MACROECONOMICS
France expects flat growth
French Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici said on Thursday he was concerned that growth this year of the EU’s second-biggest economy would be very weak, around the 0.1 percent level predicted by the European Commission. “The European Commission says 0.1 percent: I fear it won’t be far from that,” Moscovici told a forum in Paris. “We are fighting for it to be more,” he added. Both the European Commission and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development have forecast that the French economy will manage to grow by just 0.1 percent this year.
FOREIGN RESERVES
Egypt’s reserves fall further
Egypt’s foreign currency reserves dropped slightly again last month, the central bank said on Thursday. The US$13.4 billion level at the end of last month was just below the February figure of US$13.5 billion, representing a smaller drop than previous months. The nation’s reserves have fallen sharply from US$36 billion since the popular uprising in 2011 that ousted Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. The Egyptian government is in talks with the IMF to secure a US$4.8 billion loan to bolster the country’s battered economy and help cover a widening budget deficit. Egyptian Minister of International Cooperation and Planning Ashraf el-Araby said on Thursday that a final agreement with the IMF could be reached in the next two weeks.
AUTOMAKERS
Honda recalls cars over leak
Japanese automaker Honda said on Thursday it was recalling 145,573 vehicles due to a fault that caused oil to leak onto some cars’ exhaust pipes. The firm said it had received 14 complaints from motorists, including nine cases where the burned oil released fumes into the affected vehicles. There were no injuries, it added. The recall covers vehicle brand models “Vamos,” the “Vamos Hobio” small van and the “Z” two-door hatchback built between October 1998 through August 2010 and sold only in Japan, the automaker said in a document filed with Japan’s transport ministry.
TELECOMS
BlackBerry turns off music
BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion (RIM) says it is silencing its streaming music service barely two years after its launch. The Canadian firm e-mailed BlackBerry Messenger Music subscribers this week to notify them that the cloud-based service will stop working on June 2. RIM said on Thursday the decision follows a “strategic business review” of its offerings. BBM Music launched in August 2011 as a US$4.99 per month service that allowed BBM users to swap song recommendations and share music with friends. However, there were limitations — each user could only share up to 50 songs from a catalogue of millions of tracks for their own personal playlist.
ENERGY
Skilling’s case under review
Jeffrey Skilling, the former Enron Corp chief executive serving a 24-year prison term over the energy company’s spectacular collapse, may get a chance to leave prison early. The US Department of Justice has notified victims of Enron’s fraud and 2001 bankruptcy that prosecutors may enter an agreement with Skilling that could result in a resentencing. Skilling, 59, has served about six and a quarter years in prison following his May 2006 conviction by a Houston federal jury on 19 counts of securities fraud, conspiracy, insider trading and lying to auditors. Once ranked seventh on the Fortune 500 list of large US companies, Enron went bankrupt on Dec. 2, 2001.
Meta Platforms Inc offered US$100 million bonuses to OpenAI employees in an unsuccessful bid to poach the ChatGPT maker’s talent and strengthen its own generative artificial intelligence (AI) teams, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said. Facebook’s parent company — a competitor of OpenAI — also offered “giant” annual salaries exceeding US$100 million to OpenAI staffers, Altman said in an interview on the Uncapped with Jack Altman podcast released on Tuesday. “It is crazy,” Sam Altman told his brother Jack in the interview. “I’m really happy that at least so far none of our best people have decided to take them
BYPASSING CHINA TARIFFS: In the first five months of this year, Foxconn sent US$4.4bn of iPhones to the US from India, compared with US$3.7bn in the whole of last year Nearly all the iPhones exported by Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團) from India went to the US between March and last month, customs data showed, far above last year’s average of 50 percent and a clear sign of Apple Inc’s efforts to bypass high US tariffs imposed on China. The numbers, being reported by Reuters for the first time, show that Apple has realigned its India exports to almost exclusively serve the US market, when previously the devices were more widely distributed to nations including the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. During March to last month, Foxconn, known as Hon Hai Precision Industry
PLANS: MSI is also planning to upgrade its service center in the Netherlands Micro-Star International Co (MSI, 微星) yesterday said it plans to set up a server assembly line at its Poland service center this year at the earliest. The computer and peripherals manufacturer expects that the new server assembly line would shorten transportation times in shipments to European countries, a company spokesperson told the Taipei Times by telephone. MSI manufactures motherboards, graphics cards, notebook computers, servers, optical storage devices and communication devices. The company operates plants in Taiwan and China, and runs a global network of service centers. The company is also considering upgrading its service center in the Netherlands into a
Taiwan’s property market is entering a freeze, with mortgage activity across the nation’s six largest cities plummeting in the first quarter, H&B Realty Co (住商不動產) said yesterday, citing mounting pressure on housing demand amid tighter lending rules and regulatory curbs. Mortgage applications in Taipei, New Taipei City, Taoyuan, Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung totaled 28,078 from January to March, a sharp 36.3 percent decline from 44,082 in the same period last year, the nation’s largest real-estate brokerage by franchise said, citing data from the Joint Credit Information Center (JCIC, 聯徵中心). “The simultaneous decline across all six cities reflects just how drastically the market
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