BEEF
China to allow Irish imports
China has agreed to lift its ban on Irish beef, Irish Taoiseach Enda Kenny said on Friday, making it the only European country to be allowed to export beef to both the US and China. Demand for red meat in China, the world’s second-largest economy, has risen strongly in recent years due to rising incomes and a richer diet. Beijing started inspections of meat export facilities in Ireland in December as Dublin bid for the ban to be lifted. Only a few countries, such as Australia, Argentina, Canada and New Zealand, have had access to the Chinese market. China also banned beef imports from European countries following the mad cow disease outbreak.
COMPUTERS
US warns on Lenovo laptops
The US government on Friday advised Lenovo Group Ltd (聯想) customers to remove “Superfish,” a program pre-installed on some Lenovo laptops, saying it makes users vulnerable to cyberattacks. The Department of Homeland Security said in an alert that the program makes users vulnerable to a type of cyberattack known as SSL spoofing, in which remote attackers can read encrypted Web traffic, redirect traffic from official sites to spoofs, and perform other attacks. “Systems that came with the software already installed will continue to be vulnerable until corrective actions have been taken,” the agency said.
MOTORCYCLES
Buffett snaps up retailer
Warren Buffett is getting into motorcycle gear, snapping up a German retailer in a rare investment by his Berkshire Hathaway in Europe in recent years. The acquisition of the privately held Detlev Louis Motorrad-Vertriebs was announced on Friday by the company’s legal counsel, Beiten Burkhardt. The sole heir and widow of company founder Detlev Louis sold all the shares to Berkshire Hathaway after the seller approached the US firm, the law firm said. The deal was worth 400 million euros (US$456 million), according to Bloomberg News. Detlev Louis sells helmets, motorbike clothing and accessories in more than 70 stores in Germany and Austria, as well as online.
AUTOMAKERS
Brazilians protest GM layoffs
About 3,000 workers at a General Motors Co (GM) plant in Brazil went on an open-ended strike on Friday over planned layoffs. The metalworkers union at the plant in Sao Jose dos Campos in southeastern Sao Paulo state said the strikers had downed tools to protest the planned firing of 794 staff suspended in September but who resumed working last week. Some 2,000 afternoon shift workers were set later on Friday to decide if they would join the stoppage. The news came after Volkswagen AG last month scrapped plans to slash 800 of 13,000 jobs at their plant in Anchieta, near Sao Paulo, following a 10-day strike.
CREDIT
US judge rules against Amex
A US judge on Thursday ruled that American Express policies barring merchants from steering customers to lower-cost credit cards results in higher prices and violates antitrust law. US District Judge Garaufis concluded that the US credit-card giant crossed a line in barring about 3.4 million merchants who accept its cards from steering customers to other credit card brands that charge merchants less for transactions. The ruling hands a victory to US and state officials in the five-year-old case.
TELECOMS
IDT, ETECSA clinch deal
IDT Corp, the largest US-based provider of international long distance calling, has reached an agreement with Cuba’s ETECSA telecom company to provide phone service between the two countries as they normalize relations. The Cuban company, Empresa de Telecomunicaciones de Cuba SA, said in a statement on Friday that the deal enables “the reestablishment of direct communication between the United States and Cuba.” It “will allow for better capabilities and improved communication quality between the people of both nations,” added the statement, published in state-run paper Granma.
OIL
Canada to raise insurance
Canada will boost the minimum insurance that railways will be required to carry when they haul crude oil and will impose levies on oil shipments to build up a supplementary fund to cover major disasters, under a bill introduced on Friday. Transport Minister Lisa Raitt, announcing the legislation, said railroads would have to carry up to C$1 billion (US$800 million) in insurance for carrying substantial quantities of dangerous goods. Shippers of crude oil would also have to pay a levy per tonne of crude oil shipped. This would go into a fund to pay for damage exceeding a railway’s minimum insurance level for a crude-by-rail accident.
UNITED KINGDOM
Tax deadline boosts surplus
Britain last month posted its biggest budget surplus in seven years as a deadline for filing personal income-tax returns boosted payments to a record. Income tax receipts rose an annual 6.1 percent to ￡26.7 billion (US$41 billion) last month, with self-assessment surging almost 16 percent, according to data published on Friday in London. The surplus excluding public-sector banks was ￡8.75 billion, which compared with economists’ forecast for ￡9 billion. In the first 10 months of the fiscal year, the deficit narrowed to ￡74 billion from ￡80 billion a year earlier. The figures are the last before Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne announces his budget next month.
SMARTPHONES
US judge rejects Google suit
A US federal judge on Friday dismissed a lawsuit accusing Google Inc of harming smartphone buyers by forcing handset makers that use its Android operating system to make the search engine company’s own applications the default option. Consumers claimed that Google required companies such as Samsung Electronics Co to favor Google apps such as YouTube on Android-powered phones, and restrict rival apps such as Microsoft Corp’s Bing. However, US District Judge Beth Labson Freeman in San Jose, California, said the consumers failed to show that higher prices stemmed from Google’s having illegally forced restrictive contracts on the handset makers.
AUTOMAKERS
Katayama dies, aged 105
Yutaka Katayama, a former president of Nissan Motor Co’s US unit who built the Z sportscar into a powerful global brand in the 1970s, has died. He was 105. Known as the “father of the Z,” Katayama won international respect for the Datsun Z as an affordable sportscar at a time when Japan-made products were synonymous with slipshod quality. Katayama, who died on Thursday, retired from Nissan in 1977. Inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame in both the US and Japan, Katayama is revered by Z fan clubs around the world.
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
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