GAMBLING
Macau sets earnings record
The tiny Chinese city of Macau has again smashed its annual record for casino earnings as revenues last year hit US$45 billion, further underlining its outsize position as the world’s biggest gambling market. Gambling regulator data released yesterday showed that Macau’s three dozen casinos took in 33.5 billion patacas (US$4.2 billion) last month. That brought revenue for last year to 360.8 billion patacas, up 18.6 percent from the year before. Analyst Grant Govertsen of Union Gaming Research said Macau’s take would probably be more than seven times the amount earned on the Las Vegas Strip.
ELECTRONICS
Samsung urges innovation
Samsung Electronics Co chairman Lee Kun-hee yesterday urged workers to adopt new ways of thinking and move beyond their focus on hardware as the world’s biggest maker of smartphones and televisions seeks to maintain growth. “We have to change once again,” Lee said, according to e-mailed notes from the company. “We must give a bigger push for innovations, including in business structure, so that we can lead industry trends.” Samsung shipped a record number of handsets last year and posted its highest quarterly earnings, yet its shares had their first annual decline in five years amid signs of slowing growth in high-end handsets and competition from Apple Inc’s new iPhones.
ENERGY
Russian oil output rises
Russia yesterday said that its oil output last year hit a post-Soviet high, while natural gas production of its giant Gazprom holding slipped for the second successive year. The Russian Ministry of Energy’s reporting unit said oil and gas condensate production grew by 1 percent last year to reach a new record of 523.3 million tonnes. Russia had established its previous post-Soviet high in 2012, when output stood at 10.4 million barrels per day.
SRI LANKA
Key lending rate cut
The Sri Lankan central bank yesterday cut a key lending rate by 50 basis points to 8 percent after inflation eased to its lowest level in nearly two years and as the economy shows signs of sustained growth. The move by the Monetary Board of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka represents the fourth consecutive reduction since December 2012. The deposit rate was kept at 6.5 percent. The bank said it expected the nation’s economy to have grown 7.2 percent last year, up from 6.4 percent in 2012 after announcing last week that inflation had hit a 22-month low of 4.7 percent.
ENERGY
Repsol sells LNG assets
Spanish oil group Repsol yesterday said it has sold liquefied natural gas (LNG) assets to Royal Dutch Shell for US$4.1 billion, slashing its heavy debt load. The spanish group handed over its LNG assets in Trinidad and Tobago, and Peru to Shell, the world’s biggest LNG supplier, as part of a huge debt-reduction plan. The sale followed a smaller US$200 million sale of a Basque power plant to British Petroleum in October last year, bringing in a combined US$4.3 billion to the Spanish group. The sale generated a net US$2.9 billion in profits and capital gains for Repsol, the Spanish group said, more than had been anticipated when the deal was first announced in February last year.
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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