RETAIL
Inditex expansion pays off
Spain’s fashion retail giant Inditex, owner of popular brand Zara, yesterday said that its drive to expand internationally helped push up profits last year. Inditex, one of the world’s largest fashion retailers, said in a statement that its bottom-line profit rose by 10 percent to 3.16 billion euros (US$3.4 billion). Inditex — whose brands include Massimo Dutti, Pull&Bear, Bershka and Oysho — therefore beat Swedish rival H&M which booked net profit of about 2 billion euros, but the Spanish group’s profit growth was slower than in 2015 when its bottom line had risen by 15 percent. Revenues expanded by 12 percent to 23.3 billion euros, “underpinned by growth in all of the geographic regions where the group is present,” Inditex said.
TECHNOLOGY
Grab to bolster R&D
Grab, Uber Technologies Inc’s biggest rival in Southeast Asia, is to hire more than 800 new research and development (R&D) staff over the next two years as it seeks to boost its ride-hailing and payment services. Two new R&D centers are opening in Bangalore and Ho Chi Minh City, the Singaporean company said in a statement yesterday. The new locations will expand Grab’s engineering centers beyond Beijing, Jakarta, Singapore and Seattle. In Bangalore, Grab will recruit about 200 new researchers, who are to develop new payments technologies for GrabPay, the company’s digital-payments services. Like its Indonesian rival Go-Jek, which has rolled out technology to let customers pay for rides and other services, Grab sees digital payments as an area to build a potentially lucrative business. “There is now a huge payment opportunity that we are investing heavily into,” chief operating officer Tan Hooi Ling said.
BANKING
BOE deputy governor resigns
The Bank of England (BOE) on Tuesday announced that its newly appointed deputy governor, Charlotte Hogg, has resigned after failing to declare that her brother worked for commercial banking giant Barclays. “Following recent events, Charlotte Hogg yesterday voluntarily offered her resignation,” the central bank said in a brief official statement, noting its “deep regret” over the matter. In her resignation letter, Hogg revealed she had breached the bank’s code of conduct and insisted upon stepping down. However, Hogg will stay for the time being to have a smooth handover, and will still sit and vote on the bank’s Monetary Policy Committee’s interest rate meeting later this week. Her letter was published on Tuesday just after the House of Commons’ influential Treasury Select Committee said in a report that Hogg’s “professional competence falls short” of the bank’s standards for her job.
FOREX
Pound drops on Brexit fears
The British pound fell to an eight-week low against the US dollar and the basket of currencies measuring its broader strength on Tuesday, hit by fears of prolonged political jousting over the terms of the nation’s exit from the EU. British Prime Minister Theresa May won parliamentary backing on Monday to begin the process of leaving the EU and start two years of talks that will shape the future of Britain and Europe. May said she would notify parliament this month when she has triggered Article 50 of the EU’s Lisbon Treaty to begin the formal process, after her spokesperson dismissed media reports she would launch the talks on Tuesday as “speculation.”
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
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],”
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
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day