EUROZONE
Juncker denies Italy threat
There is no threat of a new sovereign debt crisis in the eurozone, despite an anti-establishment coalition government taking office in Italy on Friday, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said in remarks published yesterday. Asked by the RND network of German newspapers whether the currency bloc faced a new crisis, Juncker said: “No. The reactions of the financial markets are irrational. People should not draw political conclusions from every fluctuation in the stock market.” The Italian coalition comprises two parties hostile to the euro. “I am certain the Italians have a keen sense of what is good for their country,” Juncker said. “They will sort it out.”
SRI LANKA
IMF disburses part of loan
The IMF yesterday announced the release of the latest installment of the country’s US$1.5 billion bailout, but said that restructuring the lossmaking national airline is essential to sustain economic recovery. The IMF welcomed the island nation’s increase in fuel prices last month — a precondition for it to receive US$252 million of a three-year loan approved in June 2016. The IMF said Sri Lanka should also implement a pricing policy for electricity, which is subsidized for households and small businesses. Sri Lanka’s economy grew 3.1 percent last year, the slowest in 16 years.
TECHNOLOGY
Apple lets Telegram update
Secure messaging app Telegram on Friday said that Apple Inc cleared the path for an updated version, despite a ban in Russia. Telegram chief executive Pavel Durov thanked Apple and its CEO, Tim Cook, from his verified Twitter account for “letting us deliver the latest version of @telegram to millions of users, despite the recent setbacks.” A day earlier, Telegram accused Apple of blocking its updates for users worldwide after Russian authorities imposed a ban on Telegram for refusing to hand over keys to decrypt messages.
BANKING
Visa apologizes for failure
Visa Inc said its system in Europe is back to “close to normal levels” after a hardware failure prevented some transactions. “We apologize to all of our partners, and most especially, to Visa cardholders,” Amanda Pires, a spokeswoman for the company, said in an e-mailed statement on Friday. “The issue was the result of a hardware failure. We have no reason to believe this was associated with any unauthorized access or malicious event.” Visa said the system breakdown affected customers throughout Europe.
TECHNOLOGY
Wind farm gets bitcoin mine
A state-owned Estonian wind farm on Friday launched a cryptocurrency mine, hoping to cash in on nature’s unlimited supplies of power on a windswept Baltic Sea island, a company official said. “It is great that the decentralized money transfer blockchain technology has found its way to our wind farm. Hopefully, it will be a fruitful cooperation,” Eesti Elekter board member Oleg Sonajalg said in a statement on Friday. Eesti Elekter set up a container with banks of computers hooked up for 24-hour cryptocurrency mining at its seven-turbine, 6 megawatt Salme wind farm on the island of Saaremaa, off Estonia’s west coast.
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