PHARMACEUTICALS
Novartis to pay US$678m
Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp agreed to pay US$678 million to resolve a whistle-blower case accusing the drugmaker of paying kickbacks to thousands of doctors who prescribed its medicines and wooing them with lavish dinners, ending almost a decade of litigation. The US in 2013 sued the Swiss drugmaker, joining in a case filed two years earlier by a former sales representative who accused the company of using its speakers’ programs to bribe doctors to write prescriptions for its products. Novartis paid “exorbitant speaker fees to doctors who gave no meaningful presentations, and provided expensive meals and alcohol to doctor attendees and their guests,” federal prosecutors in Manhattan said in a statement on Wednesday. As part of the accord, Novartis is to change how it markets its drugs to doctors as part of a “corporate integrity agreement,” the drugmaker said in a statement.
UNITED STATES
House extends PPP
The House of Representatives on Wednesday gave final last-minute congressional approval to extending the popular Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) for small businesses until Aug. 8, hours after the deadline for applications lapsed with more than US$130 billion still available. The Senate on Tuesday passed the extension, shortly before the Small Business Administration (SBA) was to stop accepting new loan applications at 11:59pm. Both chambers used expedited procedures to send the bill to President Donald Trump for his signature. The program was enacted in March as part of the US$2.2 trillion COVID-19 relief package. The US$669 billion program approved more than 4.8 million loans, totaling US$520.6 billion by Tuesday night, the SBA said. The remaining US$134.5 billion would eventually have been returned to the Treasury if Congress did not extend the program.
EUROZONE
Jobless rate ticks up
The unemployment rate in the 19 countries that use the euro in May inched higher to 7.4 percent from 7.3 percent in April, as governments used support programs to cushion the effects of COVID-19 on workers. The figures released yesterday by statistics agency Eurostat show how governments have held down the rise in unemployment through programs that pay part of workers’ salaries in return for companies not laying them off. In Germany, the eurozone’s largest economy, 6.7 million people last month were still on wage support programs. The program pays at least 60 percent of missing pay when workers are put on shorter hours or no hours.
TECHNOLOGY
Takeover faces scrutiny
Global regulators should closely scrutinize the takeover of fitness tracker Fitbit Inc by Alphabet Inc’s Google, because it would strengthen Google’s already dominant position in digital markets, privacy and consumer groups said yesterday. A coalition of 20 organizations sent a statement to antitrust authorities in seven jurisdictions, including the US and the EU, which is on July 20 to rule on the US$2.1 billion deal. “This will be a test case for how regulators address the immense power the tech giants exert over the digital economy and their ability to expand their ecosystems unchecked,” the groups said. The EU can extend its review by four months if it sees antitrust issues that need more scrutiny. The US Department of Justice is also investigating, while Australia’s merger authority last month flagged preliminary concerns over Google’s access to health data.
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.
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
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
RSS