AUTOMOBILES
Toyota wants cars to ‘tweet’
Toyota Motor Corp is setting up a social networking service with the help of a US Internet company and Microsoft so drivers can interact with their cars in ways similar to Twitter and Facebook. Toyota. and Salesforce.com, based in San Francisco, announced an alliance yesterday to launch “Toyota Friend,” a private social network for Toyota owners that works similar to tweets on Twitter. In a demonstration at a Tokyo showroom, an owner of a plug-in Prius hybrid found out through a cellphone message from his Prius called “Pre-boy” that he should remember to recharge his car overnight. Toyota’s service, built on open-source cloud platforms that are the specialty of Salesforce.com, as well as on Microsoft’s platform, will start in Japan next year, and will be offered later worldwide, Toyota said.
SOFTWARE
Mahindra posts loss
India’s recovering fraud-hit software outsourcer Mahindra Satyam yesterday swung to an unexpected quarterly net loss, from a profit the previous quarter, due to one-off US lawsuit costs. The company showed a fourth-quarter net loss of 3.27 billion rupees (US$72 million) for the three months to the end of March, compared to a net profit of 589 million rupees in the previous quarter ended last December. In response, Satyam’s shares fell nearly 6 percent to a day’s low of 72.3 rupees at the Bombay Stock Exchange. Analysts had forecasted a profit for the quarter.
THAILAND
Exports fuel fast growth
Economic growth accelerated to the quickest pace in a year in the first quarter of this year, helped by surging exports, official data showed yesterday. GDP expanded 2 percent compared with the previous quarter, and by 3 percent from a year earlier, the government’s economic planning agency said. The economy grew by 1.3 percent quarter-on-quarter in the In October-December period. The agency maintained its forecast for GDP growth this year of 3.5 to 4.5 percent. With inflation also soaring, the robust figures added to expectations that the central bank will increase the official cost of borrowing again soon in an attempt to prevent the economy overheating.
ECONOMY
Concerns grow about Europe
Rising concerns emerged yesterday over the state of European economic recovery — with key indicators slowing sharply, and eurozone stragglers behind Germany and France showing signs of stagnation, a widely watched survey said. London-based research giant Markit’s composite eurozone index for manufacturing and services output, compiled via company purchasing managers’ questionnaire replies, suggested eurozone growth slowed to a seven-month low this month. Its index fell from 57.8 last month to 55.4 this month. Any score above 50 indicates growth, and this month marked the 22 successive months of economic expansion. However, the deceleration in the rate of growth was also the largest since November 2008, Markit said. “It is not clear the extent to which this reflects temporary factors such as the timing of Easter and disruptions to supply chains emanating from the earthquake in Japan,” said Chris Williamson, Markit chief economist, a view backed by external economists. “But a deterioration in business confidence in the service sector to the weakest since July 2009 suggests that a more fundamental slowing in the pace of economic growth is occurring.”
China’s top chipmaker has warned that breakaway spending on artificial intelligence (AI) chips is bringing forward years of future demand, raising the risk that some data centers could sit idle. “Companies would love to build 10 years’ worth of data center capacity within one or two years,” Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯) cochief executive officer Zhao Haijun (趙海軍) said yesterday on a call with analysts. “As for what exactly these data centers will do, that hasn’t been fully thought through.” Moody’s Ratings projects that AI-related infrastructure investment would exceed US$3 trillion over the next five years, as developers pour eye-watering sums
Bank of America Corp nearly doubled its forecast for the nation’s economic growth this year, adding to a slew of upgrades even after a rip-roaring last year propelled by demand for artificial intelligence (AI). The firm lifted its projection to 8 percent from 4.5 percent on “relentless global demand” for the hardware that Taiwanese companies make, according to a note dated yesterday by analysts including Xiaoqing Pi (皮曉青). Taiwan’s GDP expanded 8.63 percent last year, the fastest pace since 2010. The increase “reflects our sustained optimism over Taiwan’s technology driven expansion and is reinforced by several recent developments,” including a more stable currency,
NEW IMPORTS: Car dealer PG Union Corp said it would consider introducing US-made models such as the Jeep Grand Cherokee and Stellantis’ RAM 1500 to Taiwan Tesla Taiwan yesterday said that it does not plan to cut its car prices in the wake of Washington and Taipei signing the Agreement on Reciprocal Trade on Thursday to eliminate tariffs on US-made cars. On the other hand, Mercedes-Benz Taiwan said it is planning to lower the price of its five models imported from the US after the zero tariff comes into effect. Tesla in a statement said it has no plan to adjust the prices of the US-made Model 3, Model S and Model X as tariffs are not the only factor the automaker uses to determine pricing policies. Tesla said
OpenAI has warned US lawmakers that its Chinese rival DeepSeek (深度求索) is using unfair and increasingly sophisticated methods to extract results from leading US artificial intelligence (AI) models to train the next generation of its breakthrough R1 chatbot, a memo reviewed by Bloomberg News showed. In the memo, sent on Thursday to the US House of Representatives Select Committee on China, OpenAI said that DeepSeek had used so-called distillation techniques as part of “ongoing efforts to free-ride on the capabilities developed by OpenAI and other US frontier labs.” The company said it had detected “new, obfuscated methods” designed to evade OpenAI’s defenses
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