POLITICS
Trump still anti-AT&T bid
US president-elect Donald Trump remains opposed to AT&T Inc’s planned US$85.4 billion acquisition of Time Warner Inc, Bloomberg reported, citing people close to the president-elect. Trump, who has been silent about the transaction for months, told a friend in the past few weeks that he still considers the merger to be a bad deal, Bloomberg reported. He believed the deal would concentrate too much power in the media industry, Bloomberg said. Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, is also opposed to the deal, Bloomberg reported, citing another person.
RETAIL
Wal-Mart reaches Visa deal
Wal-Mart Stores Inc reached an agreement to continue accepting Visa Inc credit cards in Canada, ending the retailer’s threat to bar the world’s largest payments network from its 409 stores in the country. Customers in Manitoba and Thunder Bay, Ontario, would be able to use their Visa cards from yesterday, Alex Roberton, a spokesman for the retailer, said on Thursday in a statement. Wal-Mart’s Canadian unit threatened in June last year to expel Visa from all of its stores nationwide unless the network agreed to lower the amount it charges for credit-card transactions.
CYPRUS
Bank says it repaid bailout
Bank of Cyprus, the Mediterranean island’s largest lender, on Thursday announced it had paid back in full the 11.4 billion euros (US$12.07 billion) in Emergency Liquidity Assistance it received in an international bailout. The bank said in a statement that it was “another significant milestone in the journey back to strength since 2013.” In March 2013, Cyprus clinched a 10 billion euro loan from the EU and IMF to bail out its troubled economy and oversized banking system. Under the terms of the deal, the government was required to close the island’s second-largest bank, Laiki, and impose a 47.5 percent haircut on deposits above 100,000 euros at Bank of Cyprus.
PORTUGAL
Lone Star ‘most promising’
Portugal’s central bank said on Wednesday an offer from US private equity firm Lone Star is the most promising bid to buy Novo Banco SA, the so-called good bank salvaged by the Portuguese government from the collapse of major lender Banco Espirito Santo SA. The Bank of Portugal said it has invited the fund, based in Dallas, Texas, to “deepen negotiations” over the possible purchase, though it said rival bidders have expressed a willingness to improve their offers and would not be excluded. The statement gave neither price tag nor date for a final decision. It did not name the other bidders.
SERVICES
UK sees 17-month high
A survey of Britain’s services sector, which accounts for the bulk of the economy, shows it grew at a 17-month high at the end of last year. The purchasing managers’ index, a gauge of business activity, rose for a third month to 56.2 points last month from 55.2 in November. The index, published on Thursday by IHS Markit and the Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply, is on a 100-point scale, with figures above 50 indicating growth. The improvement was due to an increase in new work and comes despite uncertainty over the country’s decision to leave the EU. Britain says it will trigger the two-year Brexit process by the end of March.
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