■RETAIL
German sales slip 1.8%
German retail sales slipped 1.8 percent in June from the previous month, disappointing expectations for a slight increase, provisional data released on Monday by the national statistics office showed. Analysts polled by Dow Jones Newswires had penciled in a modest rise of 0.5 percent for the biggest European economy. In May, sales fell 1.3 percent after gaining 1.4 percent in April, figures from the Destatis office showed. The office based its estimate for June on seven German states that represent around 76 percent of the country’s total retail sales. On a 12-month basis, sales shed 1.6 percent at constant prices, Destatis said in a statement.
■RETAIL
Metro bounces back
Germany’s biggest retailer, Metro, on Monday reported a second-quarter profit despite a drop in sales. Metro AG said it had reversed a 453 million euro (US$645.3 million) loss in the second quarter last year to post a net profit of 48 million euros in the three months to the end of June. Metro, which has operations in Asia, the Middle East and Eastern and Western Europe, said it was retaining its medium-term sales and earnings forecasts. This, despite the group reporting a 3.8 percent fall in revenue to 15.3 billion euros, with revenue hit by lower food prices and a weak performance by currencies in Eastern Europe.
■TELECOMS
CEO dies after triathlon
Calvin Lee, chief executive officer for Asia at Deutsche Telekom AG, died after he took part in a triathlon in Singapore yesterday, a company official said. Lee, 42, was pronounced dead at the Changi General Hospital at 2.35pm, the Straits Times reported. Paramedics and doctors failed to revive Lee after he was rescued from the sea during the swim segment of the Osim Singapore International Triathlon, the newspaper said. The cause of death is being investigated, the Singapore newspaper cited the organizers as saying.
■FINLAND
Trade surplus continues
The country posted its second consecutive trade surplus in May as falling orders prompted companies to cut output and import fewer raw materials. The surplus was 92 million euros, compared with a surplus of 683 million euros the month before and a surplus of 186 million euros a year earlier, Finnish Customs said on its Web site yesterday. The country’s industry, which has seen output plunge more than 20 percent in four out of five months this year, is purchasing fewer raw materials abroad, causing both imports and exports to drop. New industrial orders plummeted an annual 40 percent in May. Exports plunged 41 percent to 3.43 billion euros in May from a year earlier, the same as the decline in imports, which fell to 3.34 billion euros.
■ELECTRONICS
Panasonic books net loss
Japan’s Panasonic Corp yesterday announced a net loss of ¥52.98 billion (US$560 million) for the second quarter, blaming weak sales of electronic goods during the recession. Panasonic, which made a profit of ¥73.03 billion in the same period last year, left unchanged its forecast for a loss of ¥195 billion in the full business year to next March. The group, which changed its corporate name from Matsushita Electric Industrial in October, is cutting 15,000 jobs and closing dozens of plants as it struggles to recover from its first annual loss in six years.
EUROPEAN TARGETS: The planned Munich center would support TSMC’s European customers to design high-performance, energy-efficient chips, an executive said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, yesterday said that it plans to launch a new research-and-development (R&D) center in Munich, Germany, next quarter to assist customers with chip design. TSMC Europe president Paul de Bot made the announcement during a technology symposium in Amsterdam on Tuesday, the chipmaker said. The new Munich center would be the firm’s first chip designing center in Europe, it said. The chipmaker has set up a major R&D center at its base of operations in Hsinchu and plans to create a new one in the US to provide services for major US customers,
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday said that it would redesign the written portion of the driver’s license exam to make it more rigorous. “We hope that the exam can assess drivers’ understanding of traffic rules, particularly those who take the driver’s license test for the first time. In the past, drivers only needed to cram a book of test questions to pass the written exam,” Minister of Transportation and Communications Chen Shih-kai (陳世凱) told a news conference at the Taoyuan Motor Vehicle Office. “In the future, they would not be able to pass the test unless they study traffic regulations
BEIJING’S ‘PAWN’: ‘We, as Chinese, should never forget our roots, history, culture,’ Want Want Holdings general manager Tsai Wang-ting said at a summit in China The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday condemned Want Want China Times Media Group (旺旺中時媒體集團) for making comments at the Cross-Strait Chinese Culture Summit that it said have damaged Taiwan’s sovereignty, adding that it would investigate if the group had colluded with China in the matter and contravened cross-strait regulations. The council issued a statement after Want Want Holdings (旺旺集團有限公司) general manager Tsai Wang-ting (蔡旺庭), the third son of the group’s founder, Tsai Eng-meng (蔡衍明), said at the summit last week that the group originated in “Chinese Taiwan,” and has developed and prospered in “the motherland.” “We, as Chinese, should never
‘A SURVIVAL QUESTION’: US officials have been urging the opposition KMT and TPP not to block defense spending, especially the special defense budget, an official said The US plans to ramp up weapons sales to Taiwan to a level exceeding US President Donald Trump’s first term as part of an effort to deter China as it intensifies military pressure on the nation, two US officials said on condition of anonymity. If US arms sales do accelerate, it could ease worries about the extent of Trump’s commitment to Taiwan. It would also add new friction to the tense US-China relationship. The officials said they expect US approvals for weapons sales to Taiwan over the next four years to surpass those in Trump’s first term, with one of them saying
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