ISRAEL
Crowds protest living costs
Tens of thousands of people gathered across the country on Saturday to call for lower living costs in an effort to show the government their protest movement has countrywide support. The gatherings followed a rally last weekend in Tel Aviv, in which more than 250,000 demonstrators called for economic reform. It was the biggest socio-economic protest the country of 7.7 million has ever seen. Past demonstrations on such a scale in the country have usually been over issues of war and peace, but on Saturday rallies from Haifa and Afula in the north of the country to the resort town of Eilat in the far south all focused on “social justice.” The protests have put pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who last week named a panel of 14 experts led by economist Manuel Trajtenberg to deliver proposals for changes within a month.
ECONOMY
Soros proffers advice
George Soros, the US speculator turned billionaire philanthropist, has suggested both Greece and Portugal quit the EU and the eurozone because of their massive debts. “One has so mishandled the Greek problem that the best way forward at present might be an orderly exit,” with Greece leaving both the EU and the euro common currency, he said in an interview yesterday in the German magazine Der Spiegel. He suggested the same might go for Portugal. “The EU and the euro would survive it,” he added. Soros also suggested the time had come for eurozone members to accept the introduction of euro bonds. “Whether you like it or not, the euro exists. And for it to function properly, countries sharing the currency must be able to refinance part of their debt under the same conditions,” he said.
AUTOMOBILES
BMW agrees to extension
Luxury automaker BMW said on Saturday it had agreed to a contract extension for employees at a California warehouse following a union dispute that had threatened to go national. The Teamsters, a nationwide union with about 1.4 million members, had said the company planned to lay off the workers at the end of this month before re-opening the facility with a lower-paid workforce. “Many of these employees have worked at BMW for decades,” said Bob Lennox of Teamsters Local 495, which represented the 68 workers. “They were facing foreclosures on their homes and the loss of their health insurance at a time of record unemployment in southern California.”
BANKING
ICBC executive found guilty
A former senior executive of Chinese banking giant ICBC (中國工商銀行) has been found guilty of accepting hundreds of thousands of Hong Kong dollars, bottles of wine and a watch as bribes, Hong Kong’s anti-graft watchdog said. Chan Yick-yiu (陳翊耀), former head of real estate and finance of the bank’s Hong Kong unit, was convicted over the handling of loan applications, the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) said in a statement late on Saturday. The 44-year-old was found guilty by a district court on Saturday over nine counts of charges, including accepting HK$2.5 million (US$321,000) in cash, five bottles of red wine and a luxury watch from a businessman. The ICAC said the judge ruled that the prosecution had “proved beyond reasonable doubt” on all charges against Chan, who was accused of helping the businessman and his firms to prepare credit proposals for loan applications. The former banker will be sentenced tomorrow.
ADVANCED: Previously, Taiwanese chip companies were restricted from building overseas fabs with technology less than two generations behind domestic factories Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp, would no longer be restricted from investing in next-generation 2-nanometer chip production in the US, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. However, the ministry added that the world’s biggest contract chipmaker would not be making any reckless decisions, given the weight of its up to US$30 billion investment. To safeguard Taiwan’s chip technology advantages, the government has barred local chipmakers from making chips using more advanced technologies at their overseas factories, in China particularly. Chipmakers were previously only allowed to produce chips using less advanced technologies, specifically
BRAVE NEW WORLD: Nvidia believes that AI would fuel a new industrial revolution and would ‘do whatever we can’ to guide US AI policy, CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia Corp cofounder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) on Tuesday said he is ready to meet US president-elect Donald Trump and offer his help to the incoming administration. “I’d be delighted to go see him and congratulate him, and do whatever we can to make this administration succeed,” Huang said in an interview with Bloomberg Television, adding that he has not been invited to visit Trump’s home base at Mar-a-Lago in Florida yet. As head of the world’s most valuable chipmaker, Huang has an opportunity to help steer the administration’s artificial intelligence (AI) policy at a moment of rapid change.
TARIFF SURGE: The strong performance could be attributed to the growing artificial intelligence device market and mass orders ahead of potential US tariffs, analysts said The combined revenue of companies listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange and the Taipei Exchange for the whole of last year totaled NT$44.66 trillion (US$1.35 trillion), up 12.8 percent year-on-year and hit a record high, data compiled by investment consulting firm CMoney showed on Saturday. The result came after listed firms reported a 23.92 percent annual increase in combined revenue for last month at NT$4.1 trillion, the second-highest for the month of December on record, and posted a 15.63 percent rise in combined revenue for the December quarter at NT$12.25 billion, the highest quarterly figure ever, the data showed. Analysts attributed the
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) quarterly sales topped estimates, reinforcing investor hopes that the torrid pace of artificial intelligence (AI) hardware spending would extend into this year. The go-to chipmaker for Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc reported a 39 percent rise in December-quarter revenue to NT$868.5 billion (US$26.35 billion), based on calculations from monthly disclosures. That compared with an average estimate of NT$854.7 billion. The strong showing from Taiwan’s largest company bolsters expectations that big tech companies from Alphabet Inc to Microsoft Corp would continue to build and upgrade datacenters at a rapid clip to propel AI development. Growth accelerated for
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