FRANCE
Growth will hold: Insee
Growth will hold up in the first half in the face of a slowing global economy as consumer spending and investment bolster domestic demand, national statistics office Insee said on Thursday. The economy will expand 0.4 percent in both the first and the second quarters, compared with 0.3 percent in the final three months of last year, Insee said. Corporate investment will grow 0.7 percent and 0.8 percent consecutively and consumer spending will climb 0.8 percent and 0.4 percent, the statistics office estimates.
TECHNOLOGY
Alphabet to sell Boston
Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc, is seeking to sell its Boston Dynamics subsidiary specialized in developing and manufacturing robots, the Financial Times reported yesterday. Financial agency Bloomberg, which also reported Alphabet intends to sell the company it acquired in 2013 as part of efforts to boost its efforts in robotics, cited two people with knowledge of the company’s plans. Toyota Motor Corp and Amazon.com Inc are seen as potential buyers of Boston Dynamics, Bloomberg reported, as Alphabet “concluded that Boston Dynamics is not likely to produce a marketable product in the next few years.”
UNITED KINGDOM
BOE maintains rate
The Bank of England (BOE) has voted to keep its main interest rate on hold, it said on Thursday, faced with a weak growth outlook at home and abroad. The move by the Monetary Policy Committee to keep borrowing costs at 0.50 percent, where they have stood for seven years, comes a day after the US Federal Reserve also left rates unchanged. The BOE also maintained the amount of cash stimulus, or quantitative easing, pumping around the British economy at ￡375 billion (US$540 billion).
EUROZONE
Core inflation at 0.8%
Underlying inflation pressures in the 19-country eurozone were not as subdued last month as initially thought, official figures showed on Thursday. The EU’s statistical agency said the core rate, which strips out energy, food, alcohol and tobacco, was 0.8 percent in the year to last month, up from the initial estimate of 0.7 percent. The headline number, which includes those typically more volatile items, was left unchanged at minus-0.2 percent.
REAL ESTATE
Juwai.com plans IPO
Juwai.com (居外網), a property search engine that lists real estate around the world for Chinese buyers, is seeking to go public in Australia as early as this year. The firm is raising funds from institutional investors and strategic partners before selling shares in an initial public offering (IPO) at the end of the year or in early next year, Juwai chief executive officer Charles Pittar said in an interview in Tokyo yesterday. He declined to provide additional details. Juwai, based in Hong Kong and Shanghai, has 2 million unique visitors per month.
MACHINERY
Caterpillar to trail estimates
Caterpillar Inc, the biggest maker of construction and mining machinery, said first-quarter sales and profit will trail analyst estimates as miners cut billions from their investment budgets to weather a commodity rout. Sales will be US$9.3 billion to US$9.4 billion and adjusted earnings per share will be US$0.65 to US$0.70, the company said on Thursday. That is below the average estimates of US$10.2 billion and US$0.95 respectively by analysts.
HORMUZ ISSUE: The US president said he expected crude prices to drop at the end of the war, which he called a ‘minor excursion’ that could continue ‘for a little while’ The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait started reducing oil production, as the near-closure of the crucial Strait of Hormuz ripples through energy markets and affects global supply. Abu Dhabi National Oil Co (ADNOC) is “managing offshore production levels to address storage requirements,” the company said in a statement, without giving details. Kuwait Petroleum Corp said it was lowering production at its oil fields and refineries after “Iranian threats against safe passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz.” The war in the Middle East has all but closed Hormuz, the narrow waterway linking the Persian Gulf to the open seas,
Apple Inc increased iPhone production in India by about 53 percent last year and now makes a quarter of its marquee devices there, reflecting the US company’s efforts to avoid tariffs on China. The company assembled about 55 million iPhones in India last year, up from 36 million a year earlier, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be named because the numbers aren’t public. Apple makes about 220 million to 230 million iPhones a year globally, with India’s share of the total increasing rapidly. Apple has accelerated its expansion in the world’s most populous country in recent years, bolstered
HEADWINDS: The company said it expects its computer business, as well as consumer electronics and communications segments to see revenue declines due to seasonality Pegatron Corp (和碩) yesterday said it aims to grow its artificial intelligence (AI) server revenue more than 10-fold this year from last year, driven by orders from neocloud solutions clients and large cloud service providers. The electronics manufacturing service provider said AI server revenue growth would be driven primarily by the Nvidia Corp GB300 server platform. Server shipments are expected to increase each quarter this year, with the second half likely to outperform the first half, it said. The AI server market is expected to broaden this year as more inference applications emerge, which would drive demand for system-on-chip, application-specific integrated circuits
PROJECTION: TSMC said it expects strong growth this year, with revenue in US dollars projected to grow by about 30 percent, outperforming the industry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday reported consolidated sales last month reached NT$317.66 billion (US$9.98 billion), the highest ever for the month of February, driven by robust demand for chips built using the company’s advanced 3-nanometer (3nm) process. Last month’s figure was up 22.2 percent from a year earlier, but fell 20.8 percent from January, the world’s largest contract chipmaker said in a statement. For the first two months of the year, TSMC posted cumulative sales of NT$718.91 billion, up 29.9 percent from a year earlier. Analysts attributed the growth to sustained global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) products
RSS