AVIATION
India to reallocate Jet slots
The Indian government plans to form a committee to temporarily allocate takeoff and landing slots left vacant by the grounding of Jet Airways Ltd flights, a senior official said, a day after the indebted carrier was forced to stop operations. The vacant slots would be allocated to other airlines, Indian Secretary of Civil Aviation Pradeep Singh Kharola told a news conference in New Delhi. At least 280 slots were vacant in Mumbai and 160 in Delhi, he said, after Jet Airways ended all operations on Wednesday evening after failing to secure further loans from lenders.
THAILAND
Ministry mulls stimulus
Minister of Finance Apisak Tantivorawong yesterday said that he was considering steps to inject 20 billion baht (US$628 million) of stimulus into the economy. Growth might slow to the low 3 percent range in the first and second quarters, he told reporters in Bangkok. “We want the measures to be effective during the second and third quarters in order to make sure the economy won’t be slumping when the new government comes in,” he said. The steps being considered include tax breaks to spur tourism and assistance for people on low incomes, he said.
PUBLISHING
‘Enquirer’ to be sold
The National Enquirer is being sold to the former head of airport newsstand company Hudson News following a rocky year in which the tabloid was accused of burying stories that could have hurt then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. Tabloid owner American Media on Thursday said that it plans to sell the supermarket weekly to James Cohen. Financial terms were not immediately disclosed for the deal, which included two other American Media tabloids, the Globe and the National Examiner.
HEALTHCARE
J&J seeks to combine suits
Johnson & Johnson (J&J) wants a federal judge to take over more than 2,000 baby-powder lawsuits it faces instead of allowing the cases to be heard by state-court juries, where the company has a mixed record. The world’s largest maker of healthcare products seeks to invoke legal protections available to J&J’s bankrupt talc supplier Imerys Talc America Inc to collect suits accusing its baby powder of causing asbestos-related cancers before a single judge in Delaware. Imerys sought Chapter 11 protection in bankruptcy court there in February after being swamped by talc suits.
GAMING
Nintendo stock surges
Nintendo Co shares jumped after China’s Tencent Holdings Ltd (騰訊) won approval to distribute one of the company’s games for its Switch console. Tencent received approval for the test version of New Super Mario Bros U Deluxe for the handheld device, according to a notice on the Web site of China’s Guangdong provincial culture and tourism department. Nintendo’s stock surged 14 percent, the most since July 2016 at the height of the Pokemon Go frenzy.
AUTOMAKERS
BMW recalls more vehicles
BMW AG is adding nearly 185,000 vehicles in the US to a 2017 recall for possible engine fires. The recall expansion covers a dozen 3 Series, 5 Series and Z4 models from the 2006 model year. The expansion brings the total number of vehicles recalled for the problem to about 925,000.
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