CRYPTOCURRENCY
Social Reality pitches coin
Social Reality Inc, a micro-cap advertising technology firm, has joined the ranks of public companies latching onto the cryptocurrency world and its big, speculative returns. Shares of the Los Angeles-based Social Reality Tuesday soared 71 percent after management unveiled plans for an initial token offering during a meeting with analysts. In an interview chief executive officer Chris Miglino discussed plans for “BIGtoken,” a digital coin customers can earn for sharing data. “BIG resolves the unanswered question others in the landscape have not addressed: How can blockchain put the consumer front-and-center in the consumer data and advertising ecosystem?” the company said in a slideshow.
INVESTMENT
EU rules reveal big fees
Goldman Sachs Group Inc has asked some clients to pay US$30,000 for up to 10 of their staff to access basic research through its analyst portal once the EU Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II rules come into force in January next year, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Goldman’s package compares with the fee of about US$40,000 a year that UBS Group AG proposes charging some clients. JPMorgan Chase & Co plans to charge as little as US$10,000 a year for some customers, the lowest price to emerge so far. Aimed at improving transparency, the regulatory overhaul prevents firms from lumping the cost of analysis in with trading fees for clients and imposes tougher reporting standards.
RETAILERS
Sainsbury sheds staff
British retailer J Sainsbury has launched a consultation over cutting 2,000 jobs, amid an ongoing cost-cutting plan over the next three years, the group said on Tuesday. The company is proposing shedding 1,400 staff from its Sainsbury’s grocery stores, and consolidating other roles across its entire operations — which also include catalogue-based retailer Argos and Sainsbury’s Bank — resulting in another 600 potential job losses. J Sainsbury employs about 195,000 staff across Britain, with more than 2,200 retail outlets.
ENTERTAINMENT
NBC and Snap ink deal
NBCUniversal and Snap Inc Tuesday announced a joint venture to produce original scripted shows for Snapchat, the social network popular with young audiences. The two firms will hold equal stakes in a new digital content studio to be based in Santa Monica, California, that is to make “made-for-mobile programming to primarily debut on Snapchat,” a joint statement said. The first content deal is with the Duplass Brothers, an independent production company known for films, as well as the HBO series Room 104.
STOCK EXCHANGES
Record listings in Stockholm
The number of companies listed on NASDAQ OMX Stockholm’s main market yesterday reached a record, as gaming company Cherry AB joined, breaking a mark set as far back as 2001. With Cherry’s transfer from Aktietorget, 319 stocks now trade on the main market, according to data from NASDAQ OMX. That is one more than a peak reached in June 2001, when a bursting IT bubble triggered a raft of bankruptcies and a stock market crash. Backed by an economic boom, NASDAQ OMX Stockholm is now enjoying record listings, with both a flurry of initial public offerings and companies moving to the main market from alternative marketplaces such as First North or Aktietorget.
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