POLITICS
Trump still anti-AT&T bid
US president-elect Donald Trump remains opposed to AT&T Inc’s planned US$85.4 billion acquisition of Time Warner Inc, Bloomberg reported, citing people close to the president-elect. Trump, who has been silent about the transaction for months, told a friend in the past few weeks that he still considers the merger to be a bad deal, Bloomberg reported. He believed the deal would concentrate too much power in the media industry, Bloomberg said. Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, is also opposed to the deal, Bloomberg reported, citing another person.
RETAIL
Wal-Mart reaches Visa deal
Wal-Mart Stores Inc reached an agreement to continue accepting Visa Inc credit cards in Canada, ending the retailer’s threat to bar the world’s largest payments network from its 409 stores in the country. Customers in Manitoba and Thunder Bay, Ontario, would be able to use their Visa cards from yesterday, Alex Roberton, a spokesman for the retailer, said on Thursday in a statement. Wal-Mart’s Canadian unit threatened in June last year to expel Visa from all of its stores nationwide unless the network agreed to lower the amount it charges for credit-card transactions.
CYPRUS
Bank says it repaid bailout
Bank of Cyprus, the Mediterranean island’s largest lender, on Thursday announced it had paid back in full the 11.4 billion euros (US$12.07 billion) in Emergency Liquidity Assistance it received in an international bailout. The bank said in a statement that it was “another significant milestone in the journey back to strength since 2013.” In March 2013, Cyprus clinched a 10 billion euro loan from the EU and IMF to bail out its troubled economy and oversized banking system. Under the terms of the deal, the government was required to close the island’s second-largest bank, Laiki, and impose a 47.5 percent haircut on deposits above 100,000 euros at Bank of Cyprus.
PORTUGAL
Lone Star ‘most promising’
Portugal’s central bank said on Wednesday an offer from US private equity firm Lone Star is the most promising bid to buy Novo Banco SA, the so-called good bank salvaged by the Portuguese government from the collapse of major lender Banco Espirito Santo SA. The Bank of Portugal said it has invited the fund, based in Dallas, Texas, to “deepen negotiations” over the possible purchase, though it said rival bidders have expressed a willingness to improve their offers and would not be excluded. The statement gave neither price tag nor date for a final decision. It did not name the other bidders.
SERVICES
UK sees 17-month high
A survey of Britain’s services sector, which accounts for the bulk of the economy, shows it grew at a 17-month high at the end of last year. The purchasing managers’ index, a gauge of business activity, rose for a third month to 56.2 points last month from 55.2 in November. The index, published on Thursday by IHS Markit and the Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply, is on a 100-point scale, with figures above 50 indicating growth. The improvement was due to an increase in new work and comes despite uncertainty over the country’s decision to leave the EU. Britain says it will trigger the two-year Brexit process by the end of March.
Meta Platforms Inc offered US$100 million bonuses to OpenAI employees in an unsuccessful bid to poach the ChatGPT maker’s talent and strengthen its own generative artificial intelligence (AI) teams, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said. Facebook’s parent company — a competitor of OpenAI — also offered “giant” annual salaries exceeding US$100 million to OpenAI staffers, Altman said in an interview on the Uncapped with Jack Altman podcast released on Tuesday. “It is crazy,” Sam Altman told his brother Jack in the interview. “I’m really happy that at least so far none of our best people have decided to take them
BYPASSING CHINA TARIFFS: In the first five months of this year, Foxconn sent US$4.4bn of iPhones to the US from India, compared with US$3.7bn in the whole of last year Nearly all the iPhones exported by Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團) from India went to the US between March and last month, customs data showed, far above last year’s average of 50 percent and a clear sign of Apple Inc’s efforts to bypass high US tariffs imposed on China. The numbers, being reported by Reuters for the first time, show that Apple has realigned its India exports to almost exclusively serve the US market, when previously the devices were more widely distributed to nations including the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. During March to last month, Foxconn, known as Hon Hai Precision Industry
PLANS: MSI is also planning to upgrade its service center in the Netherlands Micro-Star International Co (MSI, 微星) yesterday said it plans to set up a server assembly line at its Poland service center this year at the earliest. The computer and peripherals manufacturer expects that the new server assembly line would shorten transportation times in shipments to European countries, a company spokesperson told the Taipei Times by telephone. MSI manufactures motherboards, graphics cards, notebook computers, servers, optical storage devices and communication devices. The company operates plants in Taiwan and China, and runs a global network of service centers. The company is also considering upgrading its service center in the Netherlands into a
Taiwan’s property market is entering a freeze, with mortgage activity across the nation’s six largest cities plummeting in the first quarter, H&B Realty Co (住商不動產) said yesterday, citing mounting pressure on housing demand amid tighter lending rules and regulatory curbs. Mortgage applications in Taipei, New Taipei City, Taoyuan, Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung totaled 28,078 from January to March, a sharp 36.3 percent decline from 44,082 in the same period last year, the nation’s largest real-estate brokerage by franchise said, citing data from the Joint Credit Information Center (JCIC, 聯徵中心). “The simultaneous decline across all six cities reflects just how drastically the market
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