TRADE
Next US-China visits set
A US delegation headed by Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is scheduled to visit China on Thursday and Friday next week for the next round of negotiations, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce said yesterday. Chinese Vice Premier Liu He (劉鶴) is to travel to Washington early next month for more talks, ministry spokesman Gao Feng (高峰) said. US President Donald Trump on Wednesday said that the US might leave tariffs on Chinese goods for a “substantial period” to ensure that Beijing complies with any trade agreement.
CRIME
Counterfeiting gang nabbed
Chinese police have arrested 32 members of a group they said made and sold up to 100 million yuan (US$15 million) of counterfeit luxury goods from brands such as Louis Vuitton and Loewe, Xinhua news agency reported yesterday. Police in Shanghai also closed two assembly lines used to make the counterfeits and seized more than 4,000 bags, clothes and accessories.
CRIME
Fraud suspect pleads guilty
A Lithuanian man on Wednesday pleaded guilty to US charges that he helped orchestrate a scheme to defraud Facebook Inc and Google out of more than US$100 million. Evaldas Rimasauskas, 50, entered his plea to one count of wire fraud before US District Judge George Daniels in Manhattan. He faces a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison at his sentencing in July. He also agreed to forfeit about US$49.7 million he obtained from the scheme.
BRAZIL
Interest rates unchanged
The central bank on Wednesday on left interest rates unchanged after holding its first monetary policy meeting under new Governor Roberto Campos Neto. The bank’s unanimous decision — only the second since pro-business President Jair Bolsonaro took power in January — to keep rates at 6.5 percent was in line with market expectations.
INVESTMENT
Levi Strauss IPO a success
Levis Strauss & Co raised $623.3 million in its US initial public offering (IPO), pricing shares above the marketed range. The iconic blue jeans maker sold 36.7 million shares at US$17 apiece on Wednesday, according to a statement. It had marketed them for US$14 to US$16 apiece. The stock started trading yesterday on the New York Stock Exchange. The offering valued Levi Strauss at US$6.55 billion, based on the number of shares outstanding after the IPO.
CRIME
S Korean firms plead guilty
South Korean oil refiners S-Oil Corp and Hyundai Oilbank Co have agreed to plead guilty to criminal and civil charges of rigging bids to supply fuel to the US military, the US Department of Justice said on Wednesday. Hyundai is to pay US$83.1 million in criminal and civil fines, while S-Oil would pay US$43.58 million to settle the allegations, the department said.
AVIATION
India hopes to save jobs
The Indian government is mulling options to save jobs at Jet Airways India Ltd, including asking low-cost carrier SpiceJet Ltd to consider taking over some of the debt-laden company’s aircraft, people with knowledge of the matter said. The proposal involves SpiceJet acquiring as many as 40 of Jet Airways’ grounded planes that are owned by lessors, one of the people 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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