TELECOMS
Motorola loses patent suit
Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc, which has won two rulings against Apple Inc in Germany, failed to win a third in a patent case involving the use of mathematical sequences in mobile telecommunications. The Regional Court in Mannheim rejected the suit yesterday. Motorola Mobility did not show that Apple violated its patent, Presiding Judge Andreas Voss said when delivering the ruling. More cases between the two companies are pending in German courts, including a bid by Motorola Mobility to enforce its first win from December, which briefly forced Apple to remove some older iPhone and iPad models from its online store in Germany last week. Google Inc is buying Illinois-based Motorola Mobility to gain mobile patents and expand its hardware business.
OIL
IEA trims growth forecast
The International Energy Agency (IEA) trimmed its forecast for oil demand growth as a result of gloomy economic prospects, but said yesterday that markets were taking tougher international sanctions on Iran in their stride. The agency cut its forecast for growth in oil demand this year to 0.8 million barrels per day (mbd), from 1.1mbd, after the IMF slashed its estimate for global economic growth from 4 percent to 3.3 percent this year. The agency was largely sanguine about the impact of tighter international sanctions on Iran, including an EU import ban which takes effect in July. The new forecast for global oil demand of 89.9mbd, is slightly higher that that of the OPEC oil producers cartel, which trimmed its demand forecast for this year on Thursday to 88.76mbd.
AUSTRALIA
Central bank cuts forecasts
The central bank yesterday trimmed its growth and inflation forecasts for the year to June and signaled it has leeway to cut interest rates amid uncertainty over the eurozone debt crisis. In its quarterly statement on monetary policy, the bank said economic growth in the year to June was expected to be 3.5 percent, down from the 4 percent it forecast in November last year. The bank left its outlook for GDP for this year unchanged at between 3 percent and 3.5 percent. Underlying inflation was forecast to be at 2.25 percent in the 12 months to June compared with its previous estimate of 2.5 percent, within the bank’s 2 percent to 3 percent target band. The bank said uncertainty about Europe’s debt crisis had weighed on household and business confidence and while strong growth was expected in the mining sector, other parts of the economy would continue to struggle.
INVESTMENT
Fund bets on US Treasuries
Pacific Investment Management Co’s Bill Gross increased his holdings of US Treasuries to the highest level since July 2010, while Berkshire Hathaway Inc chairman Warren Buffett called them “dangerous.” Gross boosted US government and Treasury debt to 38 percent of assets in Pimco’s US$250.5 billion Total Return Fund, the world’s biggest bond fund. The position last month climbed from 30 percent in December, according to a report on the company’s Web site on Thursday. The billionaire investor, said taxes and inflation should dissuade investors from debt. That puts him in the same camp as Laurence Fink, chief executive officer of BlackRock Inc, the world’s largest money manager, who said this week investors should have 100 percent of their holdings in equities because they offer higher returns than bonds.
Napoleon Osorio is proud of being the first taxi driver to have accepted payment in bitcoin in the first country in the world to make the cryptocurrency legal tender: El Salvador. He credits Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s decision to bank on bitcoin three years ago with changing his life. “Before I was unemployed... And now I have my own business,” said the 39-year-old businessman, who uses an app to charge for rides in bitcoin and now runs his own car rental company. Three years ago the leader of the Central American nation took a huge gamble when he put bitcoin
Demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips should spur growth for the semiconductor industry over the next few years, the CEO of a major supplier to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said, dismissing concerns that investors had misjudged the pace and extent of spending on AI. While the global chip market has grown about 8 percent annually over the past 20 years, AI semiconductors should grow at a much higher rate going forward, Scientech Corp (辛耘) chief executive officer Hsu Ming-chi (許明琪) told Bloomberg Television. “This booming of the AI industry has just begun,” Hsu said. “For the most prominent
PARTNERSHIPS: TSMC said it has been working with multiple memorychip makers for more than two years to provide a full spectrum of solutions to address AI demand Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it has been collaborating with multiple memorychip makers in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) used in artificial intelligence (AI) applications for more than two years, refuting South Korean media report's about an unprecedented partnership with Samsung Electronics Co. As Samsung is competing with TSMC for a bigger foundry business, any cooperation between the two technology heavyweights would catch the eyes of investors and experts in the semiconductor industry. “We have been working with memory partners, including Micron, Samsung Memory and SK Hynix, on HBM solutions for more than two years, aiming to advance 3D integrated circuit
NATURAL PARTNERS: Taiwan and Japan have complementary dominant supply chain positions, are geographically and culturally close, and have similar work ethics Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) and other related companies would add ￥11.2 trillion (US$78.31 billion) to Japan’s chipmaking hot spot Kumamoto Prefecture over the next decade, a local bank’s analysis said. Kyushu Financial Group, a lender based in Kumamoto’s capital, almost doubled its projection for the economic impact that the chip sector would bring to the region compared to its estimate a year earlier, a presentation on Thursday said. The bank said that 171 firms had made new investments since November 2021, up from 90 in an earlier analysis. TSMC’s Kumamoto location was once a sleepy farming area, but has undergone
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