SOUTH KOREA
Growth poised to accelerate
The nation’s growth is poised to accelerate to the fastest since 2010, even as the central bank warned the won’s climb to the highest against the yen in more than five years threatens to damp exporters’ profits. Momentum in Asia’s fourth-biggest economy is picking up, led by improvement in Seoul, and central and southwest areas of the country, the Bank of Korea said in a quarterly Golden Book report released yesterday in Seoul. The yen’s decline against the won is intensifying competition with Japanese companies and may hurt profitability of some exporters, the report said. Authorities were watching for drastic moves in exchange rates, Finance Minister Hyun Oh-seok said this week when the won hit the highest level against the yen since 2008. A housing-price rebound after the worst property-market slowdown since 2004 could support the economy after government and central bank stimulus this year helped to jump start a recovery.
TECHNOLOGY
Sony seeking ‘wig’ patent
Sony Corp, which popularized portable music players with the Walkman, is seeking a US patent for “SmartWig” hairpieces that could help navigate roads, check blood pressure or flip through slides in a presentation. The wig would communicate wirelessly with another device and include tactile feedback, Sony wrote in the filing with the US Patent & Trademark Office. Depending on the model, the hairpiece may include a camera, laser pointer or global positioning system sensor, it said. The development of wearable technology such as eyeglasses, watches and earpieces is expanding as consumers seek new ways to integrate computers into everyday life. The race to gain a foothold in a market that Juniper Research estimates will jump about 14-fold in five years to US$19 billion is luring companies including Sony, Google Inc and Samsung Electronics Co.
RETAIL
Book retailer returns to profit
Book retailer Barnes & Noble returned to a profit in the fiscal second quarter as cost cuts offset lower sales. However, the company’s sales missed expectations. The report comes as the crucial holiday season begins, when retailers can make up to 40 percent of their annual revenue. Barnes & Noble has been evaluating its strategy for its Nook ebook reader after years of investing heavily in the business and developing a color tablet, the Nook HD+, that has faced tough competition from Amazon’s Kindle and the Apple iPad. Things have been in flux since June when chief executive officer William Lynch left the company, which has not named a replacement. It introduced a new non-tablet ebook reader, a US$119 Nook GlowLight, for the holidays.
BANKING
Mortgage costs could grow
The largest US banks could face more payments tied to bad mortgages ranging from US$55 billion to US$105 billion, according to Standard & Poor. Part of the sum is already covered by reserves, S&P said yesterday in a statement introducing a report on legal costs facing US lenders. The expenses will probably not hurt credit ratings, S&P said. The six largest banks have already paid more than US$100 billion to clean up claims that they sold faulty home loans and mortgage-backed bonds to investors and improperly sought to foreclose on homeowners.
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
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
RSS