CHINA
Q1 plunge of 9% forecast
China’s economy is set to post a 9 percent plunge in the first quarter from a year earlier, Goldman Sachs Group Inc said yesterday. A day after retail sales, industrial output and investment data plunged by far more than the median estimate of analysts, Goldman economists said that their new forecast for real GDP growth this year is 3 percent, down from 5.5 percent. The previous first-quarter forecast was for an expansion of 2.5 percent.
ENVIRONMENT
McDonald’s targets toys
McDonald’s Corp yesterday pledged to end the use of plastic found in toys served with children’s “Happy Meals” in the UK and Ireland by the beginning of next year. The plastic items would be replaced with a “soft toy, sustainable paper-based gifts or books,” the US fast-food giant said. “This represents the biggest reduction in plastic by McDonald’s UK and Ireland to date and is the next step in its mission to reduce its environmental impact across all areas of the business,” the company said in a statement.
RETAIL
Carphone to shut stores
British electricals retailer Dixons Carphone PLC is closing all of its 531 UK standalone Carphone Warehouse stores as part of a plan to turn around its mobile business, the company said yesterday. The stores, representing 8 percent of Dixons Carphone’s total UK selling space, are to close on April 3. The closures would result in 2,900 redundancies, with 1,800 other workers expected to take new roles internally.
RETAIL
Nordstrom revises forecast
Apparel retailer Nordstrom Inc on Monday withdrew its forecast for the current fiscal year and said that it would close stores in the US and Canada for two weeks, starting yesterday, in an effort to arrest the spread of COVID-19. The stores closing include Nordstrom full-line, Nordstrom Rack and Trunk Club clubhouses. It would provide pay and benefits to its store employees during the period, Nordstrom said.
AVIATION
S&P downgrades Boeing
S&P Global Ratings on Monday downgraded its rating for aircraft manufacturer Boeing Co. “Boeing’s cash flows for the next two years are going to be much weaker than we had expected, due to the 737 MAX grounding, resulting in worse credit ratios than we had forecast,” S&P said in a statement. “In addition, the significant reduction in global air travel due to the coronavirus will likely result in an increase in aircraft order deferrals, further pressuring cash flows.” It lowered its rating for the company to “BBB” from “A-.”
TECHNOLOGY
Huge French fine for Apple
The French Competition Authority on Monday slapped a record 1.1 billion euro (US$1.2 billion) fine on US tech giant Apple Inc for anti-competitive behavior toward its independent retail distributors. It found that Apple acted to prevent independent retailers in France from competing on price and abused its economic power over them, the agency said. Authority President Isabelle de Silva said that it was “the heaviest fine against a firm” as well as in any case, which also included two of Apple’s wholesalers in France who were hit with fines worth nearly 140 million euros.
China’s top chipmaker has warned that breakaway spending on artificial intelligence (AI) chips is bringing forward years of future demand, raising the risk that some data centers could sit idle. “Companies would love to build 10 years’ worth of data center capacity within one or two years,” Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯) cochief executive officer Zhao Haijun (趙海軍) said yesterday on a call with analysts. “As for what exactly these data centers will do, that hasn’t been fully thought through.” Moody’s Ratings projects that AI-related infrastructure investment would exceed US$3 trillion over the next five years, as developers pour eye-watering sums
Bank of America Corp nearly doubled its forecast for the nation’s economic growth this year, adding to a slew of upgrades even after a rip-roaring last year propelled by demand for artificial intelligence (AI). The firm lifted its projection to 8 percent from 4.5 percent on “relentless global demand” for the hardware that Taiwanese companies make, according to a note dated yesterday by analysts including Xiaoqing Pi (皮曉青). Taiwan’s GDP expanded 8.63 percent last year, the fastest pace since 2010. The increase “reflects our sustained optimism over Taiwan’s technology driven expansion and is reinforced by several recent developments,” including a more stable currency,
NEW IMPORTS: Car dealer PG Union Corp said it would consider introducing US-made models such as the Jeep Grand Cherokee and Stellantis’ RAM 1500 to Taiwan Tesla Taiwan yesterday said that it does not plan to cut its car prices in the wake of Washington and Taipei signing the Agreement on Reciprocal Trade on Thursday to eliminate tariffs on US-made cars. On the other hand, Mercedes-Benz Taiwan said it is planning to lower the price of its five models imported from the US after the zero tariff comes into effect. Tesla in a statement said it has no plan to adjust the prices of the US-made Model 3, Model S and Model X as tariffs are not the only factor the automaker uses to determine pricing policies. Tesla said
OpenAI has warned US lawmakers that its Chinese rival DeepSeek (深度求索) is using unfair and increasingly sophisticated methods to extract results from leading US artificial intelligence (AI) models to train the next generation of its breakthrough R1 chatbot, a memo reviewed by Bloomberg News showed. In the memo, sent on Thursday to the US House of Representatives Select Committee on China, OpenAI said that DeepSeek had used so-called distillation techniques as part of “ongoing efforts to free-ride on the capabilities developed by OpenAI and other US frontier labs.” The company said it had detected “new, obfuscated methods” designed to evade OpenAI’s defenses
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