AUTOMAKERS
Jaguar mulls outsourcing
Jaguar Land Rover, the British luxury car unit owned by Tata Motors, is considering manufacturing vehicles from scratch in India, a report said. Jaguar Land Rover currently assembles a number of cars in India with parts shipped from Britain. Manufacturing the whole car in India would make it cheaper, as it would save on government import taxes and labor costs. “Like Brazil, India is one of the possibilities for Jaguar Land Rover to fully manufacture cars,” a person close to the development told the Wall Street Journal on Sunday.
INDUSTRY
Rusal reports net loss
Russian aluminum giant Rusal yesterday reported a net loss of US$55 million for last year, compared with a net profit of US$237 million in 2011. Revenue fell 11.4 percent to US$10.89 billion. Rusal said it expects to cut approximately 270,000 tonnes of aluminum production capacity at its “less efficient aluminum smelters” by the end of this year to improve efficiency. The price of aluminum, which is used in industries including automotive and construction, is trading at about US$1,975 a tonne on the London Metal Exchange, down 15.2 percent from a year ago.
SOUTH KOREA
Inflation slows to 1.4%
South Korea’s inflation rate slowed slightly to 1.4 percent last month, well below the central bank’s target band and offering more room for monetary easing, government data showed yesterday. The figure, which compares with a rate of 1.5 percent in January, is below the Bank of Korea’s inflation target band of between 2.5 percent and 3.5 percent, and offers the central bank the option of a further interest rate cut to help spur growth. The central bank kept the key rate unchanged at 2.75 percent last month for a fourth straight month. Core inflation, which excludes volatile energy and food prices, was at 1.3 percent, compared with 1.2 percent the previous month.
BANKING
Banks to reduce bonuses
HSBC and Standard Chartered are to report a reduction in their bonus pools, reflecting separate settlements with US authorities over probes into money laundering and sanctions violations, Sky News reported on Sunday. HSBC’s bonus pot will fall to about £2 billion (US$3 billion) from £2.8 billion paid out in 2011, Sky News said on its Web site, with HSBC chief executive officer Stuart Gulliver expected to take home between £6 million and £7 million, including a bonus of just under £2 million. His counterpart at Standard Chartered, Peter Sands, will take home less than £2 million in bonus payments, with the bank’s overall bonus pool cut to US$1.4 billion from US$1.54 billion pounds last year, Sky News said.
EUROZONE
Rehn hints at Cyprus exit
European Economic Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn has warned that debt-riven Cyprus could exit the eurozone without a bailout in an interview with a German news weekly published on Sunday. New Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades has vowed to save the nearly bankrupt Mediterranean island from financial meltdown saying he will seek to secure an “earliest possible” bailout. Euro finance ministers were due to resume discussions on a Cyprus bailout package yesterday. German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble told Sunday’s Tagesspiegel newspaper that the Cypriot problem was “not easy to solve,” but insisted an “appropriate” solution would be found.
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
A start-up in Mexico is trying to help get a handle on one coastal city’s plastic waste problem by converting it into gasoline, diesel and other fuels. With less than 10 percent of the world’s plastics being recycled, Petgas’ idea is that rather than letting discarded plastic become waste, it can become productive again as fuel. Petgas developed a machine in the port city of Boca del Rio that uses pyrolysis, a thermodynamic process that heats plastics in the absence of oxygen, breaking it down to produce gasoline, diesel, kerosene, paraffin and coke. Petgas chief technology officer Carlos Parraguirre Diaz said that in
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
Japan intends to closely monitor the impact on its currency of US President Donald Trump’s new tariffs and is worried about the international fallout from the trade imposts, Japanese Minister of Finance Katsunobu Kato said. “We need to carefully see how the exchange rate and other factors will be affected and what form US monetary policy will take in the future,” Kato said yesterday in an interview with Fuji Television. Japan is very concerned about how the tariffs might impact the global economy, he added. Kato spoke as nations and firms brace for potential repercussions after Trump unleashed the first salvo of