MACROECONOMICS
UK employment slows
Growth in the number of people on British companies’ payrolls last month slowed to 0.8 percent from 1.1 percent in February, preliminary tax data that have been released earlier than usual to give a clearer sense of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic showed. “These experimental statistics show a softening picture in March, but cover the month as a whole, including the period before the coronavirus restrictions were in place,” Office for National Statistics official David Freeman said. The agency also reported a 12,100 monthly increase in the number of unemployment benefit claims last month, far below the median forecast of 172,500 in a Reuters poll of economists.
AUTOMAKERS
PSA vehicle sales fall 30%
French automaker PSA Group — owner of the Peugeot, Citroen and Opel brands — yesterday said it sold nearly 30 percent fewer vehicles during the first quarter of this year, as lockdowns due to the pandemic kept consumers away. The group suffered a less severe drop in revenue, which fell 15.6 percent to 15.2 billion euros (US$16.5 billion). The automaker sold 627,000 vehicles in the first quarter, compared with nearly 886,000 vehicles a year earlier. The second quarter is likely to be much more difficult for the automaker as lockdowns across Europe, its major market, have hobbled production and sales across the region this month. PSA now expects Europe’s auto market to shrink 25 percent this year.
BANKING
BOJ expects rising bad loans
Japanese lenders must brace for rising bad-loan costs and investment losses even as the financial system shows resilience to the COVID-19-fueled economic slump, the Bank of Japan (BOJ) said yesterday. If the downturn is prolonged, more companies at home and abroad could face solvency problems, raising credit costs, it said in its semi-annual Financial System Report. Losses on banks’ securities investment “could deteriorate” due to financial market moves, and foreign currency funding might become destabilized, it said.
GAMING
Components limit Switch
Nintendo Co has asked its partners to increase Switch production to sate a surge in global demand during the pandemic, but a lack of key components, such as memory, might curtail efforts to boost output. The Kyoto-based company has instructed suppliers to meet a revised forecast for 22 million units in the fiscal year ending March 2021, people familiar with the matter said. That is about the same level as the previous year, but up from expectations of a slight decrease in production of the three-year-old console.
SOFTWARE
SAP co-CEO stepping down
German software giant SAP AG co-CEO Jennifer Morgan is stepping down after just six months in the job, as the company switches back to a solo boss to steer it through the pandemic. Morgan, 48, became the first woman to head a company listed on Frankfurt’s DAX 30 index when she was appointed co-CEO, alongside Christian Klein, in October last year. “More than ever, the current environment requires companies to take swift, determined action which is best supported by a very clear leadership structure,” SAP said in a statement on Monday. In a decision it said was “mutually agreed” with the supervisory board, Morgan is to leave on Thursday next week, while Klein stays on as sole CEO.
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass
People walk past advertising for a Syensqo chip at the Semicon Taiwan exhibition in Taipei yesterday.
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
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