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.
CHIP HANG-UP: Surging memorychip prices would deal a blow to smartphone sales this year, potentially hindering one of MediaTek’s biggest sources of revenue MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s biggest smartphone chip designer, yesterday said its new artificial intelligence (AI) chips used in data centers are to account for 20 percent of its total revenue next year, as cloud service providers race to deploy AI infrastructure to meet voracious demand. MediaTek is believed to be developing tensor processing units for Google, which are used in AI applications. While it did not confirm such reports, MediaTek said its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business would be a new growth engine for the company. It again hiked its forecast for the addressable ASIC market to US$70 billion by 2028, compared
MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s biggest smartphone chip supplier, yesterday said it plans to double investment in data center-related technologies, including advanced packaging and high-speed interconnect technologies, to broaden the new business’ customer and service portfolios. The chip designer is redirecting its resources to data centers, mainly designing application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities for cloud service providers. The data center business is forecast to lead growth in the next three years and become the company’s second-biggest revenue source, replacing chips used in smart devices, MediaTek president Joe Chen (陳冠州) told a media event in Taipei. “Three or four years
Until US President Donald Trump’s return a year ago, when the EU talked about cutting economic dependency on foreign powers — it was understood to mean China, but now Brussels has US tech in its sights. As Trump ramps up his threats — from strong-arming Europe on trade to pushing to seize Greenland — concern has grown that the unpredictable leader could, should he so wish, plunge the bloc into digital darkness. Since Trump’s Greenland climbdown, top officials have stepped up warnings that the EU is dangerously exposed to geopolitical shocks and must work toward strategic independence — in defense, energy and
Motorists ride past a mural along a street in Varanasi, India, yesterday.
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