■BANKING
Silverton Bank closed down
US authorities on Friday closed down the Silverton Bank in Atlanta, Georgia, and created a “bridge bank” to take over its operations. Silverton Bank is the 30th bank to fail in the nation this year and the sixth in Georgia as the US reels from prolonged recession stemming from a home mortgage meltdown. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation said in a statement that it had created a bridge bank to take over the operations of Silverton Bank after the bank was closed on Friday by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
■AUTOMOBILES
Fiat in talks over Opel
The head of Italian carmaker Fiat SpA, which is in the process of acquiring US automaker Chrysler, is continuing talks with German officials about a possible takeover of General Motor’s Opel unit, according to media reports yesterday. Both the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper and Focus magazine reported, citing unidentified sources, that Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne expected to meet German Economy Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier tomorrow to present a concept for taking over Opel. Opel has said it needs 3.3 billion euros (US$4.3 billion) to get through the economic crisis, while the German government has said it doesn’t foresee giving direct state aid.
■JAPAN
Major firms reeling
Japan’s major companies slipped into the red for the three months through March 31, battered by a slump in exports following the global financial crisis, a newspaper reported yesterday. Combined pretax losses reported by the 262 non-financial firms listed on Japanese stock exchanges totaled ¥353 billion (US$3.6 billion) for the January-March quarter, a reversal from the year-earlier profits of ¥2.51 trillion, the Nikkei business daily said. Their quarterly revenue fell 24 percent from a year earlier, the paper said. For the full business year through March 31, pretax profit dropped 52 percent and sales slipped 5 percent, the first decline in both profits and sales since in the fiscal year to March 2002, it said.
■LENDING
MasterCard beats forecasts
MasterCard Inc posted better-than-expected quarterly earnings on Friday, but said revenue growth this year will fall short of its targets. The world’s second-largest credit card network said lower expenses and increased fees helped first-quarter results. Net income fell 18 percent to US$367 million, or US$2.80 per share, from US$447 million, or US$3.37 per share, a year earlier. The company’s bigger rival, Visa Inc, beat Wall Street earnings expectations earlier this week, helped by higher fees, lower expenses and increased use of its debit cards by consumers.
■INTERNET
Google rents goats
Internet innovator Google is taking advantage of an old-time principle to thwart wildfires: Goats will eat almost anything. Google has brought in about 200 of the grazers to munch fields around its campus in the Northern California city of Mountain View. “We have some fields that we need to mow occasionally to clear weeds and brush to reduce fire hazard,” Google director of real estate and workplace services Dan Hoffman wrote in a posting on the company’s official blog. “Instead of using noisy mowers that run on gasoline and pollute the air, we’ve rented some goats ... to do the job for us (we’re not ‘kidding’).”
Taiwan’s foreign exchange reserves fell below the US$600 billion mark at the end of last month, with the central bank reporting a total of US$596.89 billion — a decline of US$8.6 billion from February — ending a three-month streak of increases. The central bank attributed the drop to a combination of factors such as outflows by foreign institutional investors, currency fluctuations and its own market interventions. “The large-scale outflows disrupted the balance of supply and demand in the foreign exchange market, prompting the central bank to intervene repeatedly by selling US dollars to stabilize the local currency,” Department of Foreign
ENERGY ISSUES: The TSIA urged the government to increase natural gas and helium reserves to reduce the impact of the Middle East war on semiconductor supply stability Chip testing and packaging service provider ASE Technology Holding Co (日月光投控) yesterday said it planned to invest more than NT$100 billion (US$3.15 billion) in building a new advanced chip testing facility in Kaohsiung to keep up with customer demand driven by the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. That would be included in the company’s capital expenditure budget next year, ASE said. There is also room to raise this year’s capital spending budget from a record-high US$7 billion estimated three months ago, it added. ASE would have six factories under construction this year, another record-breaking number, ASE chief operating officer Tien Wu
The EU and US are nearing an agreement to coordinate on producing and securing critical minerals, part of a push to break reliance on Chinese supplies. The potential deal would create incentives, such as minimum prices, that could advantage non-Chinese suppliers, according to a draft of an “action plan” seen by Bloomberg. The EU and US would also cooperate on standards, investments and joint projects, as well as coordinate on any supply disruptions by countries like China. The two sides are additionally seeking other “like-minded partners” to join a multicountry accord to help create these new critical mineral supply chains, which feed into
For weeks now, the global tech industry has been waiting for a major artificial intelligence (AI) launch from DeepSeek (深度求索), seen as a benchmark for China’s progress in the fast-moving field. More than a year has passed since the start-up put Chinese AI on the map in early last year with a low-cost chatbot that performed at a similar level to US rivals. However, despite reports and rumors about its imminent release, DeepSeek’s next-generation “V4” model is nowhere in sight. Speculation is also swirling over the geopolitical implications of which computer chips were chosen to train and power the new
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