CREDIT CARDS
Visa stops serving Crimea
International credit and debit card company Visa Inc on Friday said it could no longer support bank cards being used in Crimea, following US sanctions imposed earlier this month.
The US has prohibited US-registered companies from investing in Crimea or providing services to firms operating there, among sanctions imposed over Russia’s annexation of the peninsula from Ukraine. “We can no longer support card issuing and merchant/ATM acquiring services in Crimea,” Visa said in a statement. A spokeswoman for Visa’s competitor MasterCard was unable to immediately confirm whether it had also stopped serving bank cards in Crimea.
MEXICO
US$3.4bn taken from Pemex
The Finance Ministry took out 50 billion pesos (US$3.4 billion) from the state oil company Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex), according to a statement sent to the Mexican Stock Exchange.
The payment this month was meant to “make management of public-sector finances more efficient,” according to the filing from the oil company. The withdrawal marks a departure from the government’s usual methods of obtaining revenue from Pemex, which include taxes and royalties.
During the first 11 months of the year, taxes paid by Mexico City-based Pemex declined by about 260 billion pesos, or 22 percent, from the same period of last year, according to records.
BANKING
Pheonix Light sues banks
Wells Fargo & Co, HSBC Holdings PLC, Bank of New York Mellon Corp and Deutsche Bank AG were sued by an Irish securities firm that claims the banks failed to protect investors in their role as trustees of securities backed by home loans that defaulted after the 2008 credit crisis. Phoenix Light SF Ltd accused the banks, in complaints filed on Friday in Manhattan federal court, of failing to safeguard the interests of investors as required by their contracts. The securities were sold from 2005 to 2007.
DELIVERy Services
City Link in administration
British parcel delivery company City Link has gone into administration and temporarily suspended all operations, with 2,727 jobs at risk, administrators said on Thursday. Hunter Kelly, an administrator from Ernst & Young, said undelivered parcels could be picked up at its depots from Monday and “substantial redundancies” were expected. Kelly said in a statement that the company had been hit by intense competition, changing market needs and difficulties in cost-cutting. The company had suffered “substantial losses over several years” and had “all but used up” a ￡40 million (US62.23 million) investment made last year, Kelly said.
PETROLEUM
US city sues Petrobas
Providence, Rhode Island, has filed suit against Petrobras and senior officers of the company over investor losses due to a corruption scandal at the Brazilian oil giant. The complaint by Providence, the largest city in Rhode Island, follows other investor suits against Petrobras in the US in the wake of a massive corruption scandal that has depressed Petrobras’ stock value. However, the Providence case, filed on Wednesday in New York by law firm Labaton Sucharow, is the first to bring allegations against key executives, including company president Graca Foster and chief financial officer Almir Barbassa, according to Brazilian newspaper O Estado.
Intel Corp chief executive officer Lip-Bu Tan (陳立武) is expected to meet with Taiwanese suppliers next month in conjunction with the opening of the Computex Taipei trade show, supply chain sources said on Monday. The visit, the first for Tan to Taiwan since assuming his new post last month, would be aimed at enhancing Intel’s ties with suppliers in Taiwan as he attempts to help turn around the struggling US chipmaker, the sources said. Tan is to hold a banquet to celebrate Intel’s 40-year presence in Taiwan before Computex opens on May 20 and invite dozens of Taiwanese suppliers to exchange views
Quanta Computer Inc (廣達) chairman Barry Lam (林百里) is expected to share his views about the artificial intelligence (AI) industry’s prospects during his speech at the company’s 37th anniversary ceremony, as AI servers have become a new growth engine for the equipment manufacturing service provider. Lam’s speech is much anticipated, as Quanta has risen as one of the world’s major AI server suppliers. The company reported a 30 percent year-on-year growth in consolidated revenue to NT$1.41 trillion (US$43.35 billion) last year, thanks to fast-growing demand for servers, especially those with AI capabilities. The company told investors in November last year that
Application-specific integrated circuit designer Faraday Technology Corp (智原) yesterday said that although revenue this quarter would decline 30 percent from last quarter, it retained its full-year forecast of revenue growth of 100 percent. The company attributed the quarterly drop to a slowdown in customers’ production of chips using Faraday’s advanced packaging technology. The company is still confident about its revenue growth this year, given its strong “design-win” — or the projects it won to help customers design their chips, Faraday president Steve Wang (王國雍) told an online earnings conference. “The design-win this year is better than we expected. We believe we will win
United Microelectronics Corp (UMC, 聯電) forecast that its wafer shipments this quarter would grow up to 7 percent sequentially and the factory utilization rate would rise to 75 percent, indicating that customers did not alter their ordering behavior due to the US President Donald Trump’s capricious US tariff policies. However, the uncertainty about US tariffs has weighed on the chipmaker’s business visibility for the second half of this year, UMC chief financial officer Liu Chi-tung (劉啟東) said at an online earnings conference yesterday. “Although the escalating trade tensions and global tariff policies have increased uncertainty in the semiconductor industry, we have not
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