BRAZIL
Official warns on GDP target
The government has said it is unlikely to meet an economic growth forecast of 4.5 percent because of concerns about the eurozone. “If the crisis worsens or continues to worsen, if they do not resolve the problem of Greece, then it will be difficult to achieve a growth rate of 4.5 percent,” Finance Minister Guido Mantega said at a press conference on Monday. Mantega declined to make a new prediction for this year’s growth, but said he anticipated economic growth of between 4.5 percent and 5 percent in the second half of the year. Market analysts polled in a weekly central bank survey on Monday forecast a growth of between 3.09 percent and 3.2 percent. The country’s growth slumped to 2.7 percent last year after expanding by 7.5 percent the previous year.
INTERNET
YouTube marks seven years
YouTube celebrated its seventh birthday by saying it has hit fresh milestones in terms of its offerings and the amount of time spent on the video-sharing Web site. “Today 72 hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute,” the Google-owned Web site said in a blog post on Sunday. “All 800 million of you all over the world have shown us we’re on the right track by increasing subscriptions 50 percent and watching over 3 billion hours a month,” the blog added. Google bought YouTube in 2006 for US$1.65 billion.
TECHNOLOGY
Kodak patent suit fails
A US judge on Monday said a Kodak patent allegedly infringed upon by Apple and BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion (RIM) was not valid, dealing another blow to the struggling photography pioneer. Kodak planned to appeal the ruling to the full commission, with a decision expected in September. The patent was the subject of a complaint Kodak filed with the International Trade Commission in early 2010 that focused on the technology allowing users to preview pictures on LCD screens before snapping digital photographs.
COMPENSATION
Tim Cook is best-paid CEO
Apple chief executive Tim Cook topped the list of the best-paid CEOs in the US last year thanks to stock options that put him more than US$300 million above his next rival, a Wall Street Journal survey showed on Monday. Cook clocked in total compensation of US$378 million. He earned US$900,000 for his annual salary, US$900,000 for his annual incentives and US$376 million in restricted stock grants. Another Silicon Valley big gun, Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison, came in second place with less than a fifth of Cook’s pay, at US$76 million. The study, conducted by Hay Group for the Journal covered the 300 largest US public companies by revenue.
RETAIL
Marks & Spencer profit down
Bellwether British retailer Marks & Spencer posted a 1.2 percent fall in full-year underlying profit, its first decline in three years, as even its relatively older and more affluent customers were touched by the economic downturn. Britain’s biggest clothing retailer yesterday said it made a profit before tax and one-off items of ￡705.9 million (US$1.12 billion) in the year to March 31. That was down from the ￡714 million made in 2010-2011 and compares with analyst forecasts of between ￡675 million and ￡706 million. Full-year sales at the 128-year-old group rose 2 percent to ￡9.9 billion.
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
Former Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) chairman Mark Liu (劉德音) yesterday warned against the tendency to label stakeholders as either “pro-China” or “pro-US,” calling such rigid thinking a “trap” that could impede policy discussions. Liu, an adviser to the Cabinet’s Economic Development Committee, made the comments in his keynote speech at the committee’s first advisers’ meeting. Speaking in front of Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰), National Development Council (NDC) Minister Paul Liu (劉鏡清) and other officials, Liu urged the public to be wary of falling into the “trap” of categorizing people involved in discussions into either the “pro-China” or “pro-US” camp. Liu,
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