TRADE
Canada, Mercosur in talks
Latin America’s Mercosur trade bloc countries on Friday formally launched negotiations on a free-trade deal with Canada. Paraguayan Minister of Foreign Affairs Eladio Loizaga said the first meeting would take place in Ottawa from March 20 to March 23. Ministers said in a joint statement that they aimed to conclude a “Canada-Mercosur Global Trade Agreement” with a “shared commitment to trade liberalization and opening markets.” Argentine Minister of Foreign Affairs Jorge Faurie said the two sides hoped to sign a free-trade agreement before the end of the year.
TAXES
EU to update haven blacklist
The EU is next week to add Saint Kitts and Nevis, the Bahamas and the US Virgin Islands to its new tax haven blacklist, European sources said. However, the blacklist will still number nine countries after finance ministers withdraw Bahrain, the Marshall Islands and Saint Lucia, according to an EU document. A European source said the new list would be approved by the 28-nation bloc’s finance ministers meeting in Brussels on Tuesday next week. Activists had sharply criticized the EU’s commitment to fighting tax avoidance after it withdrew Panama, the United Arab Emirates, Tunisia, Mongolia, Macau, Grenada and Barbados from the list on Jan. 23.
SPAIN
Deal reached on wage hikes
Unions have reached a deal with the government to raise the salary of civil servants for the first time since 2009 after an economic crisis sparked drastic austerity measures, they said on Friday. The agreement allows for a 6.1 percent to 8.8 percent increase over three years, depending on the growth of the nation’s economy over the period, the Workers’ Commissions union said in a statement. Last year, the government had proposed a 1 percent increase, which was rejected by unions as inadequate.
INTERNET
Facebook to stream baseball
Facebook Inc has reached a deal with Major League Baseball for exclusive rights to stream 25 afternoon games on the social network in the US. It is the first time a major US sports league has agreed to show regular-season games exclusively on Facebook, which has been building a portfolio of live sports. MLB owners unanimously approved the move, the league said. Neither MLB nor Facebook disclosed the financial terms, although people with knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be identified, because the terms are private, put the price at US$30 million to US$35 million.
TELECOMS
AT&T slams anti-trust suit
AT&T Inc has lashed out at a US anti-trust lawsuit against its proposed takeover of Time Warner Inc, saying that the government’s own economic expert determined the deal would raise prices for pay-TV subscribers by just US$0.45 per month. The telecommunications giant derided the US Department of Justice’s case, saying that the government’s own analysis shows the deal would cause minimal consumer harm, according to a filing in federal court in Washington on Friday. AT&T said that the merger with the owner of CNN and HBO would allow it to more effectively compete against rivals such as Comcast Corp and Netflix Inc to the benefit of consumers.
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