CHINA
Factory inflation slows
Factory inflation eased last month owing to slackening demand and a trade war with the US, while consumer price inflation held steady, official data showed yesterday. The producer price index decelerated to a 3.3 percent year-on-year rise. It ticked downward for the fourth consecutive month, from a high of 4.7 percent in June, while remaining in line with the forecast in a Bloomberg News survey. Meanwhile, the consumer price index rose 2.5 percent, the National Bureau of Statistics said.
BANKING
1MDB papers name ex-CEO
Former Goldman Sachs Group Inc chief executive officer Lloyd Blankfein is the senior executive mentioned in US court papers as having met a man at the center of the 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) corruption scandal in Malaysia, the Financial Times reported on Thursday, quoting two people familiar with the situation. A Goldman Sachs spokesman declined an AFP request for comment. Blankfein stepped down as CEO last month after 12 years.
ENTERTAINMENT
Disney sees earnings jump
Walt Disney Co’s earnings for the latest quarter sailed passed expectations, boosted by a strong slate of movies such as Incredibles 2. Studio entertainment revenue, which includes theater box office and streaming, jumped 50 percent to US$2.15 billion on the strength of films such as Avengers: Infinity War and the latest Ant-Man movie. Net income for the quarter ended Sept. 29 rose 33 percent to US$2.32 billion, or US$1.55 per share, from a year earlier. Revenue rose 12 percent to US$14.31 billion from US$12.78 billion last year.
APPAREL
Sock maker plans record IPO
Interloop Ltd, which makes socks for Nike Inc and Adidas AG, is planning Pakistan’s biggest initial public offering by a private firm. The company plans to raise as much as 6.8 billion rupees (US$50.9 million) to expand its sock manufacturing capacity by about 20 percent and enter the denim business, chairman and cofounder Musadaq Zulqarnain said. It is to offer 12.5 percent of the business in the sale, which is likely to take place in January, he said.
APPAREL
Ferragamo profits drop
The Salvatore Ferragamo fashion house said earnings in the first nine months of the year were down 17.5 percent, as sales of the trademark footwear slumped. The leather goods and apparel maker on Thursday reported net profit of 65 million euros (US$73.7 million) in the period, compared with 79 million euros in the first nine months of last year. Revenue was down 3.3 percent to 972 million euros from a year ago, with decreases in every region. Asia-Pacific remained the brand’s biggest market, even with a 2 percent drop in sales.
CHINA
Regulator sets loan targets
Chinese banks dragged down the region’s stock indexes yesterday after the regulator’s unprecedented move to set lending targets for private companies, its latest attempt to support economic growth at the risk of swelling bad debt. The country aims to boost large banks’ loans to private firms to at least one-third of new corporate lending, China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission chairman Guo Shuqing (郭樹清) told the Financial News in an interview published late on Thursday. The target for small and medium-sized banks is higher at two-thirds.
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