PHARMACEUTICALS
Ex-Eli Lilly workers charged
US prosecutors say three former employees of Eli Lilly and Co sent trade secrets the company valued at more than US$55 million to a competing Chinese drug company. The Indianapolis Business Journal reports an indictment unsealed on Tuesday in federal court in Indianapolis charges Guoqing Cao (曹國興) and Shuyu Li (李舒裕) of suburban Indianapolis with seven counts of theft and conspiracy to commit theft. The indictment does not name the third man. The indictment alleges Cao and Li e-mailed sensitive information about nine experimental drug research programs at Lilly to the third man when he was employed by Jiangsu Hengrui Medicine Co Ltd in China.
ELECTRONICS
Panasonic ending plasmas
Panasonic Corp will stop making plasma television screens by early next year, a report said yesterday, as the struggling electronics giant undergoes a huge corporate overhaul. Japan’s leading Nikkei Shimbun said Panasonic will shutter production at its main plasma screen plant in Amagasaki in western Japan by the end of March as it puts the factory up for sale. The move would fall in line with a broader industry shift away from plasma units, with Hitachi and Pioneer also exiting the market in recent years. In response to the report, a Panasonic statement said nothing had been decided, but discussions about business strategy were ongoing.
INTERNET
Yahoo upgrades e-mail
Yahoo on Tuesday spruced up its free Web-based e-mail service as chief executive Marissa Mayer continued her quest to win users from rival Google for online tasks people tend to daily. Upgrades to Yahoo Mail rolled out to mark its 16th birthday included letting people pretty up screens with images from Flickr, a photo-sharing service owned by the California-based Internet pioneer. Yahoo also ramped the amount of digital storage space per account up to a terabyte. The new Yahoo Mail was available in English in nine countries, including Britain, India, New Zealand, the Phillipines and the US, with more countries and languages coming soon, it said.
ENERGY
Lagarde wants subsidy end
IMF managing director Christine Lagarde is urging governments to phase out energy subsidies as a key step to address climate change. Lagarde said on Tuesday that such subsidies, particularly for fossil fuels, only encourage the use of more energy and disproportionately benefit wealthier individuals, who can afford to use more energy, instead of the poor. Lagarde said US$485 billion is spent today globally on energy subsidies and said it should all be gradually removed. She also encouraged governments to “get the pricing right” on energy, including carbon taxes.
CATERING
Yum Brands profit tumbles
KFC’s parent company Yum Brands says its profit fell 68 percent in the third quarter, as its Chinese unit struggles to recover from a controversy over its chicken supply and a bird flu scare. Results missed expectations and Yum lowered its outlook. Yum, which also owns Taco Bell and Pizza Hut, says net income for the quarter ended Sept. 7 fell to US$152 million, or US$0.33 per share. Excluding a writedown related to its Little Sheep chain in China, net income was US$0.85 per share. That compares with net income of US$471 million, or US$1.02 per share last year. Revenue fell 4 percent to US$3.02 billion, missing expectations of US$3.54 billion.
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
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.
Taiwanese manufacturers have a chance to play a key role in the humanoid robot supply chain, Tongtai Machine and Tool Co (東台精機) chairman Yen Jui-hsiung (嚴瑞雄) said yesterday. That is because Taiwanese companies are capable of making key parts needed for humanoid robots to move, such as harmonic drives and planetary gearboxes, Yen said. This ability to produce these key elements could help Taiwanese manufacturers “become part of the US supply chain,” he added. Yen made the remarks a day after Nvidia Corp cofounder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said his company and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) are jointly
United Microelectronics Corp (UMC, 聯電) expects its addressable market to grow by a low single-digit percentage this year, lower than the overall foundry industry’s 15 percent expansion and the global semiconductor industry’s 10 percent growth, the contract chipmaker said yesterday after reporting the worst profit in four-and-a-half years in the fourth quarter of last year. Growth would be fueled by demand for artificial intelligence (AI) servers, a moderate recovery in consumer electronics and an increase in semiconductor content, UMC said. “UMC’s goal is to outgrow our addressable market while maintaining our structural profitability,” UMC copresident Jason Wang (王石) told an online earnings
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