RETAIL
J.C. Penney lays off 360
Department store chain J.C. Penney Co Inc on Friday said it has cut more than 300 jobs and reported disappointing sales at established stores for the quarter that includes the year-end holiday season. It also delivered a muted outlook, with its shares falling 6 percent. The news overshadowed strong profits as investors worried about the firm’s ability to remake itself in a changing retail market. J.C. Penney eliminated 130 positions at its headquarters in Plano, Texas, and said restructuring regional, district and store support teams to eliminate bureaucracy led to 230 job cuts. It estimated the cuts will save US$20 million to US$25 million per year.
RETAIL
Agency files for Tesco retrial
Three former senior Tesco PLC executives look set to face a London jury for a second time over a £250 million (US$345.2 million) accounting scandal after their first trial was called off shortly before the jury was due to consider its verdict. The British Serious Fraud Office, which is prosecuting the case, on Friday said it had written to the court to seek a retrial of Tesco’s former finance director Carl Rogberg, former UK managing director Christopher Bush and former UK food commercial director John Scouler. The prosecution of the three men was launched after Tesco said in September 2014 that its profit forecast had been overstated by £250 million.
AUTOMOTIVE
Infineon teams up with SAIC
German computer chipmaker Infineon Technologies AG on Friday said it is teaming up with China’s biggest automaker, SAIC Motor Corp (上海汽車), to produce power modules for the Chinese electric car market. Infineon said in a statement that it would hold a 49 percent stake in the new Shanghai-based company, SAIC Infineon Automotive Power Modules (SIAPM, 上汽英飛凌汽車功率半導體), which is to make inverters — vital parts that convert power from a battery to a form that can be used by a car’s engine. SAIC Motor is to hold the remaining 51 percent.
ALCOHOL
AB InBev boosts spending
Anheuser-Busch InBev NV (AB InBev) is ramping up investment in Africa after seeing a boom in demand for its beer on the continent, building on the Budweiser brand owner’s US$106 billion takeover of SABMiller PLC in 2016. Shipments in the region excluding South Africa last year increased by as much as 20 percent, and premium brands such as Stella Artois and Corona are growing in popularity in South Africa, regional CEO Ricardo Tadeu said. “We have invested hundreds of millions of dollars on the continent this past year, most notably US$200 million in South Africa,” he said in an interview on Thursday.
GREECE
EU experts approve tranche
The government on Friday said that EU experts have approved a fresh cash injection under its bailout loan program, which is due to wrap up later this year. The Ministry of Finance said in a statement that the 5.7 billion euros (US$7 billion) should be disbursed in the middle of this month following approval by lawmakers in several eurozone countries. The approval by experts working for the group of eurozone finance ministers marks the formal closure of the third review by Greece’s creditors under the current bailout program.
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