INTERNET
Mayer punished over breach
Yahoo Inc is punishing CEO Marissa Mayer and parting ways with its top lawyer for the mishandling of two security breaches that exposed the personal information of more than 1 billion users and have already cost the company US$350 million. Yahoo’s board said it decided to withhold a cash bonus that otherwise would have been paid to her. Mayer is eligible to receive a bonus of up to US$2 million annually. The board said it accepted Mayer’s offer to relinquish her annual stock award, which is typically worth millions of US dollars. Yahoo’s general counsel, Ronald Bell, resigned without severance pay for his department’s lackadaisical response to the security lapses.
TECHNOLOGY
HPE’s Microsoft biz falls
Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co (HPE) is losing business from Microsoft Corp, one of the world’s largest users of servers, the latest sign of trouble for the pioneering computer manufacturer as it struggles with the rise of cloud services, people familiar with the matter said. Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO Meg Whitman last week said her company saw “significantly lower demand” for servers from a tier-1 service provider, but did not identify the customer. Tier-1 service providers are typically major cloud and telecom companies. The softer demand came from Microsoft, the people said, as the software giant pushes for lower prices from hardware providers to help it efficiently expand its public cloud service and keep up with rivals.
BANKING
Wells Fargo CEO’s bonus cut
Wells Fargo’s board of directors on Wednesday slashed the bonuses and other compensation of its chief executive and seven other top executives, a little more than a week after the board publicly fired four senior managers amid an investigation into the bank’s sales practices. The cuts in pay for CEO Tim Sloan, chief financial officer John Shrewsberry and others were widely expected. Wells’ board had already clawed back about US$59 million in compensation from former CEO John Stumpf and Carrie Tolstedt, who was the head of the community banking business that was at the center of the sales scandal. In total, Wells slashed executive pay by US$32 million, the board said.
BEVERAGES
PepsiCo blames tax for cuts
PepsiCo said that slumping sales from Philadelphia’s new sweetened-beverage tax are prompting layoffs of 80 to 100 workers at three distribution plants that serve the city. The company on Wednesday sent out notices saying layoffs would occur at plants in north and south Philadelphia and in Wilmington, Delaware, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. Dave DeCecco, spokesman for the Purchase, New York-based company that employs 423 people in the city, said the tax has cut sales by 40 percent there. The city blasted the news, with spokeswoman Lauren Hitt saying “the soda industry sunk to a new low today.”
AUTOMAKERS
Tesla’s China sales triple
Tesla Inc’s revenue from China last year tripled to more than US$1 billion, indicating better traction in the market CEO Elon Musk has predicted could eventually become the company’s biggest. China accounted for more than 15 percent of Tesla’s total revenue of more than US$7 billion last year, according to a US regulatory filing. Sales from the US more than doubled to US$4.2 billion. The Palo Alto, California-based company does not release vehicle sales or deliveries by country.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to