MEDIA
Fox raises offer for Sky
Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox Inc has raised its offer for Britain’s Sky PLC in an agreed deal valuing the pay-TV group at US$32.5 billion, seeing off rival bidder Comcast Corp for now. Fox, which has been trying to buy the pan-European group since December 2016, has offered to pay £14 per share, a 12 percent premium to Comcast’s offer, but below the £14.80 Sky shares were trading yesterday. Analysts said the bid threw down the gauntlet for Comcast to return with a higher offer.
MEDIA
Univision mulls Onion sale
Univision Holdings Inc is considering selling Gizmodo Media Group and the Onion, a retreat from English-language Web sites in favor of media aimed at Hispanic Americans. The company has begun a formal process to explore a sale of the properties, such as Gizmodo, Jezebel, Deadspin and Lifehacker, it said in a statement on Tuesday. Univision’s satirical Onion portfolio includes its namesake site, along with Clickhole, the A.V. Club and other brands.
ENERGY
Chevron ruling upheld
Ecuador’s highest court upheld in a ruling released on Tuesday a US$9.5 billion damages award against oil giant Chevron Corp over decades of pollution that harmed indigenous people. Chevron was sentenced in Ecuador over environmental damage blamed on Texaco, which Chevron acquired in 2001, in Ecuador’s rainforest from 1964 to 1990. Chevron did not deny that pollution had occurred, but blamed it on state-run Petroecuador and has refused to pay the settlement on the grounds that it was the result of fraud and bribes.
ENERGY
Romania raises gas tax
Romania has passed a law to impose additional taxes on gas companies operating in the Black Sea, prompting an outcry on Tuesday from energy companies active in the nation. Parliament adopted the legislation late on Monday, with the left-wing government saying it will bring in substantial new revenues and help increase its energy independence from Russia. The new law introduces tariffs on the revenues of offshore operators and also obliges them to sell at least 50 percent of their output on the local market.
MACROECONOMICS
UK economy grew 0.3%
The British economy expanded 0.3 percent in May from the previous month, a strong performance that is likely to further bolster expectations that the Bank of England would raise interest rates next month. The Office for National Statistics on Tuesday said that much of the growth was due to a 2.9 percent growth in construction. It was the first time the agency published monthly figures for growth, which has traditionally been reported quarterly.
COMMODITIES
Glencore gears up for probe
Glencore PLC has set up a board committee to respond to a US probe into possible corruption at the world’s biggest commodity trader. The committee is composed of chairman and former BP PLC chief executive officer Tony Hayward, as well as non-executive directors Patrice Merrin and Leonhard Fischer, Glencore said yesterday. Glencore last week said the US Department of Justice demanded documents relating to possible corruption and money laundering regarding its business in Nigeria, Congo and Venezuela over the past decade.
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