SMARTPHONES
Samsung to resell Note 7
The world’s biggest smartphone maker, Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, is next week to start reselling refurbished Galaxy Note 7 devices after a humiliating recall over exploding batteries last year, news reports said yesterday. Samsung Electronics declined to comment on the reports. The recall debacle cost the South Korean giant billions of US dollars in lost profits and hammered its global credibility. About 3 million Galaxy Note 7 devices were returned to the firm, but groups including Greenpeace expressed concern that discarding them could harm the environment. Citing industry sources, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency and other news reports said Samsung would start selling refurbished devices with new batteries and updated software under the name Galaxy Note Fandom Edition. They are to be priced less than 700,000 won (US$616.30) and sales are scheduled to start on Friday next week, Yonhap said.
INTERNET
Facebook making TV shows
Facebook Inc is starting production on high-quality TV series and gaming shows to be broadcast on its platform, one of the social media giant’s executives said on Monday. The online platform, which has about 2 billion monthly users worldwide, is working on the project with a small group of partners and hopes to start putting out episodes of its forthcoming series by the end of the summer, Facebook vice president for media partnerships Nick Grudin said in a statement, confirming a report in the Wall Street Journal. Facebook is funding the shows on its own at first, he said, “but over time we want to help lots of creators make videos funded through revenue sharing products like Ad Break,” a software tool that allows ads to be directly inserted into Facebook’s online content.
REAL ESTATE
Berkshire buys Store stake
Warren Buffett’s company is spending US$377 million to pick up 9.8 percent of a real-estate investment trust called Store Capital Corp. The Scottsdale, Arizona-based real-estate firm announced Berkshire Hathaway Inc’s investment on Monday. Berkshire bought 18.6 million shares of Store Capital for US$20.25 per share in a private placement sale. Store Capital’s stock jumped nearly 11 percent to US$23 after the investment was announced. Berkshire is a conglomerate based in Omaha, Nebraska, that owns more than 90 companies, including Berkshire Hathaway Home Services. It also owns Government Employees Insurance Co (commonly known as Geico), BNSF Railway and several major utilities.
PETROLEUM
Petrofac forecasts net profit
British oilfield services company Petrofac Ltd yesterday said it expected an underlying net profit of US$135 million to US$145 million for the first half of this year as higher bidding activity in its core markets led to a strong order book. Its order book stood at US$13 billion as of May 31, according to the company, which designs, builds, operates and maintains oil and gas facilities. It last year recorded an order book value of US$14.3 billion as orders picked up in its core Middle Eastern markets. The company’s high exposure to the Middle East oil markets had resulted in good backlog coverage for this year, as record production in the region drove up contract awards. “High level of tendering activity is evidence of greater confidence in our core markets and we continue to have a very good pipeline of bidding opportunities,” CEO Ayman Asfari said in a statement.
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