VIETNAM
GDP up 6.4% on exports
Economic growth accelerated this quarter, boosted by foreign investments and rising exports. GDP rose 6.4 percent in the third quarter from a year earlier, up from 5.78 percent in the previous three months, the General Statistics Office said yesterday. In the nine months through this month, the economy grew 5.93 percent, compared with the median estimate of 5.83 percent in a Bloomberg survey of four economists. Growth is being buoyed by rising foreign direct investment and exports, stronger credit demand and a slight recovery in agriculture following a crippling drought, the office said.
JAPAN
Retail beginning to slump
Retail sales fell for the first time in three months, signaling that consumer spending is struggling to maintain traction. Sales fell 1.1 percent last month from the previous month, according to a Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry report released yesterday. The median forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg was for a 0.6 percent drop. Compared with a year earlier, they fell 2.1 percent.
PHARMACEUTICALS
Novo to cut 1,000 jobs
Danish drugmaker Novo Nordisk says it plans to lay off about 1,000 employees globally to reduce operating costs because of “a challenging competitive environment, especially in its large US market.” One of the world’s leading makers of diabetes medicines says half the job cuts are expected to be in Denmark. Copenhagen-based Novo said the layoffs are likely to affect its research and development departments, headquarters staff functions and global commercial organization.
BANKING
California to cut Wells ties
California state Treasurer John Chiang on Wednesday said that he is suspending some of the state’s most profitable lines of business with Wells Fargo amid allegations bank employees opened millions of accounts without customers’ permission. The announcement by the nation’s largest issuer of municipal debt reflects the growing political pressure on the banking giant since it agreed to pay US$185 million to settle the allegations. The sanctions apply to only a portion of California’s business with Wells Fargo.
TRANSPORTATION
Fosun buys controlling stake
Fosun Group (復星集團) will become the first private Chinese company to take a controlling stake in a high-speed railway project with the government, after agreeing to invest in a 46.2 billion yuan (US$6.9 billion) venture. Shanghai Fosun High Technology Co (上海復星高科技) signed an agreement with the Zhejiang provincial government, the company said on Wednesday. It did not disclose its stake. The project, a 270km link between Hangzhou and Taizhou, is to be financed through Sunvision Capital, a public-private partnership-focused fund owned by Fosun. Sunvision has a project pipeline worth almost 500 billion yuan across China, according to the statement.
TECHNOLOGY
Apple, Deloitte to join forces
Apple Inc on Wednesday announced an alliance with professional services group Deloitte to get more businesses using iPhones and iPads as workplace tools. Deloitte is creating an Apple practice with more than 5,000 strategic advisers devoted to helping businesses adopt new work styles using the technology giant’s mobile devices and software, the companies said in a joint release.
NORWAY
Calls for investment denied
The country’s US$890 billion wealth fund shrugged off a call to increase emerging market investments after it built up a position of about 10 percent in the world’s fastest-growing economies in the past four years. “There are limits to such an allocation,” Egil Matsen, the central bank deputy governor who is in charge of overseeing the fund, said in an interview on Wednesday in Bergen, Norway. “We are comfortable with the geographic distribution of the fund now.” The fund has slowed an expansion into emerging markets in a shift that started in 2012. It had 9.5 percent of its equity holdings in emerging markets, with China the largest investment, followed by Taiwan and India, according to its second-quarter report.
PHARMACEUTICALS
Samsung Biologics gets nod
Samsung Biologics Co, the drugmaking arm of the South Korean conglomerate, received approval to list its shares in South Korea, allowing it to move ahead with an initial public offering (IPO) that would help it expand in a lucrative pharmaceutical market. Samsung Biologics, which manufactures complex drugs called biologics for drug companies, has sought to ramp up its presence in the growing market for biopharmaceutical medicines. The global biologic medicines market is projected to exceed US$390 billion by 2020, according to an IMS Consulting Group report funded by Novartis. The South Korean stock exchange did not specify the potential size or timing of the IPO.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by