JAPAN
Spending down again
Household spending fell for an eighth straight month last month, despite a 21-year-low unemployment rate, Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications data showed yesterday. However, the 0.4 percent drop from a year earlier was a smaller decline compared with September’s 2.1 percent, partly because of higher vegetable prices. “Household spending has been flat in the past year because disposable income has not increased,” Dai-ichi Life Research Institute head economist Yoshiki Shinke said.
FOOD
PIF invests in Adeptio
Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) is to acquire a 50 percent stake in a United Arab Emirates firm which last month took control of Kuwaiti food giant Americana, the fund said on Monday. Through a wholly owned subsidiary, PIF will obtain the share in Adeptio Holdings from Mohamed al-Abbar, the head of Dubai property giant Emaar. An Adeptio Holdings subsidiary, Adeptio, last month completed the nearly US$2.4 billion deal for 67 percent of Americana, the group that brought more than a dozen major food brands to the Middle East. “Following the acquisition of this stake in Americana, Adeptio will launch a mandatory tender offer for the remaining shares in Americana held by public shareholders,” PIF said in a rare news release.
AUTOMAKERS
BMW to invest in startups
BMW AG plans to boost its investments in startups, as competition intensifies with new rivals, including Tesla Motors Inc, over technologies that make cars smarter and more energy-efficient. The luxury-vehicle maker will invest as much as 500 million euros (US$533 million) through its iVentures capital fund over 10 years, Munich-based BMW said on Monday in a statement. The fund, which started in 2011 with 100 million euros, will add autonomous driving to its investment areas and expand its reach from the US to Europe and Asia. “The mobility of the future and our industry is being defined by the increasingly rapid pace of technological change,” BMW head of development Klaus Froehlich said in the statement. “Anyone who wants to succeed must shape this change and have access to the best ideas.”
SECURITY
Deutsche Telekom attacked
Deutsche Telekom AG fell victim to hackers using malware that targets household devices, with hundreds of thousands of customers experiencing technical issues with their phone, Internet and TV services. Hackers infected customers’ routers, causing as many as 900,000 of its more than 20 million landline subscribers to lose service or see disruptions starting on Sunday, the company said. The carrier’s network was not affected, it said in a Web site statement. “We saw attacks from the Mirai botnet that targeted customer routers globally,” Thomas Tschersich, head of IT security at Deutsche Telekom, said in a video message posted on Twitter. The issues have been largely fixed after the carrier sent software updates to the devices and updated its network, Tschersich said.
TUNISIA
Support on offer
Western and regional partners are expected to offer pledges of support for the nation’s economy at a two-day investment conference that started yesterday. Representatives from 40 countries are to be offered the chance to participate in about US$30 billion worth of projects. France and Qatar are the main foreign backers.
NEW IMPORTS: Car dealer PG Union Corp said it would consider introducing US-made models such as the Jeep Grand Cherokee and Stellantis’ RAM 1500 to Taiwan Tesla Taiwan yesterday said that it does not plan to cut its car prices in the wake of Washington and Taipei signing the Agreement on Reciprocal Trade on Thursday to eliminate tariffs on US-made cars. On the other hand, Mercedes-Benz Taiwan said it is planning to lower the price of its five models imported from the US after the zero tariff comes into effect. Tesla in a statement said it has no plan to adjust the prices of the US-made Model 3, Model S and Model X as tariffs are not the only factor the automaker uses to determine pricing policies. Tesla said
OpenAI has warned US lawmakers that its Chinese rival DeepSeek (深度求索) is using unfair and increasingly sophisticated methods to extract results from leading US artificial intelligence (AI) models to train the next generation of its breakthrough R1 chatbot, a memo reviewed by Bloomberg News showed. In the memo, sent on Thursday to the US House of Representatives Select Committee on China, OpenAI said that DeepSeek had used so-called distillation techniques as part of “ongoing efforts to free-ride on the capabilities developed by OpenAI and other US frontier labs.” The company said it had detected “new, obfuscated methods” designed to evade OpenAI’s defenses
China’s top chipmaker has warned that breakaway spending on artificial intelligence (AI) chips is bringing forward years of future demand, raising the risk that some data centers could sit idle. “Companies would love to build 10 years’ worth of data center capacity within one or two years,” Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯) cochief executive officer Zhao Haijun (趙海軍) said yesterday on a call with analysts. “As for what exactly these data centers will do, that hasn’t been fully thought through.” Moody’s Ratings projects that AI-related infrastructure investment would exceed US$3 trillion over the next five years, as developers pour eye-watering sums
Bank of America Corp nearly doubled its forecast for the nation’s economic growth this year, adding to a slew of upgrades even after a rip-roaring last year propelled by demand for artificial intelligence (AI). The firm lifted its projection to 8 percent from 4.5 percent on “relentless global demand” for the hardware that Taiwanese companies make, according to a note dated yesterday by analysts including Xiaoqing Pi (皮曉青). Taiwan’s GDP expanded 8.63 percent last year, the fastest pace since 2010. The increase “reflects our sustained optimism over Taiwan’s technology driven expansion and is reinforced by several recent developments,” including a more stable currency,
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