JAPAN
Factory output shoots up
The nation’s factory output expanded at its fastest pace in more than three-and-a-half years in October, but the outlook for the coming months is less certain. Industrial production jumped 2.9 percent from September, after falling in five of the previous six months, economy ministry data showed yesterday. Output increased 4.2 percent from the same period a year earlier. Separate data showed consumer prices excluding fresh food rose 1 percent last month, matching economists’ forecasts, while the jobless rate ticked up to 2.4 percent in October, with the job-applicant ratio edging down to 1.62, compared with an estimate of 1.65.
LEISURE
Hong Kong IPO for Club Med
The owner of French luxury holiday resort group Club Med yesterday launched an initial public offering (IPO) in Hong Kong, hoping to raise more than US$500 million. Fosun Tourism Group (復星旅遊), a unit of the sprawling Fosun Group (復星集團), said in a prospectus that it is offering 214.2 million shares for between HK$15.60 and HK$20.00, and hopes to price the deal by Friday next week with a listing a week later. It said it hopes to raise up to US$548 million. As well as the Club Med brand, which it bought for more than US$1 billion in 2015, Fosun owns the Atlantis Sanya, a high-end hotel complex on Hainan Island, a popular holiday destination in China.
UNITED STATES
Trump, tech bosses to meet
President Donald Trump is to meet with top executives from Google, Microsoft Corp, Oracle Corp and Qualcomm Inc during a White House roundtable on Thursday next week that could touch upon some of the sticking points in the increasingly prickly relationship between his administration and the technology industry. Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Oracle co-CEO Safra Catz and Qualcomm CEO Steven Mollenkopf all plan to attend the meeting. The White House had said in late September that Pichai had been invited to a tech roundtable without specifying when it would be held or who else would be asked to come.
SOFTWARE
Ex-Autonomy CEO charged
Michael Lynch, a British entrepreneur and former CEO of Autonomy Corp, has been charged with fraud by the US. Prosecutors had long identified Lynch as a coconspirator with his chief financial officer at Autonomy, Sushovan Hussain, who was found guilty in April of orchestrating an accounting fraud to arrive at the US$10.3 billion price then-Hewlett-Packard Co paid for the UK-based company in 2011. Autonomy was the UK’s second-largest software business at the time.
TRANSPORTATION
Lyft buys bike-sharing firm
Lyft Inc has completed its acquisition of Motivate, the US’ largest bike-sharing company. The deal is part of the San Francisco-based ride-hailing company’s goal of offering an array of transportation options within one app and reducing individual car ownership. Financial details were not disclosed. Motivate operates bike-share systems in New York, Washington, San Francisco and elsewhere. Last year, 80 percent of bike-share rides in the US were on Motivate bikes. Caroline Samponaro, head of bike, scooter and pedestrian policy for Lyft, said the company plans to invest US$100 million in New York to triple its bike fleet there to 40,000 and double the footprint of the system.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by