■TELECOMS
Zain, Bharti to start talks
Kuwait’s Zain telecom and India’s Bharti Airtel are to start talks soon after the Kuwaiti firm accepted an offer to sell its African operations for US$10.7 billion, a statement said yesterday. “Zain’s Board issued a resolution today [Sunday] to accept a proposal received from Bharti Airtel to enter into exclusive discussions until 25 March 2010 regarding the sale of its African unit for a total consideration of US$10.7 billion,” the Zain statement said. “Bharti’s proposal remains subject to due diligence, customary regulatory approvals and signing of final transaction documentation.”
■INTERNET
Japan to probe iTunes
Japanese authorities plan to summon Apple officials this week over complaints that its iTunes online store has billed customers for downloads they never made, officials said yesterday. In at least 95 cases in Japan involving five major credit card companies, iTunes customers said they had sometimes been charged thousands of dollars, they said. “We have seen such cases increasing, notably since autumn last year,” an official with Japan’s Consumer Affairs Agency said. “The damage in those cases seems to range from a few hundred yen to several hundred thousand yen,” the official said.
■WIND POWER
Mitsubishi mulls US plant
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd said yesterday it is considering building a wind turbine plant in the US, and will a make final decision after seeing how demand recovers. Mitsubishi is tussling with General Electric (GE) over wind turbine patents, with GE this month filing patent suits against the Japanese company in a US court. Mitsubishi’s plans call for a turbine manufacturing plant to be built in Fort Smith, Arkansas, with an investment cost of US$100 million
■NATURAL GAS
S Korean LNG imports drop
South Korea’s imports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) dropped about 10 percent year-on-year last month, customs data showed yesterday. South Korea, the world’s second-largest LNG buyer after Japan, imported 3.5 million tonnes of LNG last month, down from 3.9 million tonnes a year earlier, according to the Korea Customs Service. State-owned Korea Gas Corp, the world’s biggest corporate buyer of LNG and South Korea’s sole wholesaler, said on Thursday it sold 4 million tonnes of LNG last month, up 25.6 percent from a year earlier.
■ECONOMY
Indian inflation accelerates
India’s inflation accelerated to a 15-month high last month, adding pressure on policy makers to withdraw more fiscal and monetary stimulus. The benchmark wholesale-price index, measuring prices of rice, oil and manufactured products, climbed 8.56 percent from a year earlier, following a 7.31 percent gain in December, the commerce ministry said in New Delhi yesterday.
■ENERGY
Executive dies in avalanche
The head of ConocoPhillips Alaska died in a weekend avalanche while riding a snowmobile in the wilderness of south central Alaska, US media reported on Sunday. Jim Bowles, 57, the president of the company, was with a group of a dozen snowmobile riders in the wilderness area of the Kenai Peninsula when he and another man were buried and killed by the avalanche that roared down a slope. He led ConocoPhillips Alaska since November 2004 and oversaw roughly 900 employees in the state.
■ENERGY
UK considers ‘green bonds’
Britain is considering the introduction of “green bonds” offered to the public to help fund the sustainable energy industry, a newspaper reported yesterday. Ian Pearson, economic secretary to the finance ministry, told the Financial Times that he had asked officials to examine the idea of bringing in the new form of government borrowing. The bonds, which would be issued by state-backed bank National Savings and Investments, would be used to attract investors to sustainable energy production, the paper said. Their introduction would come at a time Britain is seeking new ways to finance infrastructure projects as it fights to balance the books in the wake of the worst recession for decades, it added.
■ECONOMY
Trichet berates Greece
European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet on Sunday told debt-ridden Greece to strengthen its audit procedures, saying that using unverified figures “should not have been tolerated.” “Greece must strengthen the verification of its figures,” Trichet told RTL radio. Producing badly checked statistics “should not have been tolerated and is intolerable,” he added. Greekce’s previous Conservative government has been widely accused of producing unreliable figures.
■ECONOMY
Moody’s upgrades Riyadh
Rating agency Moody’s yesterday upgraded Saudi Arabia to its second-highest level as oil earnings and a recovering economy push the government’s budget back into the black this year. Moody’s Investors Service hiked Saudi government foreign and local currency debt to Aa3 from the previous rating of A1 even as Riyadh powers ahead with its massive state spending program on schools, infrastructure and the military. “The upgrade was prompted by the continued strong state of government finances, which have largely withstood oil price volatility and the global economic crisis,” Moody’s said in a statement.
■COMPUTERS
Adobe joins LiMo alliance
US software firm Adobe and three other firms yesterday joined the wireless Linux group LiMo, underlying the growing role of the Linux computer operating system in cellphones. “There has been a step change for Linux in mobile,” Morgan Gillis, head of LiMo, said in an interview. “No other operating system now matches the vendor coverage of Linux — it is being commercially deployed by virtually all leading mobile device vendors from the largest downwards.” Google Inc used Linux to build its Android platform and Nokia rolled out its top-of-the-range model N900 using Linux Maemo.
■MACHINERY
MAN swings into net loss
The German industrial group MAN swung into net loss last year owing to exceptional items, but remained profitable on the operating level, it said yesterday. The group, which makes heavy trucks and buses along with turbo machinery and diesel engines, reported a net loss of 258 million euros (US$350 million), compared with a profit of 1.25 billion euros in 2008. MAN’s sales shed nearly 20 percent to 12 billion euros from 14.9 billion in 2008, a statement said. The group put the drop in sales down to a “massive decline in demand in the transportation sector in particular,” as truck markets crashed owing to the global economic downturn.
‘DECENT RESULTS’: The company said it is confident thanks to an improving world economy and uptakes in new wireless and AI technologies, despite US uncertainty Pegatron Corp (和碩) yesterday said it plans to build a new server manufacturing factory in the US this year to address US President Donald Trump’s new tariff policy. That would be the second server production base for Pegatron in addition to the existing facilities in Taoyuan, the iPhone assembler said. Servers are one of the new businesses Pegatron has explored in recent years to develop a more balanced product lineup. “We aim to provide our services from a location in the vicinity of our customers,” Pegatron president and chief executive officer Gary Cheng (鄭光治) told an online earnings conference yesterday. “We
LEAK SOURCE? There would be concern over the possibility of tech leaks if TSMC were to form a joint venture to operate Intel’s factories, an analyst said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday stayed mum after a report said that the chipmaker has pitched chip designers Nvidia Corp, Advanced Micro Devices Inc and Broadcom Inc about taking a stake in a joint venture to operate Intel Corp’s factories. Industry sources told the Central News Agency (CNA) that the possibility of TSMC proposing to operate Intel’s wafer fabs is low, as the Taiwanese chipmaker has always focused on its core business. There is also concern over possible technology leaks if TSMC were to form a joint venture to operate Intel’s factories, Concord Securities Co (康和證券) analyst Kerry Huang (黃志祺)
It was late morning and steam was rising from water tanks atop the colorful, but opaque-windowed, “soapland” sex parlors in a historic Tokyo red-light district. Walking through the narrow streets, camera in hand, was Beniko — a former sex worker who is trying to capture the spirit of the area once known as Yoshiwara through photography. “People often talk about this neighborhood having a ‘bad history,’” said Beniko, who goes by her nickname. “But the truth is that through the years people have lived here, made a life here, sometimes struggled to survive. I want to share that reality.” In its mid-17th to
‘MAKE OR BREAK’: Nvidia shares remain down more than 9 percent, but investors are hoping CEO Jensen Huang’s speech can stave off fears that the sales boom is peaking Shares in Nvidia Corp’s Taiwanese suppliers mostly closed higher yesterday on hopes that the US artificial intelligence (AI) chip designer would showcase next-generation technologies at its annual AI conference slated to open later in the day. The GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in California is to feature developers, engineers, researchers, inventors and information technology professionals, and would focus on AI, computer graphics, data science, machine learning and autonomous machines. The event comes at a make-or-break moment for the firm, as it heads into the next few quarters, with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s (黃仁勳) keynote speech today seen as having the ability to
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