RETAILERS
Reliance to buy Hamleys
Mukesh Ambani, Asia’s richest man, sealed another deal to expand his retail footprint and add heft in a battle with Amazon.com Inc and Walmart Inc in India. Reliance Brands Ltd agreed to purchase the 259-year-old British toy store chain Hamleys from C.Banner International Holdings Ltd for almost £68 million (US$88.5 million) in cash, the unit of Ambani’s Reliance Industries Ltd said in a statement on Thursday. The transaction would “catapult Reliance Brands to be a dominant player in the global toy retail industry,” it said. Adding Hamleys would give Reliance 167 stores across 18 nations. The company is already a master franchisee of the toy store in India, where it operates 88 outlets. Hamleys, which was founded in 1760 and opened its flagship store on London’s Regent Street in 1881, has been something of an international hot potato.
AUSTRALIA
Growth outlook slashed
The central bank has slashed its near-term growth outlook and is relying on persistent jobs market strength to cushion a property-driven downturn in household spending. The economy is expected to expand 1.75 percent in the year through next month, versus 2.5 percent seen three months earlier, and is then forecast to lift to 2.75 percent for the rest of the forecast period, the Reserve Bank said in Sydney yesterday. It made substantial cuts to the outlook for consumption and dwelling investment, despite all forecasts being premised on two cuts in the cash rate. “Growth in the Australian economy has slowed and inflation remains low,” the central bank said in its quarterly statement on monetary policy. “Subdued growth in household income and the adjustment in the housing market are affecting consumer spending and residential construction. Despite this, the labor market is performing reasonably well, with the unemployment rate steady.”
PACKAGING MAKERS
BillerudKorsnas touts AI
From watching pulp cook for hours on end and tracking parasite bugs on satellite photographs to handling lengthy legal documents, Swedish forest companies are creating new jobs they would never ask a human to do. Packaging maker BillerudKorsnas AB has been an early adopter of artificial intelligence (AI) by using the technology to analyze thousands of diagrams to determine just how long it needs to cook its wood chips before they turn into pulp. While that process could be done manually, it says it would be difficult to find any human who would be willing to spend all day just looking at such charts. “A machine can review large data quantities and find patterns in ways we humans just find too boring,” BillerudKorsnas director of intellectual property management Olle Steffner said. “Tasks such as monitoring processes or analyzing diagrams will hardly be missed by anybody. Our staff is needed for other things.”
INTERNET
Netflix buys Chinese show
Netflix Inc is acquiring the rights to another show from Alibaba Group Holding Ltd’s (阿里巴巴) Youku (優酷) video service, stepping up efforts to serve Chinese-speaking viewers around the world. The US streaming giant purchased the rights to a romantic comedy called I Hear You. Netflix is to stream 24 episodes of the show in 190 nations and regions starting on Wednesday next week, Alibaba said in a statement. Netflix has been investing in Chinese-language programming for distribution outside China. Demand for that content is growing and entertainment companies want a bigger slice of the market.
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
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
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],”
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