BANKING
Sumitomo picks Frankfurt
Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group Inc has decided to set up banking and securities units in Frankfurt to maintain business in the EU following the UK’s eventual departure from the bloc. Japan’s second-biggest lender by market value is establishing the units to offer services “with no disruption” once Britain leaves the union, it said in a statement yesterday. Sumitomo Mitsui’s banking unit will also take steps to set up a branch in London. The plans are subject to regulatory approval. “While the UK is expected to continue playing a significant role in the global financial sector following its withdrawal from the EU, there is still uncertainty with regard to the expected results of negotiations between the UK and the EU,” Sumitomo Mitsui said. The Tokyo-based lender follows Japan’s Nomura Holdings Inc and Daiwa Securities Group Inc in choosing Frankfurt as their post-Brexit EU base, and global firms such as Morgan Stanley are also gravitating toward the city.
MANUFACTURING
China’s orders increase
China’s manufacturing activity rebounded last month as new orders and production gathered pace, independent figures showed yesterday, but an analyst warned the pickup was likely to be temporary. The indicator tallies with the government’s purchasing managers’ index (PMI) that also showed an improvement in factory conditions in June compared with the previous month. The private Caixin survey of purchasing managers at hundreds of manufacturing companies showed a reading of 50.4 last month, compared with 49.6 in May. May’s data showed the first contraction in almost a year. New orders expanded at the fastest pace in three months, boosting production and helping lift the PMI, Caixin said in a joint statement with data compiler IHS Markit.
BANKING
BOE staff vote to strike
Bank of England (BOE) facilities staff voted to go on strike for four days in a dispute over pay in the first action of its kind at the central bank in 50 years, according to a labor union. Ninety five percent of Unite’s members in the BOE’s maintenance, security and the governors’ private offices — known as the parlours — backed industrial action between July 31 and Aug. 3, it said in an e-mailed statement. If management fails to resolve the disagreement, Britain’s biggest labor union said it will consult members in other departments at the central bank in an escalation of the plan. Bank Governor Mark Carney brought in consultants McKinsey shortly after he joined the institution to help with a revamp, which included a review of pay structures. The latest dispute has been caused by the bank granting weaker-than-inflation salary increases for the past two years, with the overall annual wage bill projected to rise by only 1 percent from March this year, according to Unite. Consumer prices rose 2.9 percent in May from a year earlier.
VENEZUELA
Mininum wage boosted
President Nicolas Maduro on Sunday raised his nation’s minimum wage by half to just over US$12.50 per month at the black market exchange rate. However, given the currency’s fall, the new minimum monthly wage of 97,532 bolivars is effectively down 17 percent in US dollar terms since the last increase in May. The bolivars has fallen 99.7 percent since Maduro was elected president in April. The monthly salary is accompanied by a food ticket, the value of which also went up to 153,000 bolivars per month, bringing the total to just over US$30 a month at the black market rate.
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