Oil jumped to the highest in two weeks after the US and China reached a partial agreement following trade talks and as an Iranian oil tanker was struck.
Futures in New York climbed 2.2 percent on Friday and the global benchmark Brent closed above US$60 a barrel for the first time in nearly two weeks.
The US and China on Friday reached a partial agreement that would broker a truce in their trade dispute.
Further adding fuel to the oil rally, a National Iranian Tanker Co ship, capable of carrying 1 million barrels a of crude, caught fire after a blast off the coast of Saudi Arabia.
“We had some good statements come out of the US-China talks,” Ashley Petersen, an oil analyst at Stratas Advisors LLC in New York.
The discussions seemed to end “very peacefully and now we are going to see what next steps entail. That was the best case scenario for these talks today.”
While optimism around US and China trade talks, as well as the tanker explosion, have pushed crude higher, bearish factors in the market remain.
The International Energy Agency, which advises major economies, trimmed forecasts for global oil demand growth this year and the next by 100,000 barrels a day amid a deteriorating economic backdrop.
West Texas Intermediate for November delivery advanced US$1.15 to settle atUS $54.70 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, the biggest gain in more than three weeks. Prices advanced 3.6 percent this week.
Brent crude for December settlement rose US$1.41 to end the session at US$60.51 a barrel on the ICE Futures Europe Exchange. The contract is up 3.7 percent this week.
The global benchmark traded at a premium of US$5.73 a barrel to West Texas Intermediate for the same month.
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