GERMANY
Nation’s economy contracts
The nation’s first economic contraction since 2015 was led by a drop in exports and private consumption, a trend that needs to be reversed if Europe’s largest economy is to rebound before the end of the year. The 0.2 percent decline in the third quarter, matching the initial reading, has been blamed on a slump in the auto industry that the Bundesbank and government predict would be temporary. The data published yesterday showed that exports plunged 0.9 percent in the period, while private consumption fell 0.3 percent. There was strong growth in capital and construction investment.
SINGAPORE
Property market cools
The city-state’s property market cooling measures have moderated the pace of price rises and subdued transaction activity, the nation’s central bank said. That should contribute to stronger household balance sheets over the medium term. Aggressive land bids have declined after the July curbs, which should benefit the long-term stability of the property sector and encourage prudence among real-estate firms, the Monetary Authority of Singapore said in its annual financial stability review yesterday.
TRADE
Import barriers a concern
The world’s biggest economies slapped import restrictions on nearly half a trillion US dollars of trade over the past six months, the WTO said on Thursday, voicing “serious concern.” Forty new import barriers were erected by G20 states between mid-May and mid-October — six times more than during the preceding six months — impacting US$481 billion in trade, a WTO report showed. That was the highest figure recorded since the WTO started calculating the measure in 2012.
RETAILERS
US online sales increase
Nordstrom Inc and Walmart Inc saw the biggest online sales increases in the week leading up to Thanksgiving among US retailers studied by Edison Trends. Nordstrom’s Web revenue almost doubled over the period — Thursday last week to Wednesday — from a year earlier, while Walmart’s increased 67 percent. Target Corp, Macy’s Inc, Amazon.com Inc and Best Buy Inc also saw sales rise, according to Edison, an e-commerce research company that uses e-mail receipts from purchases to calculate trends.
INTERNET
Facebook to pay 100m euros
Social media giant Facebook Inc has agreed to pay more than 100 million euros (US$114 million) to end a fiscal fraud dispute, Italian tax authorities said on Thursday. The accord aims to “end the disagreement relating to tax inquiries undertaken by the financial police at the behest of the Milan prosecutor for the period 2010 to 2016,” Italy’s tax authority said in a statement. The authority added that Facebook Italy would be “making a payment of more than 100 million euros.”
CANADA
Nation lacks ‘tech clusters’
Technology talent is drawing more investment to cities such as Toronto and Montreal, but the nation could lose momentum if it does not do more to encourage industries to scale up, CBRE Ltd said. The nation lacks “tech clusters,” dense areas of activity that contain critical mass for companies, and educational and research institutions, the Toronto-based brokerage said in a report on Thursday. Toronto is the only city competitive enough to rank among powerhouses in North America, it said.
Napoleon Osorio is proud of being the first taxi driver to have accepted payment in bitcoin in the first country in the world to make the cryptocurrency legal tender: El Salvador. He credits Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s decision to bank on bitcoin three years ago with changing his life. “Before I was unemployed... And now I have my own business,” said the 39-year-old businessman, who uses an app to charge for rides in bitcoin and now runs his own car rental company. Three years ago the leader of the Central American nation took a huge gamble when he put bitcoin
Demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips should spur growth for the semiconductor industry over the next few years, the CEO of a major supplier to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said, dismissing concerns that investors had misjudged the pace and extent of spending on AI. While the global chip market has grown about 8 percent annually over the past 20 years, AI semiconductors should grow at a much higher rate going forward, Scientech Corp (辛耘) chief executive officer Hsu Ming-chi (許明琪) told Bloomberg Television. “This booming of the AI industry has just begun,” Hsu said. “For the most prominent
PARTNERSHIPS: TSMC said it has been working with multiple memorychip makers for more than two years to provide a full spectrum of solutions to address AI demand Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it has been collaborating with multiple memorychip makers in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) used in artificial intelligence (AI) applications for more than two years, refuting South Korean media report's about an unprecedented partnership with Samsung Electronics Co. As Samsung is competing with TSMC for a bigger foundry business, any cooperation between the two technology heavyweights would catch the eyes of investors and experts in the semiconductor industry. “We have been working with memory partners, including Micron, Samsung Memory and SK Hynix, on HBM solutions for more than two years, aiming to advance 3D integrated circuit
NATURAL PARTNERS: Taiwan and Japan have complementary dominant supply chain positions, are geographically and culturally close, and have similar work ethics Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) and other related companies would add ￥11.2 trillion (US$78.31 billion) to Japan’s chipmaking hot spot Kumamoto Prefecture over the next decade, a local bank’s analysis said. Kyushu Financial Group, a lender based in Kumamoto’s capital, almost doubled its projection for the economic impact that the chip sector would bring to the region compared to its estimate a year earlier, a presentation on Thursday said. The bank said that 171 firms had made new investments since November 2021, up from 90 in an earlier analysis. TSMC’s Kumamoto location was once a sleepy farming area, but has undergone
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