AUTOMAKERS
Nissan dives on scandal
Nissan Motor Co’s passenger car sales in Japan plummeted more than 55 percent last month, data showed yesterday, after the company suspended all domestic production due to an inspection scandal. Sales of Nissan-brand passenger cars stood at 10,134 vehicles, down by 55.2 percentage points from a year earlier, the Japan Automobile Dealers Association said. The drop comes after Nissan admitted it had failed to meet domestic rules on final vehicle inspections and recalled about 1.2 million vehicles produced and sold in Japan for reinspection. The dramatic fall in Nissan cars compares with a more modest decline of 4.4 percentage points in overall sales in the Japanese market in the month.
AUSTRALIA
Housing boom over: UBS
The housing boom that has seen the nation’s home prices more than double since the turn of the century is “officially over,” after data showed prices are flatlining, UBS Group AG said. National house prices were unchanged last month from September, while annual growth has slowed to 7 percent from more than 10 percent as recently as July, CoreLogic Inc data released yesterday showed. The cooling housing market might encourage the Reserve Bank of Australia to keep interest rates at a record low. A rate hike would be undesirable, as it would put further downward pressure on housing prices, AMP Capital Investors Ltd senior economist Diana Mousina said.
TECHNOLOGY
Grab wallet for Singapore
Grab, Southeast Asia’s largest ride-hailing app, is launching a new digital wallet service in Singapore as it stakes a claim to the region’s burgeoning mobile payments sector. Starting yesterday, Grab’s 4 million users in the city-state could scan a quick response, or QR, code to pay for dishes at hawker stands. Grab plans to increase the number of small merchants accepting GrabPay from 25 to 1,000 by the end of next month. Grab, which is bigger than Uber Technologies Inc in the region, wants to build on its success in ride-hailing by adding new services in the more lucrative payments market. The company has expanded from taxi booking to private vehicles, rental cars and shuttle bus services. The five-year-old start-up plans to roll out mobile wallet services across the region next year.
NIGERIA
Crop park to be established
The government plans to establish a US$1 billion crop-processing park with Turkish investors in Niger State as part of efforts to improve value and boost agricultural exports, according to the Nigerian Investment Promotion Council. The Badeggi Crop Processing Zone is expected process more than 750,000 tonnes of crops, including rice, maize, yam, cassava, groundnuts and peas annually, the council said. The government plans to set up 15 similar crop zones nationwide.
MACAU
Casino revenue soars
Casino revenue last month climbed to the highest in three years as many high-stake bettors and recreational players visited the territory after China’s Golden Week holiday. Gross gaming receipts rose 22.1 percent to 26.6 billion patacas (US$3.3 billion), according to data released yesterday by the Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau. That compares with the median estimate for a 14.5 percent increase in a Bloomberg survey of nine analysts. The gains in casino revenue is the highest since October 2014.
MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s biggest smartphone chip supplier, yesterday said it plans to double investment in data center-related technologies, including advanced packaging and high-speed interconnect technologies, to broaden the new business’ customer and service portfolios. The chip designer is redirecting its resources to data centers, mainly designing application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities for cloud service providers. The data center business is forecast to lead growth in the next three years and become the company’s second-biggest revenue source, replacing chips used in smart devices, MediaTek president Joe Chen (陳冠州) told a media event in Taipei. “Three or four years
CHIP HANG-UP: Surging memorychip prices would deal a blow to smartphone sales this year, potentially hindering one of MediaTek’s biggest sources of revenue MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s biggest smartphone chip designer, yesterday said its new artificial intelligence (AI) chips used in data centers are to account for 20 percent of its total revenue next year, as cloud service providers race to deploy AI infrastructure to meet voracious demand. MediaTek is believed to be developing tensor processing units for Google, which are used in AI applications. While it did not confirm such reports, MediaTek said its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business would be a new growth engine for the company. It again hiked its forecast for the addressable ASIC market to US$70 billion by 2028, compared
Until US President Donald Trump’s return a year ago, when the EU talked about cutting economic dependency on foreign powers — it was understood to mean China, but now Brussels has US tech in its sights. As Trump ramps up his threats — from strong-arming Europe on trade to pushing to seize Greenland — concern has grown that the unpredictable leader could, should he so wish, plunge the bloc into digital darkness. Since Trump’s Greenland climbdown, top officials have stepped up warnings that the EU is dangerously exposed to geopolitical shocks and must work toward strategic independence — in defense, energy and
Motorists ride past a mural along a street in Varanasi, India, yesterday.
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