GERMANY
Business confidence rises
Business confidence rose for the first time in nine months as companies’ concerns about rising trade tensions seem to have bottomed out. The Ifo institute’s closely watched gauge this month increased to 103.8 from 101.7 last month. The pickup, the first since the index started declining from a record-high late last year, was better than economists had forecast. The nation’s economy continued its robust expansion in the second quarter of this year, driven by a surge in domestic demand that mitigated a drag from net trade. The data confirmed the Bundesbank’s assessment that the economy remains on a “sound growth path” after a slowdown in the first quarter, though weakening growth in China, emerging market turmoil and protectionism pose risks to the outlook.
FINTECH
Berkshire to buy One97 stake
Berkshire Hathaway Inc has agreed to buy a stake in the company behind Paytm, India’s biggest digital payments brand, in Warren Buffett’s first foray into the country’s start-ups, people familiar with the matter said. Buffett is set to acquire 3 to 4 percent of One97 Communications Ltd, valuing the target at more than US$10 billion, the people said, adding that a formal announcement could come in the next few days. One97, founded by billionaire Vijay Shekhar Sharma, runs the Paytm brand and is the leading player in India’s booming digital payments market. Buffett would join a star-studded group who have invested in Sharma’s companies, including Masayoshi Son’s Softbank Group Corp and Jack Ma’s (馬雲) Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴) and Ant Financial (螞蟻金服).
REAL ESTATE
Londoners opting out of city
Londoners are buying more homes outside the capital as prices remain too high for houses within the city even after the end of a decade-long housing boom. In the first half of this year, Londoners bought more than 30,000 homes outside the city, a 16 percent rise from a year earlier and 61 percent more than in the same period a decade earlier, according to research by Hamptons International. Nearly 40 percent of leavers relocated to the southeast of England, followed by 30 percent who moved to the east of the country. With affordability stretched, more Londoners are moving out of the capital to find their new home, Hamptons research analyst Aneisha Beveridge said, adding that more people are making a bigger move and buying a larger home sooner to avoid having to pay stamp duty on additional moves as they trade up. Despite a recent cooling in the market, home prices in the capital have still almost doubled in the past decade after demand outstripped supply and low interest rates fueled purchases.
NIGERIA
GDP slows on oil production
The nation’s economic growth slowed in the second quarter as oil production fell. GDP in Africa’s largest oil producer expanded 1.5 percent in the three months through June from a year earlier, Abuja-based National Bureau of Statistics said in a report released on Twitter yesterday. That compares with 1.95 percent in the first quarter. Oil output fell to 1.84 million barrels a day in the period. That is the lowest since the first quarter of last year, when the economy was contracting. While it accounts for 9 percent of GDP, crude is the West African nation’s biggest source of foreign income.
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