoo, was debarred for engaging in “corrupt misconduct” to win a bank-financed contract in Mongolia. The company is frozen out of World Bank projects for two-and-a-half years. The other three companies were put on the black list for submitting false information in bidding for contracts: Thang Loi Group, over a Vietnam project; Consorcio Ocongate, for a Peru project; and Minimix Agencies, related to a project in Kenya. They were debarred from two to four years.
ENVIRONMENT
Bank estimates green costs
As much as US$7 trillion will need to be spent building new infrastructure around the world that will make it possible to cut carbon emissions over the next 15 to 20 years, Bank of England Governor Mark Carney said in Toronto on Friday. Carney said measures to finance “green” initiatives would form a major part of this year’s G20 summit in China in September and encouraged investors to back them. Carney also backed efforts to launch programs that put a price on carbon dioxide emissions, saying it was the “cleanest” way to regulate emissions.
REAL ESTATE
UK home sales stall
The number of prime properties sold in London in the 12 working days after the Brexit referendum fell 43 percent from the same period a year earlier, according to data compiled by researcher Lonres. The number of homes on offer dropped 25 percent. Prime home sales dropped 18 percent in the 12 working days after the vote compared with the same period before the referendum, the Lonres data showed.
BANKING
Low interest hurts Citigroup
Citigroup’s earnings fell 17 percent in the second quarter, hurt by weak results in consumer banking as interest rates remain low, making lending less profitable. The New York-based financial conglomerate on Friday said it earned net income of US$4 billion, or US$1.25 per share, compared with US$4.85 billion, or US$1.51 per share, in the same period a year earlier. The results beat the US$1.1 per share analysts had expected, according to FactSet. Revenue fell 10 percent to US$17.54 billion, beating the $17.52 billion analysts expected.
INTERNET
Unister founder killed
Thomas Wagner, the founder and manager of German Internet company Unister, which operates popular travel Web sites, has been killed in a plane crash in Slovenia. Unister said the 38-year-old Wagner was among four people killed in Wednesday’s crash. The US-registered Piper 32, which was flying from Venice, Italy, to Leipzig, Germany, came down in western Slovenia. Slovenian air traffic control has said the pilot reported problems with icing before the aircraft disappeared from the radar. Wagner founded Leipzig-based Unister in 2002, which operates German vacation-booking sites fluege.de and ab-in-den-urlaub.de.
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