JAPAN
Trade deficit widens
The trade deficit widened to ￥520 billion (US$6.5 billion) last month from a ￥478 billion deficit a year earlier as oil and gas imports surged after the nuclear crisis, the government said yesterday. Separately, the Bank of Japan yesterday left its key interest rate unchanged at near zero to support growth, as widely expected. The country earlier this year reported its biggest annual trade deficit ever for the fiscal year ending March. Exports grew nearly 8 percent last month from a year earlier on the back of recovery from the disaster, but imports also grew, rising 8 percent.
BANKING
Banks on downgrade watch
Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc’s main banking units and those of Japan’s largest lending groups were put on watch for a one-level downgrade by Fitch Ratings, after cutting the nation’s sovereign-credit rating. Banking entities under Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group Inc, the country’s second-biggest lender, and Mizuho Financial Group Inc, the third biggest, were put on watch, Fitch said in a statement after lowering Japan by two levels to “A+” on Tuesday.
SOFTWARE
SAP buys Ariba
German business software giant SAP said on Tuesday it was acquiring US cloud-based e-commerce firm Ariba for US$4.3 billion, in a move boosting its arsenal against archrival Oracle. The companies said the acquisition would help combine Ariba’s successful buyer-seller collaboration network with SAP’s broad customer base. The Ariba board of directors has unanimously approved the deal, which offers a 20 percent premium to Monday’s closing price.
AUTOMAKERS
Mazda, Fiat build sports car
Japanese automaker Mazda Motor and Italy’s Fiat said yesterday that they have agreed to jointly produce a new two-seater sports car as part of a technology and product development alliance. The vehicle, which will use Mazda’s next-generation rear-wheel-drive technology, is to be sold under the Mazda and Alfa Romeo brands, the latter owned by Fiat, with some differences including an engine unique to each. Both are to be made in the southern Japanese city of Hiroshima, with production on the Alfa Romeo brand car scheduled to begin by 2015, they added.
LUXURY BRANDS
Burberry expands
British luxury brand Burberry posted a 26 percent jump in profit, as expected, and said it would invest up to ￡200 million (US$314 million) in new outlets and expanding existing stores in London, Chicago and Hong Kong. The company said yesterday it made an underlying pretax profit of ￡376 million in the year to March 31. Revenue rose 24 percent to almost ￡1.9 billion. Burberry said yesterday that it planned to increase retail selling space by 12 percent to 14 percent in the coming year, shifting to larger format stores and opening about 15 new outlets.
COMPUTERS
Lenovo posts record sales
Lenovo Group (聯想), the world’s second-largest PC maker, said yesterday its quarterly profit rose 59 percent over a year earlier on record sales. Profit for the first three months was US$67 million, or US$0.65 per share, the company announced. Quarterly sales rose 54 percent to US$7.5 billion. For the full year ending in March, Lenovo said profit rose 73 percent to US$473 million, on a 37 percent increase in sales to US$29.6 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
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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