TECHNOLOGY
Cisco announces job cuts
Cisco Systems Inc said on Wednesday that it is laying off 1,100 more workers, deepening job losses at the Internet gear maker, which is battling declining revenue. The new round of layoffs comes on top of the 5,500 jobs Cisco announced it was cutting in August last year. That amounted to about 7 percent of its workforce at the time. The San Jose, California-based company on Wednesday reported US$11.94 billion in revenue for its fiscal third quarter that ended last month. That was down from US$12 billion a year earlier. It said it expects revenue to dip 4 to 6 percent in the quarter ending in July compared with a year ago.
MACROECONOMICS
Jakarta seeks higher growth
Indonesian Minister of Finance Sri Mulyani Indrawati said boosting economic growth above 5.6 percent next year was “very critical” and she hoped the government would not need to cut spending this year to keep the budget deficit in check. Exports are rebounding quite strongly and “that’s encouraging,” Indrawati said on Wednesday in an interview on the sidelines of the Islamic Development Bank’s annual meeting in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The global outlook has improved and domestic demand is holding up, she said. The government is targeting growth of 5.1 to 5.2 percent this year and estimates the budget deficit would reach 2.4 percent of GDP, below the 3 percent cap.
MACROECONOMICS
Australian employment up
Australia’s jobless rate fell last month, adding to the previous month’s strong employment gains, reinforcing expectations that the central bank would not cut interest rates further. Employment rose by 37,400 jobs from March and the jobless rate fell to 5.7 percent last month, the lowest since January, according to the latest government data released yesterday. Full-time jobs fell by 11,600, while part-time employment rose by 49,000, data showed. The labor participation rate held at 64.8 percent versus the 64.7 percent forecast by analysts.
REAL ESTATE
Price growth in China eases
Growth in China’s housing prices eased last month after authorities imposed more restrictions on property purchases. New home prices, excluding state-subsidized housing, rose last month in 58 of the 70 cities tracked by the government, compared with 62 in March, the National Bureau of Statistics said yesterday. Prices fell in eight cities and were unchanged in four, the data showed. On an annual basis, new home prices rose in 69 cities last month, compared with 68 in March. Meanwhile, foreign direct investment into China fell 0.1 percent to 286.41 billion yuan (US$41.56 billion) in the first four months of this year from the same period a year earlier, the Ministry of Commerce said yesterday.
AUTOMAKERS
Volvo to abandon diesel
Volvo Car Co might stop developing new diesel engines due to high costs triggered by stricter regulations, the head of Swedish carmaker said in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published on Wednesday. “From today’s perspective we will no longer develop any new generation diesel engines,” chairman Hakan Samuelsson said. The company will continue building its latest model of diesel engines, first developed in 2013, but Samuelsson said it would be too costly to invest in research for a new motor. He said it was unclear how long the current diesel program would run, but the newspaper estimated that it could end in 2023.
Cairo’s new monorail slices across the city skyline, running above the familiar chaos of blaring horns and aging buses’ exhaust fumes that mark rush hour below. The US$4.5 billion monorail, opened this month, is among Egypt’s most prominent new transport projects, part of a debt-funded infrastructure drive criticized for sapping state finances while bringing limited benefits to most of the country’s 109 million people. “It feels like you’re in a different country,” said Ramy Sayed, a restaurant manager, aboard a driverless Innovia 300 train. “No noise, no traffic, we’re not used to this.” The eastern line runs 56km from the bustling middle-class
Taiwanese firms have increased investment in the Philippines in recent years as Manila’s ties with Washington deepen and global supply chains continue to shift away from China, an expert at the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) said yesterday. The Philippines had not been among Taiwanese investors’ top choices in Southeast Asia, CIER Taiwan ASEAN Studies Center director Kristy Hsu (徐遵慈) said at a seminar in Taipei. However, Taiwan’s investment in the country has grown significantly since the COVID-19 pandemic, reaching US $257 million last year, a high in recent years, she said. Although Taiwan’s total investment in the Philippines still lags
Intel Corp regards Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) as a longstanding partner, as the US chipmaker would continue outsourcing production of advanced chips to TSMC, Intel chief executive officer Lip-Bu Tan (陳立武) said yesterday. “I don’t look at people as competitors. I look at the collaboration... Nvidia is also, you know, a good friend,” Tan told a news conference following his keynote speech at the Computex trade show in Taipei. “It’s a very trusted partnership for us... We are a big, top customer for them, and we’re going to continue doing that,” he said, referring to TSMC, the world’s largest foundry
Artificial intelligence (AI) agents would supplant smartphones as the center of people’s digital lives, fundamentally reshaping personal devices and driving a major computing upgrade cycle, Qualcomm Inc CEO Cristiano Amon said yesterday. In his keynote speech for this year’s Computex trade show in Taipei, Amon said that the rise of "agentic AI" — AI systems capable of reasoning, planning and carrying out tasks autonomously — would transform how people interact with technology across phones, PCs, vehicles and wearable devices. Describing the technology as the next major evolution in computing, Amon said that "2026 is the year of agents.” For decades, smartphones have sat
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