CONGLOMERATES
Lotte chair wins final appeal
The South Korean Supreme Court yesterday upheld a suspended jail term for Lotte Group chairman Shin Dong-bin over a sprawling corruption scandal that brought down former president Park Geun-hye. Shin was jailed for 30 months in February last year for providing 7 billion won (US$6.2 million) to a foundation controlled by Park’s secret confidante in return for government favors. However, he was released in October last year after an appeals court reduced his sentence to a suspended jail term, which the Supreme Court upheld.
AUTOMAKERS
GM, union reach accord
General Motors Co (GM) and the United Auto Workers on Wednesday reached a tentative agreement on a new contract, clearing the way for a union vote yesterday on whether to continue a more than monthlong strike. The accord includes US$9 billion in investment in US plants, signing bonuses exceeding the US$8,000 workers got four years ago, 3 percent pay raises in some years of the contract and 4 percent lump-sum payments in the others, people familiar with the matter said.
TECHNOLOGY
IBM Q3 revenue disappoints
International Business Machines Corp (IBM) on Wednesday reported third-quarter revenue that missed analysts’ estimates, with the long-awaited revenue infusion from Red Hat failing to compensate for continued declines in other parts of its business. Total revenue was US$18 billion in the three months that ended on Sept. 30, down 3.9 percent from a year earlier, the company said in a statement. Analysts had forecast US$18.2 billion. It marked the fifth consecutive quarter of shrinking sales at IBM.
TAXATION
US, OECD said near pact
Washington is inching toward an agreement with the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on taxing global tech giants, US Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin said on Wednesday. A resolution would ease long-standing transatlantic friction over imposing taxes on tech multinationals, the largest of which are US-based, but operate worldwide. “We don’t yet have an agreement, but we are getting closer in that direction,” Mnuchin told reporters.
BRAZIL
Inequality hits highest
The nation’s income inequality reached its highest level last year, data released on Wednesday by the Institute of Geography and Statistics showed. The so-called Gini coefficient used to measure inequality is at a level just above that registered in 2012, it said. Last year, the richest 10 percent of Brazilians accounted for 43.1 percent of national income, up from 41.4 percent in 2015, the institute said. The poorest 30 percent of earners saw their incomes fall from 2017, it said.
MACROECONOMICS
IMF warns on African debt
Rising debt levels in Africa pose an increasing risk to the region’s economies, especially with increasing borrowing from China, the IMF said on Wednesday. IMF analysis shows “more than a dozen countries that are either in distress or at high risk of debt distress,” said Evan Papageorgiou, of the IMF’s Monetary and Capital Markets Department. “In a lot of low-income countries, particularly a lot of Sub-Saharan African countries, the issue of debt is becoming more and more pressing,” he said.
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
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day