■ELECTRONICS
Sanyo forecasts loss
Japan’s Sanyo Electric Co yesterday forecast a net loss of ¥30 billion (US$330 million) for the current financial year to March, partly due to the cost of recalling faulty washing machines. Sanyo — which is being bought by its bigger rival Panasonic Corp — had previously estimated that it would just break even with zero net profit, after a loss of ¥93.2 billion the previous year. The group left unchanged its projections for annual revenue of ¥1.66 trillion and an operating loss of ¥25 billion.
■ELECTRONICS
Fujitsu president resigns
Japanese electronics maker Fujitsu Ltd said yesterday that its president Kuniaki Nozoe, 62, had resigned due to illness after about one year in the job. Fujitsu chairman Michiyoshi Mazuka, 65, will take on the additional role while Nozoe will become an adviser to the group, it said in a statement. The company lost more than US$1 billion in the year to March as it overhauled its operations in response to the global economic crisis.
■FINANCE
HSBC chief heads to London
HSBC on Friday said that its chief executive Michael Geoghegan will move to Hong Kong from London so that he is closer to the banking group’s “largest and most important region” of operation. HSBC, founded in Hong Kong and Shanghai in 1865, said it would remain headquartered in London. “There is absolutely no question of HSBC pulling away from London. We will operate from two equally strategically important centers for the company,” chairman Stephen Green said in a statement.
■CONSUMER PRODUCTS
Unilever to buy Sara Lee unit
Consumer products maker Unilever NV says it has agreed to buy the personal care products businesses of Sara Lee Corp for 1.28 billion euros (US$1.88 billion). Unilever makes Dove soaps and Axe deodorants, while the Sara Lee businesses to be acquired are known for the Sanex, Radox and Duschdas brands, Unilever said. The Anglo-Dutch company says the businesses are complementary and have room to grow in developing markets. Unilever said in a statement yesterday the deal must be approved by regulators.
■SINGAPORE
Industrial output rises
Singapore’s industrial output rose 12.3 percent year-on-year last month, its second straight monthly expansion amid signs the city-state was recovering from a recession, government data showed yesterday. The biomedical industry was the main driver for the surge in industrial output with an expansion of 97.8 percent from a year ago, the Economic Development Board (EDB) said. The strong showing from the biomedical sector cushioned declines in other industries, including electronics, which dropped 6.4 percent year-on-year last month, it said.
■INTERNET
Google sorry for outage
Google apologized on Thursday for a Gmail outage which left some users of the free Web-based email service cut off for the second time in a month. The Internet giant announced at 10:29am that an unspecified problem was preventing a “small subset of users” from accessing their Gmail accounts. About an hour later, the Internet giant said service had been restored for some users and at 12:58pm it said the problem had been resolved. The disruption came just more than three weeks after an outage that left millions of users without Gmail for more than an hour and a half.
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has