BANKING
HSBC pre-tax profit up 12%
HSBC Holdings PLC yesterday said that pre-tax profit rose 12 percent in the first half of the year as revenue expanded faster than costs and higher interest rates fattened margins for its Hong Kong lending business. The London-based bank also said it would buy back another US$2 billion in shares in the second half of the year. Profit for the January-to-June period came in at US$12 billion, higher than the US$10.7 billion from a year earlier, while adjusted revenue rose 0.8 percent to US$26.1 billion, HSBC said.
CHINA
PPP enters ‘fast lane’
The nation’s public-private partnership (PPP) project construction has entered the “fast lane” and is to become a unified, standardized, transparent market, a government research office said. As of the end of June, there were 13,554 projects nationwide with investment of 16.3 trillion yuan (US$2.4 trillion), according to data from the China Public Private Partnerships Center, Xinhua news agency said on Sunday. More than 34 percent of projects had reached the implementation phase, it said.
BEVERAGES
Heineken profits from heat
Dutch brewing giant Heineken NV yesterday reported a 48.6 percent leap in first-half profit, with beer sales boosted by warm weather in Europe and its new zero-alcohol brand. Profit rose to 871 million euros (US$1.02 billion) in the first half of this year compared with 586 million euros over the same period last year, the company said in a statement. Total sales in the first six months were up 3.8 percent to 10.47 billion euros, compared with 10.09 billion a year earlier.
BEVERAGES
Scotch law requested
The government has called for Scotch to be defined in UK law so its vital whisky industry can be protected after Brexit. Secretary for Economy, Jobs and Fair Work Keith Brown has written to officials asking for strong legal protections for the industry, which is worth about £4 billion (US$5.3 billion) in exports. A EU definition of whisky currently protects sales from substandard products, but EU laws will no longer apply to Britain after the country exits the bloc in 2019.
AIRLINES
JAL profit up on brisk sales
Japan Airlines (JAL) yesterday reported that net profit rose 32.9 percent to ¥19.6 billion (US$177 million) for the three months to June thanks to brisk sales at home and overseas. Revenue for the April-to-June period increased 5.9 percent to ¥314.8 billion. JAL upgraded its full-year forecast, projecting ¥108 billion in net profit for the year ending March next year, and annual sales are now seen at ¥1.348 trillion, it said.
JEWELRY
De Beers to exceed target
De Beers SA, the world’s biggest diamond producer by value, said its unit in Botswana is on track to produce the most since 2014 this year, exceeding its annual forecast. Debswana, as the local division is known, is likely to produce 22 million carats this year, exceeding its 20.5 million-carat target, executive head of strategy Gareth Mostyn said on Thursday in an interview in Gaborone. De Beers, which also has operations in Canada, Namibia and South Africa, kept its total forecast for the year at 31 million to 33 million carats. Production in Botswana has been helped by the return of a 46-year-old processing plant at Orapa, which was partially idled in December 2015 due to weak demand.
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