JAPAN
Business bankruptcies rise
Corporate bankruptcies in the first half of the year rose for the first time in 11 years, partly due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has hit hotel and restaurant businesses. There were 4,001 cases through last month, up 0.2 percent from a year earlier, said Tokyo Shoko Research, which tracks local bankruptcies. The firm yesterday said that 240 companies went bankrupt due to the pandemic. Bankruptcies in industries including accommodation and food services came in at 1,295, up 3.8 percent from last year, it said.
RETAIL
Itochu eyes FamilyMart
Itochu Corp is planning to take full control of convenience-store chain FamilyMart Co through a tender offer, the retailer said yesterday. The offer is to be valued at ￥500 billion to ￥600 billion (US$4.6 billion to US$5.6 billion), the Nikkei reported, without citing how it obtained the information. Itochu owns 50.1 percent of FamilyMart. If the tender offer is successful, it would become a wholly owned subsidiary of Itochu, one of Japan’s largest trading companies, Nikkei said.
AGRICULTURE
China tapping pork reserves
China yesterday said it plans to sell 20,000 tonnes of frozen pork from state reserves as it seeks to contain rallying prices after the top consumer of the meat halted imports from dozens of overseas producers. Domestic wholesale pork prices last month jumped 16 percent, the biggest monthly gain since October last year, after Beijing suspended imports from more than 20 overseas meat plants amid concerns over COVID-19 infections among employees at the slaughterhouses.
AUTOMOBILES
China auto sales down 6.5%
Vehicle sales in China retreated last month following a rare increase in May, the China Passenger Car Association said yesterday. Retail sales of sedans, sports utility vehicles, minivans and multipurpose vehicles declined 6.5 percent to 1.68 million units from a year earlier, it said. Sales had risen 1.9 percent in May, the first increase in a year. The decline is a setback for an industry betting that demand would return as the COVID-19 pandemic eases in the country, and showrooms and malls reopen.
APPAREL
Levi Strauss cutting jobs
Levi Strauss & Co on Tuesday said that it would cut 700 office jobs, or about 15 percent of its worldwide corporate workforce, as it deals with a sharp drop in sales due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The San Francisco-based jeans maker said the layoffs would save it about US$100 million a year and would not affect workers at its stores or factories. Its second-quarter revenue sank 62 percent to US$497.5 million, it said as it reported a loss of US$363.5 million, after reporting a profit a year earlier. Adjusted losses came to US$0.48 per share, beating Wall Street expectations.
LOGISTICS
Deutsche Post offers bonus
German logistics group Deutsche Post DHL on Tuesday said that it would pay all its employees worldwide a 300 euro (US$339) bonus to thank them for their “tireless efforts” during the COVID-19 pandemic. More than 500,000 workers are set to receive the “one-time bonus” in the coming months, costing the group about 200 million euros. “We have navigated our company through this crisis very well so far. We owe this to our committed colleagues worldwide,” chief executive Frank Appel said in a statement.
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
TARIFF TRADE-OFF: Machinery exports to China dropped after Beijing ended its tariff reductions in June, while potential new tariffs fueled ‘front-loaded’ orders to the US The nation’s machinery exports to the US amounted to US$7.19 billion last year, surpassing the US$6.86 billion to China to become the largest export destination for the local machinery industry, the Taiwan Association of Machinery Industry (TAMI, 台灣機械公會) said in a report on Jan. 10. It came as some manufacturers brought forward or “front-loaded” US-bound shipments as required by customers ahead of potential tariffs imposed by the new US administration, the association said. During his campaign, US president-elect Donald Trump threatened tariffs of as high as 60 percent on Chinese goods and 10 percent to 20 percent on imports from other countries.
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
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