■TRANSPORTATION
London Tube to axe staff
London Underground is to cut 1,000 jobs to reduce costs amid the global downturn, it said on Thursday, in what unions called a “body blow” ahead of the 2012 London Olympics. No drivers or frontline Tube staff will be axed, a spokesman said. The most directly affected staff will be in the finance, IT, legal and administration departments. Several hundred more posts could also be axed across the Transport for London network as a result of an operating costs review. Gerry Doherty of the Transport Salaried Staffs Association said the cuts would affect services, adding that: “We shall fight any compulsory redundancies with every weapon at our disposal.”
■TRADE
WTO deal achievable: India
Indian Commerce Minister Kamal Nath said on Thursday he was optimistic that the WTO could reach a new global free-trade deal in coming months. “I am optimistic that in the next couple of months with intensive negotiations we should be able to close this round,” he told delegates at the Davos forum in Switzerland, referring to the stalled Doha round of world trade talks launched in 2001. A traditional informal meeting of trade ministers in Davos is scheduled today, a spokesman for the WTO said, but the talks will be hamstrung by the absence of the US negotiator.
■UNITED STATES
California work week cut
A California judge ruled on Thursday that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger could close some state offices for two days each month from next month as the state grapples with its spiraling budget deficit. Unions representing state workers had gone to court to try to block the move, saying Schwarzenegger had exceeded his authority and that only state legislators could approve the cuts to the working week. But Judge Patrick Marlette said the state’s fiscal emergency justified the governor’s executive order, which translates into a pay cut of between 9 percent and 10 percent for affected workers. The cutbacks are scheduled to last until June next year, and are expected to save the state US$1.3 billion.
■FINLAND
Industrial output plummets
Industrial output last month declined the most since at least 1986 as the economy approached its first recession in 16 years. The annual 15.6 percent decline, adjusted for working days, compared with a revised drop of 9.2 percent in November, Helsinki-based Statistics Finland said on its Web site yesterday. The drop in output was caused by a slide in global demand as the eurozone, the US and Japan were simultaneously in recession for the first time since World War II. Finland’s economy will shrink “more than” 2 percent this year, Finance Minister Jyrki Katainen said last week.
■SOUTH KOREA
Production posts record fall
The nation yesterday reported a record fall of 18.6 percent year-on-year in industrial output last month, or 9.6 percent from November, a further sign that the export-driven economy is set for its first recession in more than a decade amid the global economic crisis. The contraction stemmed mostly from sharply falling exports and domestic consumption of such products as semiconductors and vehicles, the statistics office said in a statement. “With output declining for two months in a row, an economic downturn seemed to be accelerating,” it said.
IN THE AIR: While most companies said they were committed to North American operations, some added that production and costs would depend on the outcome of a US trade probe Leading local contract electronics makers Wistron Corp (緯創), Quanta Computer Inc (廣達), Inventec Corp (英業達) and Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶) are to maintain their North American expansion plans, despite Washington’s 20 percent tariff on Taiwanese goods. Wistron said it has long maintained a presence in the US, while distributing production across Taiwan, North America, Southeast Asia and Europe. The company is in talks with customers to align capacity with their site preferences, a company official told the Taipei Times by telephone on Friday. The company is still in talks with clients over who would bear the tariff costs, with the outcome pending further
NEGOTIATIONS: Semiconductors play an outsized role in Taiwan’s industrial and economic development and are a major driver of the Taiwan-US trade imbalance With US President Donald Trump threatening to impose tariffs on semiconductors, Taiwan is expected to face a significant challenge, as information and communications technology (ICT) products account for more than 70 percent of its exports to the US, Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) president Lien Hsien-ming (連賢明) said on Friday. Compared with other countries, semiconductors play a disproportionately large role in Taiwan’s industrial and economic development, Lien said. As the sixth-largest contributor to the US trade deficit, Taiwan recorded a US$73.9 billion trade surplus with the US last year — up from US$47.8 billion in 2023 — driven by strong
A proposed 100 percent tariff on chip imports announced by US President Donald Trump could shift more of Taiwan’s semiconductor production overseas, a Taiwan Institute of Economic Research (TIER) researcher said yesterday. Trump’s tariff policy will accelerate the global semiconductor industry’s pace to establish roots in the US, leading to higher supply chain costs and ultimately raising prices of consumer electronics and creating uncertainty for future market demand, Arisa Liu (劉佩真) at the institute’s Taiwan Industry Economics Database said in a telephone interview. Trump’s move signals his intention to "restore the glory of the US semiconductor industry," Liu noted, saying that
AI: Softbank’s stake increases in Nvidia and TSMC reflect Masayoshi Son’s effort to gain a foothold in key nodes of the AI value chain, from chip design to data infrastructure Softbank Group Corp is building up stakes in Nvidia Corp and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the latest reflection of founder Masayoshi Son’s focus on the tools and hardware underpinning artificial intelligence (AI). The Japanese technology investor raised its stake in Nvidia to about US$3 billion by the end of March, up from US$1 billion in the prior quarter, regulatory filings showed. It bought about US$330 million worth of TSMC shares and US$170 million in Oracle Corp, they showed. Softbank’s signature Vision Fund has also monetized almost US$2 billion of public and private assets in the first half of this year,
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