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.
HORMUZ ISSUE: The US president said he expected crude prices to drop at the end of the war, which he called a ‘minor excursion’ that could continue ‘for a little while’ The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait started reducing oil production, as the near-closure of the crucial Strait of Hormuz ripples through energy markets and affects global supply. Abu Dhabi National Oil Co (ADNOC) is “managing offshore production levels to address storage requirements,” the company said in a statement, without giving details. Kuwait Petroleum Corp said it was lowering production at its oil fields and refineries after “Iranian threats against safe passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz.” The war in the Middle East has all but closed Hormuz, the narrow waterway linking the Persian Gulf to the open seas,
Apple Inc increased iPhone production in India by about 53 percent last year and now makes a quarter of its marquee devices there, reflecting the US company’s efforts to avoid tariffs on China. The company assembled about 55 million iPhones in India last year, up from 36 million a year earlier, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be named because the numbers aren’t public. Apple makes about 220 million to 230 million iPhones a year globally, with India’s share of the total increasing rapidly. Apple has accelerated its expansion in the world’s most populous country in recent years, bolstered
HEADWINDS: The company said it expects its computer business, as well as consumer electronics and communications segments to see revenue declines due to seasonality Pegatron Corp (和碩) yesterday said it aims to grow its artificial intelligence (AI) server revenue more than 10-fold this year from last year, driven by orders from neocloud solutions clients and large cloud service providers. The electronics manufacturing service provider said AI server revenue growth would be driven primarily by the Nvidia Corp GB300 server platform. Server shipments are expected to increase each quarter this year, with the second half likely to outperform the first half, it said. The AI server market is expected to broaden this year as more inference applications emerge, which would drive demand for system-on-chip, application-specific integrated circuits
PROJECTION: TSMC said it expects strong growth this year, with revenue in US dollars projected to grow by about 30 percent, outperforming the industry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday reported consolidated sales last month reached NT$317.66 billion (US$9.98 billion), the highest ever for the month of February, driven by robust demand for chips built using the company’s advanced 3-nanometer (3nm) process. Last month’s figure was up 22.2 percent from a year earlier, but fell 20.8 percent from January, the world’s largest contract chipmaker said in a statement. For the first two months of the year, TSMC posted cumulative sales of NT$718.91 billion, up 29.9 percent from a year earlier. Analysts attributed the growth to sustained global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) products
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