INVESTMENTS
Fidelity bars ‘fear gauge’
Fidelity Investments on Friday told clients they could not buy shares in an exchange-traded fund that bets on the direction of Wall Street’s “fear gauge,” after the product was sideswiped by a sell-off in stocks and lost 90 percent of its value this week. The company placed restrictions on investor purchases of ProShares Short VIX Short-Term Futures ETF, the latest investment product profiting from market calm to fall victim to the recent upsurge in volatility. On Tuesday, Credit Suisse Group AG said it would terminate the second-largest publicly traded product betting on future swings in the S&P 500.
EDUCATION
Facebook to train leaders
Facebook Inc on Friday said that it would issue up to US$10 million in grants to help support and train community leaders around the world. The tech giant unveiled its new initiative at a London summit of more than 300 community leaders from across Europe. The Facebook Community Leadership Program is to offer residency, fellowship and training opportunities, as well as community leadership circles and specialized assistance on the social networking platform.
E-COMMERCE
Alibaba plans for Olympics
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴) is to launch a project to create a “smarter” and more connected athletes’ village and stadiums, and make all Olympics stakeholders “more money,” its executives said yesterday. International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach said some of Alibaba’s plans “can become operational pretty soon,” while Alibaba founder Jack Ma (馬雲) said they are expected to be realized at the next Winter Games in Beijing in 2022.
BANKING
BMPS loss beats expectation
Italy’s troubled bank, Monte dei Paschi di Siena (BMPS), suffered an even deeper loss last year, despite being bailed out, according to information released on Friday. The net loss of 3.5 billion euros (US$4.3 billion) was worse than the 3.2 billion euro loss it registered last year, and worse than the average of 3.2 billion euros expected by analysts, analytics firm Factset Estimates said.
AVIATION
Airbus agrees to fine
European aircraft manufacturer Airbus SE on Friday said it had agreed to pay a fine of 81.25 million euros to end a German corruption probe into the 2003 sale of Eurofighter jets to Austria. Prosecutors in Munich said in a statement that their investigation did not find evidence of bribery to secure the lucrative contract. However, they said Airbus management had failed in its supervisory duty by allowing employees to make multimillion-euro payments linked to the deal for “unclear purposes.”
AUTOMAKERS
Mercedes mulls Detroit
Mercedes-Benz might pull out of the annual North American International Auto Show in Detroit next year, according to people familiar with the matter, as carmakers increasingly choose to unveil new products at tech shows or their own special events. Daimler AG, Mercedes’s parent, is moving toward standalone presentations of new models and technology summits like CES in Las Vegas, the sources said. A final decision has not yet been made, they said.
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