CHINA
Inflation accelerating
Consumer prices last month accelerated at their fastest pace in almost eight years as an African swine fever epidemic caused pork prices to more than double, data showed yesterday. The consumer price index — a key gauge of retail inflation — was 4.5 percent, the National Bureau of Statistics said, up from 3.8 percent in October and the highest rate since January 2012. The government’s consumer inflation target for this year is about 3 percent. The producer price index — an important barometer of the industrial sector that measures the cost of goods at the factory gate — showed that prices fell 1.4 percent year-on-year last month.
RETAIL
Ted Baker bosses quit
Ted Baker PLC chairman David Bernstein and interim chief executive officer Lindsay Page have resigned as the British fashion chain ends its most difficult year ever following a scandal over its founder’s workplace behavior. The retailer yesterday suspended its dividend payout as it forecast pretax profit could decline more than 90 percent to as little as ￡5 million (US$6.6 million) this year. “The last 12 months has undoubtedly been the most challenging in our history,” the company said. Ted Baker last week said that it would appoint outside lawyers and accountants to review an overstatement of unsold goods.
MEDIA
ViacomCBS mulls tower sale
ViacomCBS Inc has hired CBRE Group Inc to review its entire real-estate portfolio, including a possible sale of the CBS skyscraper known as Black Rock in midtown Manhattan. ViacomCBS chief executive officer Bob Bakish announced the plan at the UBS Global telecom and media conference in New York on Monday. He did not indicate an expected price for the Eero Saarinen-designed skyscraper, which opened in 1965 and is 38 stories tall. Viacom and CBS, which completed their merger this month, are looking to generate US$500 million in cost savings. CBS occupies about a third of the building at 51 West 52nd Street.
FOOD DELIVERY
Just Eat rejects new bid
Just Eat PLC has rejected Prosus NV’s higher bid saying that it still significantly undervalues the company. Prosus raised its offer for the British food delivery firm by 4.2 percent to ￡7.40 per share on Monday. Just Eat advised its shareholders to stick with an all-share combination with Takeaway.com NV in a statement yesterday. Just Eat shares have been trading above the offer price as shareholders hold out for a bigger premium. They closed at ￡7.81 in London trading on Monday, valuing the company at about ￡5.3 billion.
BANKING
Paul Volcker dies at 92
Former US Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, who tackled inflation in the 1970s and 1980s, and later lent his name to landmark Wall Street reforms, died on Sunday. Volcker, who headed the US central bank from 1979 to 1987, was 92. The cause was complications from prostate cancer, his daughter, Janice Zima, said. In a career spanning the post-World War II decades to the 2008-2009 financial crisis — he advised former US presidents from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama — Volcker persuaded lawmakers following the financial meltdown to impose tighter restrictions on the conduct of banks.
ADVANCED: Previously, Taiwanese chip companies were restricted from building overseas fabs with technology less than two generations behind domestic factories Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp, would no longer be restricted from investing in next-generation 2-nanometer chip production in the US, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. However, the ministry added that the world’s biggest contract chipmaker would not be making any reckless decisions, given the weight of its up to US$30 billion investment. To safeguard Taiwan’s chip technology advantages, the government has barred local chipmakers from making chips using more advanced technologies at their overseas factories, in China particularly. Chipmakers were previously only allowed to produce chips using less advanced technologies, specifically
BRAVE NEW WORLD: Nvidia believes that AI would fuel a new industrial revolution and would ‘do whatever we can’ to guide US AI policy, CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia Corp cofounder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) on Tuesday said he is ready to meet US president-elect Donald Trump and offer his help to the incoming administration. “I’d be delighted to go see him and congratulate him, and do whatever we can to make this administration succeed,” Huang said in an interview with Bloomberg Television, adding that he has not been invited to visit Trump’s home base at Mar-a-Lago in Florida yet. As head of the world’s most valuable chipmaker, Huang has an opportunity to help steer the administration’s artificial intelligence (AI) policy at a moment of rapid change.
TARIFF SURGE: The strong performance could be attributed to the growing artificial intelligence device market and mass orders ahead of potential US tariffs, analysts said The combined revenue of companies listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange and the Taipei Exchange for the whole of last year totaled NT$44.66 trillion (US$1.35 trillion), up 12.8 percent year-on-year and hit a record high, data compiled by investment consulting firm CMoney showed on Saturday. The result came after listed firms reported a 23.92 percent annual increase in combined revenue for last month at NT$4.1 trillion, the second-highest for the month of December on record, and posted a 15.63 percent rise in combined revenue for the December quarter at NT$12.25 billion, the highest quarterly figure ever, the data showed. Analysts attributed the
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) quarterly sales topped estimates, reinforcing investor hopes that the torrid pace of artificial intelligence (AI) hardware spending would extend into this year. The go-to chipmaker for Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc reported a 39 percent rise in December-quarter revenue to NT$868.5 billion (US$26.35 billion), based on calculations from monthly disclosures. That compared with an average estimate of NT$854.7 billion. The strong showing from Taiwan’s largest company bolsters expectations that big tech companies from Alphabet Inc to Microsoft Corp would continue to build and upgrade datacenters at a rapid clip to propel AI development. Growth accelerated for
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