COSMETICS
Kanebo complaints rise
Japanese cosmetics maker Kanebo yesterday said the number of complaints about skin discoloring from using its whitening products has reached a total of 7,266 from customers at home and abroad. The latest figure is more than triple the number of complaints announced last month. The company last month announced a recall of 54 of its products that contained a substance called 4HPB, a synthetic version of a natural compound developed by the firm. The recall, involving almost 4.75 million products on retail shelves affected Japan, Taiwan, the UK, Hong Kong and eight other Asian nations.
REAL ESTATE
UK home prices up 5.5%
Asking prices for homes in Britain are 5.5 percent higher than a year ago, property Web site Rightmove said yesterday, as it urged the government to boost the supply of new homes to avoid an asset bubble. Rightmove figures, which are not seasonally adjusted, show the price of property coming on to the market has risen 8.8 percent in the first eight months of the year. The rally has been most marked in London, where prices are up 10.2 percent on the year, Rightmove said. With house prices already rising faster than inflation, the government is under pressure from some quarters to abandon plans to offer state-backed guarantees to riskier homebuyers.
ENERGY
Statoil selling assets
Statoil ASA, Norway’s biggest energy company, agreed to sell assets, including stakes in the Gudrun and Gullfaks fields, to Austria’s OMV AG for US$2.65 billion as it frees up cash for new projects. The company will reduce its stake in the two Norwegian fields from more than 70 percent to 51 percent, the Stavanger-based company said yesterday. Statoil will also sell all its holdings in the Schiehallion and Rosebank fields, west of the Shetlands in the UK. Statoil said it expects to book gains of US$1.3 billion to US$1.5 billion from the transaction. The sale will allow the company to redeploy about US$7 billion of capital expenditure, it said.
ETHIOPIA
Ethio Telecom, ZTE ink pact
The government signed an US$800 million agreement with Chinese telecom giant ZTE (中興) on Sunday to expand its telecommunications network, national operator Ethio Telecom said. The agreement is part of a telecommunications expansion project worth US$1.6 billion, which is shared with China’s Huawei Technologies (華為). Huawei and ZTE have split the cost of the scheme. The project aims to increase mobile phone and 3G Internet access throughout the country and introduce 4G broadband Internet in Addis Ababa.
METALS
Rusal posts net loss
Rusal, the world’s largest aluminum producer, yesterday reported a net loss of US$439 million for the first half of this year, citing falling prices, an excess global supply and economic uncertainty. The Russian aluminum giant, which is listed in Hong Kong, also said revenue for the six months to June 30 fell 8.8 percent year-on-year to US$5.2 billion. The net loss compared with a US$1 million net profit in the first half of last year, and the company said it was partly related to a one-off sale of shares in its stake of Norilsk Nickel, with the proceeds used for prepayment of debts.
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
TARIFF TRADE-OFF: Machinery exports to China dropped after Beijing ended its tariff reductions in June, while potential new tariffs fueled ‘front-loaded’ orders to the US The nation’s machinery exports to the US amounted to US$7.19 billion last year, surpassing the US$6.86 billion to China to become the largest export destination for the local machinery industry, the Taiwan Association of Machinery Industry (TAMI, 台灣機械公會) said in a report on Jan. 10. It came as some manufacturers brought forward or “front-loaded” US-bound shipments as required by customers ahead of potential tariffs imposed by the new US administration, the association said. During his campaign, US president-elect Donald Trump threatened tariffs of as high as 60 percent on Chinese goods and 10 percent to 20 percent on imports from other countries.
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