TRADE
US ‘willing to negotiate’
US President Donald Trump on Friday said he is willing to negotiate trade deals individually or as a group with the nations that remain in the Trans-Pacific Partnership that he pulled the US out of after taking office. Trump said in a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that trade needs to be fair and reciprocal. The US is prepared to negotiate mutually beneficial bilateral trade agreements with all countries, including those in the partnership that involves 11 other Pacific Rim nations, he said.
CANADA
Call cost falls 7.6 percent
Canadians just got the biggest break on the cost of making a call since before the dawn of the smartphone era: Prices for telephone services last month slumped 7.6 percent, the biggest monthly decrease since at least 1988, as the nation’s cellular providers offered deals to lure customers, the federal statistics agency reported on Friday. That contributed to a drop in headline inflation, which fell 0.4 percent on the month, the most in more than a year.
JORDAN
Pita subsidies lifted
Officials said a decision to end subsidies on staple pita bread that would lift its prices by between 60 and 100 percent was to take effect yesterday, the first such step in more than two decades to ease the nation’s budget woes. The price of 1kg of white pita bread was raised 60 percent to 0.40 dinars (US$0.56) from 0.25 dinars and prices of large pita bread were nearly doubled. Other types of bread that most middle-class Jordanians consume are not affected.
CHINA
Industry profit growth stable
Profit growth at industrial firms moderated for a third month, after factory inflation decelerated to the weakest pace in more than a year. Industrial profits last month rose 10.8 percent from a year earlier, compared with 14.9 percent in November, the statistics bureau said on Friday. That is the slowest pace of increase in a year. The producer price index fell for a second month last month, the bureau said.
FINANCE
SoFi buys mortgage teams
Social Finance Inc (SoFi) has acquired the engineering and product teams of mortgage start-up Clara Lending, bolstering the financial technology company’s offerings beyond student-loan refinancing. SoFi on Friday said that taking on the Clara teams allows it to “immediately ramp up our technical capabilities.” The San Francisco-based SoFi said earlier this week that Twitter Inc chief operating officer Anthony Noto would become its chief executive in March, replacing Mike Cagney, who resigned in September last year.
BEVERAGES
Starbucks announces pay
Starbucks Corp paid CEO Kevin Johnson US$11.5 million for last year, according to a regulatory filing on Friday. Johnson, 57, took the helm of the coffee chain in April last year. Founder Howard Schultz, whose salary was cut to US$1 as part of his transition to chairman, received US$18 million in total compensation. The company this week said it plans to spend US$250 million on new employee benefits in the wake of the US tax overhaul. The company also announced raises for 150,000 hourly and salaried US employees.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to