Panasonic Corp plans to move its European headquarters from Britain to the Netherlands later this year over concerns about potential tax issues related to Brexit, a company spokeswoman said yesterday.
“We will move our European headquarters to the Netherlands,” the spokeswoman said, confirming a report in the Nikkei Shimbun business daily about the Japanese electronics giant’s decision.
Panasonic Europe chief executive officer Laurent Abadie told the daily that the headquarters would move from outside London to Amsterdam in October.
The decision was sparked by fears that Japan could treat Britain as a tax haven after Brexit if London decides to lower its corporate tax rate in a bid to attract businesses, she said.
If Japan made the designation, Panasonic could face back taxes levied by Tokyo.
Abadie told the newspaper that Panasonic had been considering a move for the past 15 months, with concerns about post-Brexit barriers to the flow of people and goods also a factor in the decision to move.
Of the 20 to 30 people in the London office, about 10 to 20 employees dealing with auditing and financial operations would move, while investor relations staff would stay put, the newspaper said.
Britain is to leave the EU in March next year.
Several Japanese firms — including megabank Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc, Nomura Holdings Inc, Daiwa Securities Group Inc and Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group Inc — have said that they are planning to move their main EU bases out of London.
There are 879 Japanese companies employing 142,000 staff in Britain, including automakers Honda Motor Co and Nissan Motor Co, and Japanese companies have more than US$60 billion invested in the UK, according to the most recent statistics.
Nissan is already preparing to axe hundreds of jobs at its factory in the northeastern city of Sunderland — which produces 500,000 vehicles per year — as British sales slump.
Earlier this week, Hiroaki Nakanishi, head of Keidanren, which represents 1,000 Japanese firms, expressed his frustration in an interview with the Financial Times.
“We just can’t do anything. Everyone is seriously concerned,” Nakanishi said.
Different scenarios are being debated, ranging from reversing Brexit to plunging into Brexit without a deal, Nakanishi said.
“We’re now in a situation where we have to consider what to do in all of them,” he said.
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
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],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained