SINGAPORE
Economy to slow next year
The economy is likely to grow 15 percent this year, but expansion will moderate to 4 to 6 percent next year, the government said yesterday following the release of third-quarter data. The government earlier predicted 13-15 percent GDP growth this year. The Ministry of Trade and Industry said the biomedical and financial sectors would drive growth in the fourth quarter with manufacturing expansion slowing down. GDP growth in the third quarter from a year ago moderated to 10.6 percent, compared to record 19.5 percent growth in the second quarter. Manufacturing growth fell to 14.3 percent in the third quarter from 46.1 percent in the previous three months.
RETAIL
Carrefour cancels sell-off
French retail giant Carrefour said yesterday it had canceled a planned sale of its stores in Malaysia and Singapore, deciding instead to build up its market share in the Asian nations. Carrefour, the world’s second-biggest retailer behind US colossus Walmart, said this week it was offloading its 42 Thai stores, and had been looking to sell its 23 Malaysian and two Singaporean outlets as well. The firm said it had decided to retain its presence in Malaysia and Singapore, after the planned auction did not attract bids that would have justified proceeding.
BANKING
ICBC mulls Kwangju takeover
The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) is considering taking over South Korea’s Kwangju Bank, a report said yesterday, as the world’s largest bank by market value moves to expand overseas. The newspaper Dong-A Ilbo cited financial industry sources as saying ICBC had expressed an intention to bid for the regional bank based in the southwestern city of Kwangju. Kwangju Bank has assets of 17.9 trillion won (US$15.7 billion) and is a subsidiary of Woori Financial Holdings, South Korea’s largest financial holding company by assets.
AUTOMOBILES
GM returns to public trading
General Motors Co (GM), which went bankrupt last year after almost a century on the New York Stock Exchange, returns to public trading yesterday following an initial public offering (IPO) that raised more than US$20 billion. GM’s owners, including the US Treasury, sold US$15.8 billion of common shares at US$33 each on Wednesday in the second-largest US IPO on record, according to a statement. The company’s offering of US$4.35 billion of preferred shares and an overallotment option may boost the total to US$23.1 billion, more than the US$22.1 billion raised by Beijing-based Agricultural Bank of China Ltd (中國農業銀行) in the biggest IPO of common stock in history.
AIRLINES
Air France returns to profit
Air France-KLM said on Wednesday it returned to profit in its second quarter, taking advantage of an improved situation in the civil aviation sector as a whole to raise its financial targets. The carrier reported net earnings of 290 million euros (US$392 million) in the June-September period after a loss of 147 million euros a year earlier. At the operating level, reflecting core activities, the company earned 576 million euros against a loss of 47 million in the same period of last year. Sales rose 18.6 percent to 6.64 billion euros. Air France-KLM is now looking ahead to an operating profit of more than 300 million euros in its financial year to March next year. For the full fiscal year 2009 Air France-KLM suffered an operating loss of 1.28 billion euros.
Shares of contract chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) came under pressure yesterday after a report that Apple Inc is looking to shift some orders from the Taiwanese company to Intel Corp. TSMC shares fell NT$55, or 2.4 percent, to close at NT$2,235 on the local main board, Taiwan Stock Exchange data showed. Despite the losses, TSMC is expected to continue to benefit from sound fundamentals, as it maintains a lead over its peers in high-end process development, analysts said. “The selling was a knee-jerk reaction to an Intel-Apple report over the weekend,” Mega International Investment Services Corp (兆豐國際投顧) analyst Alex Huang
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is expected to remain Apple Inc’s primary chip manufacturing partner despite reports that Apple could shift some orders to Intel Corp, industry experts said yesterday. The comments came after The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Apple and Intel had reached a preliminary agreement following more than a year of negotiations for Intel to manufacture some chips for Apple devices. Taiwan Institute of Economic Research (台灣經濟研究院) economist Arisa Liu (劉佩真) said TSMC’s advanced packaging technologies, including integrated fan-out and chip-on-wafer-on-substrate, remain critical to the performance of Apple’s A-series and M-series chips. She said Intel and Samsung
POWER BUILDUP: Powered by Nvidia’s B200 Blackwell chips, the data center would support MediaTek’s computing power demand and business growth, the company said Smartphone chip designer MediaTek Inc (聯發科) yesterday launched a new artificial intelligence (AI) data center with a maximum capacity of 45 megawatts to meet its rising demand for computing power required to develop new advanced chips for AI applications. The company has completed the first-phase computing power buildup at the data center in Miaoli County’s Tongluo Township (銅鑼), providing 15 megawatts of capacity to support its research and development (R&D) capabilities, despite an industrywide shortage of key components, MediaTek said. Supply constraints have plagued a wide range of key components, including memory chips, solid-state drives, power supply units and central
IMAGE SENSORS: The Japanese company would be the controlling shareholder of the venture, with development and production lines to be set up in Kumamoto Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it has signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Sony Semiconductor Solutions Corp to create a joint venture to develop and produce next-generation images sensors. The partnership seeks to explore and address emerging opportunities in physical artificial intelligence (AI) applications, such as automotive and robotics, paving the way for innovations and expanded technological advancements, TSMC said in a statement. Sony would be the majority and controlling shareholder of the joint venture, the statement said, adding that the company would set up development and production lines in its newly constructed fab in Kumamoto Prefecture’s
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