ELECTRONICS
ZTE nears final US hurdle
ZTE Corp (中興通訊) is close to clearing the final hurdle needed for the US government to lift sanctions that prevented the Chinese telecommunications giant from buying US equipment, a US Department of Commerce official said. The Shenzhen-based company has paid a US$1 billion fine and another US$400 million in escrow is to be completed in a couple of days, the official said. A bipartisan group of lawmakers remains concerned about ZTE’s threat to US national security and wants legislation aimed at stronger penalties.
COMMUNICATIONS
BlackBerry drops up to 10%
BlackBerry Ltd shares plunged the most in a year after investors focused on weak growth in software revenues that the company attributed to a change in accounting standards. Shares in BlackBerry on Friday fell as much as 10 percent to US$10.49 in New York, the greatest intraday drop since June 23 last year. Software revenue, the company’s most important growth metric, was US$83 million in the first quarter, 18 percent lower than a year earlier, a statement said on Friday.
INTERNET
Delivery giant files for IPO
Internet giant Meituan Dianping (美團點評) on Friday filed for an initial public offering (IPO) in Hong Kong, becoming the latest Chinese technology juggernaut to throw a multibillion-dollar coming-out party in Hong Kong this year, a person familiar with its filing documents said. Meituan made a net loss of 19 billion yuan (US$2.9 billion) on total revenue of 34 billion yuan for fiscal year 2017, the person said.
CANADA
May prices jumped 2.2%
Canadians paid 2.2 percent more for goods and services last month than a year earlier, with price hikes recorded in all categories, government data showed on Friday. Inflation was flat from the previous month, but came in well below forecasts of 2.6 percent, confirming economists’ predictions that the Bank of Canada would hold off raising interest rates when meeting next month. Gasoline was the biggest contributor to inflation last month, rising 23 percent year-on-year, Statistics Canada said.
UNITED STATES
Rise in self-employed drivers
Call it the Uber effect. The number of self-employed US workers in the taxi and limousine services industry, which includes ridesharing, surged 46 percent in 2016 to more than 700,000, a Census Bureau report released on Thursday showed. The government defines so-called “nonemployer establishments” as businesses without paid employees that have annual receipts of at least US$1,000.
EUROPEAN UNION
French-German plan in doubt
The Netherlands on Friday led a behind-the-scenes campaign to stop a French-German plan to establish a eurozone budget ahead of a key EU summit to discuss the matter. European sources said the Dutch government was making arguments on behalf of about a dozen countries that held wide-ranging doubts about the French-German plan. In an e-mail to Eurogroup President Mario Centeno, Dutch Minister of Finance Wopke Hoekstra insisted that the lack of consensus on the budget be clearly communicated to leaders at next week’s summit.
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