STEEL
Countries to drop subsidies
The world’s largest steel-producing countries on Thursday agreed to dismantle market-distorting subsidies, but deep division remained, with China calling for more action from other producers. Speaking at the conclusion of a Berlin summit, German Minister of Economics and Energy Brigitte Zypries said delegates had agreed on the need to dismantle subsidies and arrange better sharing of information on the process of capacity reduction. Chinese Assistant Minister of Commerce Li Chenggang (李成鋼) said the world’s largest steel maker made painful efforts to cut capacity “while the rest of the world just watches.”
EUROPEAN UNION
Joblessness hits decade low
The buoyant economic recovery across the 19-country eurozone has pushed unemployment down to its lowest level in nearly nine years, but has yet to translate to a sustained pick-up in wages and prices, official figures said on Thursday. Eurostat, the EU’s statistics agency, said the jobless rate fell to 8.8 percent in October, from 8.9 percent the previous month. That is the lowest since January 2009. Across the region, there were 14.34 million people out of work, down 1.5 million in the past year.
CANADA
Account deficit nears record
Canada’s reliance on foreign financing rose to near record levels in the third quarter as exporters continue to struggle. The country’s current account deficit — what it needs to borrow from the rest of the world to finance spending — widened to C$19.3 billion (US$15.01 billion), the third-highest on record. Economists had forecast a C$20 billion deficit. Canada has booked current account deficits for 36 straight quarters, worth more than C$500 billion over that time.
BREWERIES
AB InBev muscles local beers
The EU on Thursday accused the world’s biggest brewer, Anheuser-Busch InBev NV (AB InBev), of illegally blocking cheaper imports of local favorites Leffe and Jupiler into Belgium. Both brands are Belgium’s best-selling beers and part of the AB InBev behemoth that the EU says has a “very strong” position on the Belgian beer market. AB InBev is based in the Belgian city of Leuven and completed a blockbuster merger worth US$103 billion with rival SABMiller PLC last year.
ENTERTAINMENT
Macau attracts high rollers
Macau’s casino revenue last month grew at the fastest pace in four months as tour operators attracted high-stakes players to the world’s largest gambling hub. Gross gaming receipts rose 23 percent to 23 billion patacas (US$2.9 billion) last month, data released yesterday by Macau’s Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau showed. That exceeds the median estimate for a 19 percent increase in a Bloomberg survey of seven analysts. Revenue climbed 20 percent from January to last month.
AUTOMAKERS
Nissan’s car sales halved
Nissan Motor Co’s passenger car sales nearly halved in Japan last month, data released yesterday showed, following a 55 percent drop from the previous month as it struggles with a damaging inspection scandal. Sales of Nissan-brand passenger cars stood at 16,888, down 46.8 percent from a year earlier, the Japan Automobile Dealers Association said. The dramatic fall in Nissan-brand cars compares with a more modest decline of just 5.5 percentage points in overall sales in the Japanese market last month.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by