JAPAN
Non-urban land prices rise
Land prices outside the nation’s three main cities rose for the first time since the bursting of a property bubble in the early 1990s, adding to signs that a moderate economic recovery under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is gradually filtering to the regions. The average price of land outside Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya edged up 0.4 percent as of Jan. 1 from a year earlier, rising for the first time since 1992, Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism data released yesterday showed. Falling unemployment, higher pay, low interest rates, and demand for hotels and retail space to cater to foreign tourists helped boost land prices, the ministry said. Overall, land prices rose 1.2 percent, increasing for a fourth straight year, the report said.
EXPATRIATES
Paris tied for priciest city
Paris has climbed to the top of the world’s priciest cities for expatriates, tied with Singapore and Hong Kong, according to a survey released yesterday that named Caracas as the cheapest. The French capital was the only eurozone city in the top 10, rising from second-most expensive last year and from seventh position two years ago. The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) said it was the first time in the more than three decades that three cities were equally ranked top, after Singapore led the chart outright a year earlier. The top 10 list was dominated by Asian and European cities. Currency appreciation, inflation and devaluation, as well as political upheaval played a part in this year’s rankings, said the EIU, which surveyed 133 cities. The survey is aimed at helping companies calculate compensation packages and allowances for expatriate staff and business travelers.
TECHNOLOGY
Tencent cutting management
Tencent Holdings Ltd (騰訊) is putting about 10 percent of its managers on notice, as China’s largest gaming and social media company shakes up its workforce amid cooling growth and intensified competition, people familiar with the matter said. President Martin Lau (劉熾平) late last year told an internal meeting that its lowest-performing general managers would need to leave or be demoted, mainly because not much staff pruning has occurred in the past, the people said. Tencent follows a slew of Chinese tech companies from JD.com Inc (京東) to Didi Chuxing (滴滴出行) that are shaking up their ranks. Funding has shrunk alongside a cooling in the nation’s economy.
INVESTMENT
Goldman to buy ETF channel
Goldman Sachs Group Inc agreed to buy a distribution channel for its expanding roster of exchange-traded funds (ETFs). The acquisition of Standard & Poor’s Investment Advisory Services LLC gives the New York City-based bank another vehicle to bring its funds to investors through the creation of model portfolios — ready-made packages of ETFs that its asset-management arm is to oversee. Goldman currently offers 18 ETFs, which together manage about US$11.6 billion, or less than 1 percent of the US$3.8 trillion market. The deal is expected to close in the first half of the year, the group said on Monday, without disclosing the terms of the agreement. Investment Advisory Services oversees about US$33 billion in assets. The portfolios offer issuers a way to get their products into more hands and stand out in a marketplace of more than 2,000 funds. The pitch to advisers is that they can focus more on the personal side of their jobs rather than on making asset allocation choices with ETFs or single securities.
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],”
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
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