■OIL
Total must sell refinery: chief
Total needs to sell its Lindsey refinery in Britain, the oil company’s chief told French radio Europe 1 yesterday. Industry sources had said in February that Total intended to sell the UK refinery, which combined with the closure of the Dunkirk refinery in France would allow the French company to meet a key target to cut production by 500,000 barrels per day by next year. “We need to sell it, yes one can put it like that,” Christophe de Margerie told Europe 1. De Margerie repeated that Total, Europe’s biggest refiner, had no plans to shut or sell any plants apart from its Dunkirk site in France.
■BANKS
Citigroup Q1 profit US$4.43bn
Citigroup Inc posted a US$4.43 billion first-quarter profit, its best result in nearly three years, as the economic recovery reduced the bank’s credit losses and increased prices on even its worst assets. The third-largest US bank posted first-quarter net income to shareholders of US$0.15 a share, compared with a shareholder loss of US$0.18 a share, or US$966 million, for the first quarter of last year.
■AUTOMOBILES
Toyota to update stability
Toyota will offer the same fix for stability control programming it has announced for the Lexus GX 460 in North America to vehicles in other regions, affecting 34,000 vehicles worldwide, the Japanese automaker said yesterday. Toyota Motor Co will update the stability-control software program to reduce the risk of vehicles sliding in some Land Cruiser Prado vehicles, as well as the Lexus GX 460, sold in other regions, the company said in a statement.
■OIL
CNPC to boost Iraq output
China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC, 中石油) aims to boost output at a giant Iraqi oilfield by 10 percent this year, a newspaper owned by the company said yesterday. CNPC and Britain’s BP in November signed a deal with Iraq to nearly triple production from the current one million barrels a day to 2.85 million barrels at the Rumaila field over the next six to seven years. The consortium will fully take over work on the oilfield by June 30 and plans to increase its output by 10 percent by the end of this year, said a report in the China Petroleum Daily, a newspaper owned by CNPC.
■AUTOMOBILES
Daimler AG makes profit
Car maker Daimler AG is reporting a pretax profit of 1.2 billion euros (US$1.6 billion) for the first quarter — compared with a loss a year earlier. The Stuttgart, Germany-based company said on Monday that its first-quarter performance was bolstered by “very solid results” from its core Mercedes-Benz Cars unit. In last year’s first quarter, it had a loss before earnings and taxes of 1.4 billion euros. The company did not give net profit figures in a brief preliminary report. However, it said that its group revenue for the first quarter was 21.2 billion euros.
■RETAIL
Tesco annual profit soars
Britain’s biggest retailer, Tesco, announced soaring annual net profits yesterday, aided by a strong performance in Asia, and said it would create 16,000 jobs after emerging strongly from the recession. Net profits jumped by 9.3 percent to £2.327 billion (US$3.57 billion) in the group’s financial year, which ran until the end of February, Tesco said in a results statement. That compared with £2.133 billion in the previous year.
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