GERMANY
Industry continues to decline
Industrial orders fell for firms for the fourth month in a row in April, official data showed yesterday, confounding analysts’ hopes for a recovery. New contracts dropped 2.5 percent month-on-month, adjusting for price, seasonal and calendar effects, the federal statistics authority Destatis said. The result disappointed analysts’ forecasts of a 0.7 percent increase compared with last month.
INDIA
Repurchase rate increased
The Reserve Bank of India raised its benchmark interest rate for the first time since 2014 and set the stage for a gradual tightening cycle as economic growth rebounds from a four-year low and price pressures build. The six-member Monetary Policy Committee voted unanimously to increase the repurchase rate to 6.25 percent from 6 percent on Wednesday, as predicted by 14 of 44 economists in a Bloomberg survey. The central bank kept its policy stance neutral, which suggested the move was a “dovish hike,” Nomura Holdings Inc said.
INVESTMENT
Quarterly guidance a ‘no-no’
Warren Buffett and Jamie Dimon are doubling down on their plea for corporations to stop providing quarterly earnings guidance. Buffett and Dimon, the chief executive officers of Berkshire Hathaway Inc and JPMorgan Chase & Co respectively, said in a joint Wall Street Journal opinion piece that they are encouraging all public companies to consider moving away from the practice, arguing that it can stifle long-term investments. “Quarterly earnings guidance often leads to an unhealthy focus on short-term profits at the expense of long-term strategy, growth and sustainability,” they wrote.
AUTOMAKERS
Volvo bets on driverless cars
Volvo Cars is betting that driverless vehicles will make up one-third of its deliveries by the middle of the next decade, setting the auto industry’s most ambitious target yet for the technology. Half of the cars the Swedish company offers would be available through its subscription service, creating links to more than 5 million consumers and generating new sources of revenue, Volvo said yesterday.
CRYPTOCURRENCY
Coinbase to buy brokerage
Coinbase Inc, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges, agreed to buy a registered broker-dealer as it races to build a trading platform for the surging number of digital tokens deemed to be securities. The San Francisco-based company announced a trio of acquisitions on Wednesday, including a takeover of Keystone Capital Corp, firm overseen by the US Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. Subject to US regulatory approval, Coinbase plans to use licenses it gets in the deals to offer customers securities that trade on a blockchain ledger.
BANKING
Ex-Anglo Irish CEO guilty
The former chief executive officer of Anglo Irish Bank was on Wednesday found guilty of fraud and false accounting at the institution whose rapid fall from grace epitomized the Irish financial collapse. David Drumm, 51, had denied conspiring in 2008 to inflate deposits in the bank by 7.2 billion euros (US$8.5 billion at the current exchange rate), at the start of the crisis that would see Anglo Irish taken into government hands. He was accused of transferring huge sums between his bank and another financial institution to make the bank’s balance sheet look better than it was.
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