TECHNOLOGY
Microsoft head sells shares
Microsoft Corp chief executive officer Satya Nadella has sold 328,000 shares valued at US$35.9 million for financial planning reasons, and is beginning a regularly scheduled trading plan for some of the equity awards he has received. Nadella would continue to divest shares in the next year through the structured plan, in which he does not control the timing or amounts sold, the company said on Friday. He would sell less than one-half of his Microsoft shares, the company added.
ELECTRONICS
Apple CEO and Trump dine
US President Donald Trump said on Twitter that he would have dinner on Friday with Apple Inc chief executive officer Tim Cook. “Looking forward to dinner tonight with Tim Cook of Apple. He is investing big dollars in U.S.A.,” said Trump, who is on vacation at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. Apple was looking at whether Trump’s tariffs in a trade war with China would hit the company on the purchases it must make, Cook said in a conference call last week.
TECHNOLOGY
Oracle charged with lying
Oracle Corp is named in a lawsuit saying that its executives allegedly lied to shareholders when explaining why cloud sales were growing. City of Sunrise Firefighters’ Pension Fund, the investor leading the case, claimed that Oracle engaged in coercion to sell its cloud-computing products, creating an unsustainable model, according to the suit filed on Friday. Investors lost money when Oracle’s stock plummeted in March after reporting disappointing earnings.
LEISURE
House of Fraser acquired
The 169-year-old House of Fraser on Friday entered administration only to be snapped up by retailer Sports Direct for US$115 million. The Chinese-owned UK department store chain has outlets across Britain and Ireland. Shortly after it revealed that it would be appointing administrators, Sports Direct announced that it had acquired almost all of the chain’s business and assets.
PHARMACEUTICALS
Chinese firms seek IPOs
Two more Chinese drug developers are seeking initial public offerings in Hong Kong, adding to the growing wave of biotech firms taking advantage of the city’s new listing rules. Suzhou Kintor Pharmaceuticals Inc (開拓藥業) and Frontier Biotechnologies Inc (前沿生物) are planning Hong Kong stock offerings that could each raise about US$300 million, people with knowledge of the matter said. Listing preparations for Frontier and Kintor are at an early stage and details of the potential offerings could change, the people said.
UNITED STATES
Record yearly deficit on track
The federal government recorded a US$76.9 billion deficit last month, with increased government spending and tax cuts keeping the country on track to record its biggest annual deficit in six years. The US Department of the Treasury reports that in the first 10 months of this budget year, the deficit totaled US$684 billion, up 20.8 percent from the same period last year. US President Donald Trump’s administration last month projected that annual deficits would again top US$1 trillion next year.
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