TECHNOLOGY
Apple gears up for iPad 3
Apple plans to begin trial production of a next generation iPad in October with an eye to a launch early next year, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. The newspaper, citing “people familiar with the situation,” said Apple is working with component suppliers and its assembler in Asia on the iPad 3 and has ordered key components such as display panels and chips. It said the next generation iPad is expected to feature a high resolution 2048-by-1536 pixel display, compared with the 1024-by-768 display on the iPad 2. The Journal quoted one unidentified component supplier as saying that the company had placed parts orders for about 1.5 million iPad 3s in the fourth quarter. Apple sold 9.25 million iPads last quarter.
INDIA
Target of 9% growth agreed
The nation aims to accelerate the pace of economic growth to 9 percent in the five years beginning in April next year to help cut poverty, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said. The government had asked the Planning Commission to consider a goal of 9.5 percent, Singh said in New Delhi in an address to Cabinet colleagues and members of the government agency that sets five-year investment targets. The Reserve Bank of India is concerned that growth in excess of 8 percent could fan inflation, underscoring the dilemma policymakers face in raising living standards in Asia’s third-biggest economy, where the World Bank estimates 76 percent of its 1.2 billion people live on less than US$2 a day.
CANADA
No more stimulus spending
Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said on Friday that the government would stick to its plan to reduce the deficit by 2015 and not spend more money to stimulate the economy, but signaled that could change if the global economy deteriorated dramatically. Flaherty told an emergency meeting of parliament’s finance committee that more government spending is precisely the wrong thing to do. He pointed to Europe where he said too much government spending is the problem. Flaherty also said most economists do not believe there will be another global recession, but said there are certainly risks. Central bank governor Mark Carney said the US and Europe were expected to grow more slowly than thought earlier this year, but said he did not expect the US to slip back into recession.
HACKING
Epson Korea breached
Epson Korea Co said yesterday that hackers breached the personal data of its 350,000 registered customers last week, the latest in a series of cyber attacks involving a huge number of victims in the country. An official at the South Korean affiliate of Seiko Epson Corp said the company had reported the case to the communications regulator. It said personal information, including telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, names and coded data from customers registered on its Web site had been compromised. South Korea has recently drawn up an intensive cyber security master plan after a wave of hacking attacks against government agencies, companies and financial firms exposed the vulnerabilities of networks in the world’s most wired country. Late last month, hackers attacked the Nate Internet portal and the Cyworld blogging site, both run by SK Comms, accessing the personal information of up to 35 million users in the country’s biggest cyber attack so far.
CHIP WAR: Tariffs on Taiwanese chips would prompt companies to move their factories, but not necessarily to the US, unleashing a ‘global cross-sector tariff war’ US President Donald Trump would “shoot himself in the foot” if he follows through on his recent pledge to impose higher tariffs on Taiwanese and other foreign semiconductors entering the US, analysts said. Trump’s plans to raise tariffs on chips manufactured in Taiwan to as high as 100 percent would backfire, macroeconomist Henry Wu (吳嘉隆) said. He would “shoot himself in the foot,” Wu said on Saturday, as such economic measures would lead Taiwanese chip suppliers to pass on additional costs to their US clients and consumers, and ultimately cause another wave of inflation. Trump has claimed that Taiwan took up to
SUPPORT: The government said it would help firms deal with supply disruptions, after Trump signed orders imposing tariffs of 25 percent on imports from Canada and Mexico The government pledged to help companies with operations in Mexico, such as iPhone assembler Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), shift production lines and investment if needed to deal with higher US tariffs. The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday announced measures to help local firms cope with the US tariff increases on Canada, Mexico, China and other potential areas. The ministry said that it would establish an investment and trade service center in the US to help Taiwanese firms assess the investment environment in different US states, plan supply chain relocation strategies and
Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) is reportedly making another pass at Nissan Motor Co, as the Japanese automaker's tie-up with Honda Motor Co falls apart. Nissan shares rose as much as 6 percent after Taiwan’s Central News Agency reported that Hon Hai chairman Young Liu (劉揚偉) instructed former Nissan executive Jun Seki to connect with French carmaker Renault SA, which holds about 36 percent of Nissan’s stock. Hon Hai, the Taiwanese iPhone-maker also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), was exploring an investment or buyout of Nissan last year, but backed off in December after the Japanese carmaker penned a deal
WASHINGTON POLICY: Tariffs of 10 percent or more and other new costs are tipped to hit shipments of small parcels, cutting export growth by 1.3 percentage points The decision by US President Donald Trump to ban Chinese companies from using a US tariff loophole would hit tens of billions of dollars of trade and reduce China’s economic growth this year, according to new estimates by economists at Nomura Holdings Inc. According to Nomura’s estimates, last year companies such as Shein (希音) and PDD Holdings Inc’s (拼多多控股) Temu shipped US$46 billion of small parcels to the US to take advantage of the rule that allows items with a declared value under US$800 to enter the US tariff-free. Tariffs of 10 percent or more and other new costs would slash such