CHIPMAKERS
Renesas on track to recovery
Japanese chipmaker Renesas Electronics Corp yesterday said that it was on track to restore full capacity by next month after a plant fire as manufacturers around the world battle to secure semiconductor supplies. By the end of this week, the company hopes to bring production at the blaze-hit factory near Tokyo to 30 percent of previous capacity, before fully restoring it next month, chief executive officer Hidetoshi Shibata told reporters in an online briefing. It is not yet clear exactly what caused the March fire, which burnt 600m2 of factory floor.
TECHNOLOGY
Clubhouse raises funds
Clubhouse has closed a new funding round as the wildly popular live audio app struggles to scale up in response to demand, the company said on Sunday. Launched last year, the San Francisco-based platform is looking to establish itself as the standard-bearer for digital audio and has inspired copycat products from Facebook Inc and Twitter Inc. The social media sensation had “grown faster than expected” after an earlier capital raising in January and servers had struggled with the amount of users, the company said on its blog. Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz led the latest funding round, with participation from funds DST Global, Tiger Global and businessman Elad Gil.
TECHNOLOGY
Microsoft to invest US$1bn
Microsoft Corp would invest US$1 billion over the next five years in Malaysia as part of a new partnership program with government agencies and local companies, Malaysian Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin said yesterday. The announcement on what would be the US tech giant’s biggest investment in Malaysia comes after the country in February gave conditional approvals for Microsoft, Google, Amazon.com Inc and state telecoms firm Telekom Malaysia Bhd to build and manage hyper-scale data centers and provide cloud services.
JAPAN
Exports rise 16.1 percent
The country’s exports last month posted a double-digit gain for the first time in more than three years, offering another indication that a recovery in global trade is gaining strength. The value of overseas shipments jumped 16.1 percent from a year earlier, for the biggest increase since November 2017, led by exports of vehicles, plastics, semiconductors and chipmaking equipment, the Ministry of Finance reported yesterday. Month-on-month, exports rose 4.3 percent after seasonal adjustment. The jump helps lift exports gains to 6 percent for the first quarter of this year, compared with a year earlier. Quarterly imports were up 1.9 percent.
UNITED KINGDOM
House prices hit record
House prices surged to a record this month, with a tax break on purchases and rock-bottom interest rates prompting a “buying frenzy,” the property Web site Rightmove said. The average cost of a home rose 2.1 percent to £327,797 (US$455,246) this month, marking only the second time in the past five years it rose that much in a single month. Almost one-quarter of sales were for properties on the market less than a week, with larger homes outside London snapped up quickest. A separate survey showed strength in London’s housing luxury housing market. The number of transactions in the capital surged as buyers snapped up the opportunity to take the tax break, data from research company LonRes show.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”