NEW ZEALAND
Orr to head central bank
Adrian Orr is to oversee the biggest overhaul of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand since it pioneered inflation targeting in the early 1990s. Orr, 54, is to begin a five-year term as governor of the central bank on March 27, Finance Minister Grant Robertson said in Wellington yesterday. A former deputy governor and chief economist at the central bank, Orr currently heads the government’s sovereign wealth fund, which has swelled to more than NZ$37 billion (US$25.61 billion) under his decade-long leadership. The New Zealand dollar jumped on Orr’s appointment as traders bet he would not allow the goals of full employment and price stability to weaken the central bank’s inflation-fighting resolve.
TURKEY
Resilient output ups growth
The economy grew by a strong 11.1 percent in the third quarter of this year compared with the same period last year, official statistics showed yesterday, with the high reading driven by one-off effects, as well as resilient output. The figure was well above the consensus market forecast, which had been for 10 percent growth. Growth was driven by construction and services, as well as a strong rise in exports, official data published by the Statistics Institute showed. Analysts said ahead of the data release that the third-quarter figure would be particularly strong as last year’s comparative period was especially weak due to the effects of the July 15 failed coup and a long religious holiday. The economy grew by 1.2 percent in the third quarter from the second quarter on a seasonally adjusted basis, the institute said. QNB Finansbank Research said its end of year forecast was for 6.3 percent GDP growth.
UNITED KINGDOM
Festive spending tumbles
Squeezed consumers reined in Christmas travel plans and bought fewer new cars last month, setting the stage for the first fall in festive spending in five years, credit card company Visa said yesterday. The downbeat message came alongside a cut by the Chambers of Commerce to its economic outlook for the next two years as the business organization sees inflation rising faster than pay for the next two years. Visa said inflation-adjusted consumer spending last month was 0.9 percent lower than last year. This was a smaller decline than October’s 2.1 percent drop, but still enough to make annual falls in spending likely for the first time since 2012 for both the Christmas season and this year overall, the company said.
AUTOMAKERS
BYD to build cars in Morocco
Chinese electric car manufacturer BYD Co (比亞迪) on Saturday signed an agreement to open a factory near the Moroccan city of Tangiers to build battery-powered vehicles, officials said. BYD is to become the third car manufacturer, after Renault SA and PPSA Peugeot Citroen of France, to construct cars in the North African state. The memorandum of understanding was signed at the royal palace in the coastal city of Casablanca in the presence of King Mohammed VI and BYD chairman Wang Chuanfu (王傳福), whose company is backed by US investor Warren Buffett. The factory in the new Mohammed VI Tangier Tech City, part of a project between China and Morocco, is to produce electric cars, buses and trucks at a 50-hectare site employing 2,500 people, the project directors said.
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