Semiconductors
Toshiba attracts large bids
Google and Amazon.com Inc joined a list of potential buyers eyeing Toshiba Corp’s lucrative memorychip business as the Japanese conglomerate seeks bidders to cover huge losses, the Yomiuri Shimbun said yesterday. Toshiba has reportedly completed the first round of bidding for the business, seen as key for the cash-strapped company to turn itself around. About 10 foreign companies and funds tendered bids, the daily said, quoting unnamed sources. The two US tech giants are expected to use Toshiba’s memory chips for their cloud services, it said. Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), which last year acquired Japanese electronics maker Sharp Corp, has apparently bid more than ¥2 trillion (US$18 billion), it added.
FINANCE
Lisbon sells bank to US firm
Portugal is selling the remnants of a bankrupt bank, Novo Banco, to US equity firm Lone Star Funds for 1 billion euros (US$1.06 billion). Its Central Bank on Friday announced that the Dallas, Texas-based fund is to buy 75 percent of the bank, while the remaining 25 percent would be sold later. The 1 billion euros are to be spent on recapitalizing Novo Banco, the so-called “good” bank salvaged from the 2014 bankruptcy of major lender Banco Espirito Santo, meaning that other Portuguese banks and its treasury would not yet — and might never — get back the 4.9 billion euros they lent to Novo Banco.
DATA SECURITY
McDonald’s confirms leak
McDonald’s Canada said on Friday that hackers stole the personal data of about 95,000 jobseekers from the fast food chain’s recruitment Web site over the past three years. The data were from people who had sought work with the company since March 2014. The Web portal targeted in the attack, which has been shut down, collected candidates’ names, addresses, e-mails, telephone numbers, employment histories and other relevant data, the company said in a statement. There were no signs so far that the stolen information had been misused, the company said, and apologized to those affected.
TOURISM
Iceland hikes tourism tax
Tourists keen to explore Iceland’s natural beauty are to pay more from next year, after Reykjavik on Friday announced a tax hike on the sector, which has exploded in recent years. The nation announced the end of an 11 percent reduced rate of value-added sales tax, saying it would make a typical holiday there about 4 percent more expensive. Tax on hotels, campsites, travel agent services, pools, spas and others would rise to the regular rate, which was itself reduced to 22.5 percent.
MACROECONOMICS
Spain credit outlook raised
Standard & Poor’s Financial Services LLC on Friday raised its outlook on Spain’s sovereign credit rating to “positive,” saying it believed the nation’s strong economic performance would continue over the next two years. The firm left the debt rating unchanged at “BBB+,” but said it could raise it within the next 24 months “if economic performance and budgetary consolidation continue in line with our expectations.” It predicts the Spanish economy would grow by 2.5 percentage points this year and 2.1 percentage points next year after expanding by 3.2 percentage points last year.
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