BANKING
Senior Wells Fargo staff fired
Wells Fargo’s board of directors fired four senior managers as part of its investigation into the bank’s sales practices scandal. Tuesday’s announcement is the first public firing of managers and executives since the bank acknowledged in September last year that its employees opened up to 2 million bank and credit card accounts without customer authorization in order to meet lofty sales goals. When the scandal first broke, Wells Fargo had said it had fired about 5,300 employees as a result of the scandal, the vast majority of them lower-level workers. Numerous branch employees have said that intense sales pressure from senior managers was at least partially why they were driven to open the accounts. The board said the four executives being terminated, effective immediately, were former community bank chief risk officer Claudia Anderson, Arizona lead regional president Pamela Conboy, former Los Angeles regional president Shelly Freeman and community bank’s strategy and initiatives head Matthew Raphaelson.
SOLAR ENERGY
First Solar report losses
First Solar Inc reported its biggest-ever loss after overhauling its manufacturing strategy and firing more than a quarter of its workforce. The bulk of its pain might be in the past. The largest US solar manufacturer posted a fourth-quarter net loss of US$719.9 million, largely due to a US$729 million restructuring charge, it said in a statement on Tuesday, but increased its sales forecast for this year. The Tempe, Arizona-based company announced in November last year plans to scrap a new panel design this year, the Series 5, while firing 1,600 workers and retooling its factories to produce the Series 6 starting in the middle of this year. The move came as a global oversupply helped drag panel prices down 35 percent last year. Sales last year slipped 18 percent to US$2.95 billion last year, but might be close to flat this year as chief executive officer Mark Widmar’s plans start to take effect.
TAXATION
Companies push border tax
Chief executive officers of 16 companies, including Boeing Co, Caterpillar Inc and General Electric Co, have urged the US Congress to pass a comprehensive tax code rewrite, including a controversial border tax. In a letter to Republican and Democratic leadership on Tuesday, the chief executives said a Republican-proposed border adjustment tax would make US-manufactured products more competitive abroad and at home by making imported goods face the same level of taxation. It was the latest move in a back-and-forth lobbying effort from companies over changes to the US tax code.
RETAIL
Holidays benefit Wal-Mart
Wal-Mart Stores benefited from increased sales in US stores and online during the critical holiday shopping quarter, although earnings fell on higher expenses, according to results released on Tuesday. The world’s biggest retailer saw net income fall about 18 percent in the fourth quarter to US$3.8 billion compared with the final three months of 2015. Revenues rose 1 percent to US$130.9 billion. The results underscored the benefits and drawbacks of the retailers increased investment in employee wages, store beautification and e-commerce in a bid to fend off competition from Amazon.com Inc and others. Shoppers are returning to stores and buying more, but profit margins are down. Comparable sales at US Wal-Mart stores rose a solid 1.8 percent.
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
Clambering hand-over-hand, sweat dripping into his eyes, a durian laborer expertly slices a cumbersome fruit from a tree before tossing it down to land with a soft thump in his colleague’s waiting arms about 15m below. Among Thailand’s most famous and lucrative exports, the pungent “king of fruits” is as distinctive in its smell as its spiky green-brown carapace, and has been farmed in the kingdom for hundreds of years. However, a vicious heat wave engulfing Southeast Asia has resulted in smaller yields and spiraling costs, with growers and sellers increasingly panicked as global warming damages the industry. “This year is a crisis,”