Wed, Feb 06, 2008 page5

• Business Quick Take

  • STAFF WRITER, WITH AGENCIES
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  ■ SEMICONDUCTORS

  Intel creates 2bn-chip

  Intel said it has created a 2 billion-transistor chip that will give supercomputers "a leap in performance and capabilities." On Monday, Intel said the new Itanium brand chip, codenamed "Tukwila," increases the power of machines more than twofold and will be available near the end of the year. The "quad core" chip is designed with four processors that share computing workloads, Intel said. "The quad-core chip is coupled with higher bandwidths and large caches to enable a doubling in performance of Tukwila over the current Intel Itanium 9100 series processor," Intel said.

  ■ BANKING

  US probing SocGen trades

  US prosecutors are probing 4.82 billion euros (US$7.09 billion) in trading losses at Societe Generale (SocGen), the French bank said yesterday. The bank's New York branch was contacted on Jan. 25 by the US Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York, SocGen spokeswoman Laura Schalk said. The New York probe comes as the US Securities and Exchange Commission reportedly opened an investigation into stock sales by US investor Robert Day, a SocGen board member, in the days before the losses were made public. Day and his family's trusts and foundations sold 140 million euros worth of shares last month.

  ■ MINING

  Beijing not involved in buy

  The move by the state-owned Aluminum Corp of China (Chinalco, 中國鋁業) to take a stake in Anglo-Australian mining group Rio Tinto was an independent decision, Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi (楊潔箎) said yesterday. Chinalco, acting with US-based Alcoa Inc, bought 12 percent of the London-listed shares of the world's third-biggest miner for US$14 billion in a sharemarket raid on Friday. "This is an independent decision by the two companies," Yang told a news conference in Canberra, Australia. "They did it, I guess, for their companies' own good."

  ■ INTERNET

  MySpace has new features

  MySpace users will be able to add games, e-mail services and other features from outside developers without ever leaving the site under a new program to be fully launched next month. Under the MySpace Developer Platform, an outside e-mail provider can write a program that sits on the personal home page users see when they log on. Users can check for new messages right there. MySpace said developers would be able to write and test interactive programs on up to five users for a month before making them available to the broader MySpace community.

  ■ AUTOMOBILES

  Tata sees Jaguar deal soon

  India's top vehicle maker Tata Motors says it hopes to clinch a deal to buy the Jaguar and Land Rover car brands from ailing US carmaker Ford "in the forthcoming weeks." Tata denied British media reports that it had held talks about Fiat's participation in the deal.

  ■ ENERGY

  Solaria, E-Ton sign deal

  Solaria Energia y Medio Ambiente SA, the Spanish solar-panel maker that sold shares last year, signed an agreement with E-ton Solar Tech Co (益通光能) for supply of photovoltaic cells. The Tainan-based company will provide Solaria with 40 megawatts-worth of cells, about a third of the Spanish company's needs for this year, Solaria said yesterday in a regulatory filing. E-ton Solar may report a 5 percent decline in its sales last month from December as polysilicon supply from M.Setek has yet to arrive, the DigiTimes reported yesterday, citing industry sources.

  ■ INVESTMENT

  FSC approves changes

  The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday approved the Taiwan Stock Exchange Corp's proposal to revise its block trade system, which is slated to be implemented on April 4. Under the revision, paired block trade will be allowed between 8am and 8:30am before the market opens. The unit of price quotes will also be lowered from NT$0.1 to NT$0.01 for shares priced between NT$50 and NT$100 and to NT$0.05 for shares priced between NT$10 and NT$50. Paired trades are presently allowed at three time slots: 9:30am to 9:50am, 11:30am to 11:50am and 1:30pm to 5pm. The definition of block trades was also relaxed to include trades of more than 500,000 shares or worth more than NT$15 million (US$468,000).

  ■ FINANCE

  Fubon subsidiary approved

  Fubon Financial Holding Co (富邦金控), the nation's second-largest financial services company, said it received approval to set up an insurance subsidiary in Vietnam. An application by Fubon Financial and its subsidiary, Fubon Insurance Co (富邦產險), to invest approximately NT$630 million (US$19.7 million) in Vietnam was approved by Taiwan's Financial Supervisory Commission, the Taipei-based company said in a filing to the stock exchange today. The company won initial approval from the commission to set up a property insurance subsidiary in Xiamen, China.

  ■ SEMICONDUCTORS

  ProMOS to pay royalties

  Mosaid Technologies Inc said Taiwan's ProMOS Technologies Inc (茂德) agreed to pay royalties for six years to settle a patent-infringement lawsuit over semiconductor designs. The amount wasn't disclosed. Mosel Vitelic Inc (茂矽), another Taiwanese chipmaker, agreed to make a lump-sum payment to end the suit against it, Ottawa-based Mosaid said today in a statement. "Our preference has always been to negotiate rather than litigate, and we believe that this is a fair settlement benefiting all parties," Mosaid chief executive officer John Lindgren said in the statement.

  ■ ENERGY

  Crude oil imports increase

  The nation's crude oil imports increased 14 percent from a year earlier in December, rebounding from a 24 percent decline in the previous month, the Ministry of Economic Affairs' Bureau of Energy said. Stockpiles of crude oil held by companies plunged 38 percent to 2.88 million kiloliters, about 18.1 million barrels, the bureau said on its Web site. Crude oil imports totaled 5.08 million kiloliters, the bureau said. Rising oil prices boosted the nation's December crude oil bill by 61 percent from a year earlier, the Ministry of Finance said.
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