CHINA
Inflation surged to 2.7%
Inflation rose to its highest level in more than a year last month, driven by surges in pork and fruit prices caused by the African swine fever epidemic and bad weather, National Bureau of Statistics data showed yesterday. The consumer price index hit 2.7 percent from a year earlier, compared with 2.5 percent in April and the highest since February last year. The price of pork soared 18.2 percent last month, while the price of fresh fruit surged 26.7 percent as bad weather hammered supplies. The producer price index, an important indicator of domestic demand, hit 0.6 percent last month, from 0.9 percent the previous month, data showed.
AUSTRALIA
Confidence low despite cut
Debt-laden households responded more with concern than enthusiasm to the Reserve Bank of Australia’s interest rate cut, according to surveys conducted since last week’s move. Westpac Banking Corp’s consumer sentiment index fell 0.6 percent this month, while Australia & New Zealand Banking Group’s weekly report showed a 2 percent drop, the lenders said yesterday. Westpac said that confidence was showing signs of strength in the lead-up to the policy easing, but that fell away in the following days.
BONDS
Italy announces bond sale
Long-dated Italian government bond yields yesterday rose 7 to 9 basis points after the nation’s debt office announced a surprise 20-year bond sale, looking to take advantage of hefty demand for eurozone debt. The deal, announced late on Tuesday, would be a test of market appetite for Italian bonds at a time when the EU is expected to take disciplinary action against Rome over the nation’s growing debt.
AUTOMAKERS
VW changes partners: report
Volkswagen AG (VW) on Tuesday said it has dropped a partnership with a US start-up developing self-driving cars, Aurora, as it explores a broader alliance with Ford Motor Co. VW is looking to work with Ford’s self-driving unit Argo AI to forge ahead into the nascent, but revolutionary sector, a Financial Times report said. An agreement could be announced in the next few weeks, it said.
TECHNOLOGY
Dassault buys US software
French technology company Dassault Systemes SE is to buy Medidata Solutions Inc, a software firm that analyzes clinical trials, in a deal that gives the US company an enterprise value of US$5.8 billion. The all-cash deal, which would bolster Dassault’s life-science unit, values Medidata at US$92.25 a share. The deal is expected to close in the final quarter of this year, the companies said. Dassault chief financial officer Pascal Daloz said the deal is to be financed by a 3 billion euro (US$3.4 billion) bond, the first time the company has resorted to external funding.
SECURITIES
Huatai to list in London
Huatai Securities Co (華泰證券), one of China’s biggest brokerages by market value, plans to raise as much as US$2.02 billion through a listing on the London Stock Exchange. It plans to sell about 82 million global depositary receipts, Huatai told the stock exchange on Tuesday. The offer closes tomorrow, with trading starting on Thursday next week. If successfully listed, Huatai would become the first China-listed company to list on the London Stock Exchange according to Shanghai-London Connect rules.
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