SEMICONDUCTORS
Toshiba warns WD over sale
Toshiba Corp on Wednesday fired another legal missive at manufacturing partner Western Digital Corp (WD), warning the US company to stop its “harassment” as the Japanese company tries to sell its flash memory business. Toshiba sent a letter to Western Digital’s chief legal officer forcefully reasserting its right to auction off the business in which the two companies hold certain assets together. The letter said the joint venture only owns equipment — and nothing more — and that the value of those joint assets is less than 5 percent of the Japanese company’s chip business.
BANKING
Swiss bank raises US$4.3bn
Credit Suisse Group AG investors on Wednesday agreed to buy 99.2 percent of the shares on sale in a rights offering, raising 4.1 billion Swiss francs (US$4.3 billion) for chief executive officer Tidjane Thiam’s turnaround plan. Credit Suisse plans to sell the unsubscribed shares in the market, the Zurich-based bank said in a statement after markets closed. The shares, offered at SF10.80, are expected to begin trading today.
GAMING
Sony sells 1m VR headsets
Sony Corp has sold more than 1 million units of its virtual reality (VR) headset globally, the Asia chief of the Japanese firm’s gaming unit said on Wednesday, as a relatively low price helps push the product into an early lead. Sales of the PlayStation VR headset, released in October last year, have “exceeded our expectations,” Sony Interactive Entertainment Japan Asia president Atsushi Morita said in an interview. “We are boosting production and a supply shortage should be solved accordingly.”
MACROECONOMICS
German output rises 0.8%
Industrial production in Europe’s largest economy rebounded faster than expected in April from a March slump, official data showed yesterday, beating analysts’ expectations. Manufacturing grew 0.8 percent compared with the previous month, adjusting for seasonal effects, federal statistics authority Destatis said. The statisticians also issued a revised figure for March, showing a fall in industrial output of just 0.1 percent — an improvement on the 0.4 percent previously reported.
TRADE
China beats forecasts
China posted a forecast-busting surge in exports and imports for last month, official data showed yesterday, signaling an improvement in the world’s second-largest economy. Exports rose 8.7 percent to US$191 billion while imports jumped 14.8 percent to US$150.2 billion year-on-year. Analysts surveyed by Bloomberg News had forecast a 7.2 percent rise in exports and 8.3 percent increase in imports. The trade surplus rose to US$40.8 billion, up US$2 billion from April.
MACROECONOMICS
Japan’s Q1 GDP disappoints
Japan yesterday posted lower-than-expected growth in the first quarter, but official data still confirmed that the nation saw its longest economic expansion in more than a decade. The world’s No. 3 economy grew 0.3 percent between January and March — or 1.0 percent at an annualized rate — which was down from a preliminary estimate of 0.5 percent growth. The unexpected downgrade was also below market expectations for an upward revision to 0.6 percent growth. Japan’s current account rose 7.5 percent year-on-year to ¥1.95 trillion (US$17 billion) in April.
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