INTEREST RATES
Thai policy unchanged
The Bank of Thailand yesterday held its benchmark interest rate near a record low, seeking to preserve policy room despite signs that the economy is heading deeper into deflation again. The one-day bond repurchase rate was left at 1.5 percent, with monetary policy committee members voting unanimously in favor, the central bank said. Policymakers are struggling to get inflation back into the 1 percent to 4 percent target range. The central bank has been reluctant to cut interest rates despite a stronger currency, amid worries over consumer debt levels. Thailand’s economy is strengthening on the back of a recovery in exports, but growth will probably remain below a long-term trend of 4.5 percent, according to the World Bank.
INVESTMENT
BlackRock taps Israeli tech
BlackRock Inc opened its first office in Israel, tapping into the country’s well of engineers and programmers to help improve the firm’s global platform in a changing asset-management industry. “The technological expertise in Israel is widely celebrated and this was an important factor in the decision to open an office,” BlackRock Israel country head Alex Pollak said in an e-mailed statement. The world’s largest asset manager hired seven employees, among them engineers. BlackRock, known for its dominance in low-cost passive strategies, is making a push into technology with chief executive officer Laurence Fink seeing computer models and data science as the future of active-equity management.
MACROECONOMICS
ECB exec hints at more QE
European Central Bank (ECB) executive board member Peter Praet called for patience and persistence in the bank’s stimulus, as his colleague Yves Mersch said policymakers should review the composition of bond purchases. “We need to be patient, because inflation convergence needs more time to show through convincingly in the data,” Praet said in a speech in Rome on Tuesday. The baseline scenario for future inflation remains crucially contingent on very easy financing conditions, which depend on the current accommodative monetary policy stance, he said. The ECB is next to meet to set policy on July 20, although most economists foresee any major change being put off until at least the following meeting in September.
E-COMMERCE
Ocado eyes licensing deals
Ocado Group Plc CEO Tim Steiner said the UK online grocer’s chances of licensing its technology to a US counterpart have been boosted by Amazon.com Inc.’s acquisition of Whole Foods Market Inc. The US$13.7 billion deal “is a positive move for our solutions business and we’ve seen increased interest from players in the US,” said Steiner, who for years has been talking up the potential for international partnerships. Ocado is holding conversations with a number of US grocers, he said.
COPYRIGHTS
Philippine brand loses case
The Philippines’ biggest fast-food chain has lost a long trademark battle against the nation’s “King of Night Entertainment” to own the “jolli” brand, according to government documents. Famous for fried chicken, hamburgers and spaghetti, Jollibee Foods in 2013 opposed the trademark registration of real estate firm Jolliville Holdings Corp, saying it was “confusingly similar” with its name. However, the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines ruled in favor of Jolliville, which said the company’s name was a tribute to its founder Jolly Ting.
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