AUTOMAKERS
Mitsubishi fined in Germany
Japanese automaker Mitsubishi Motors Co yesterday confirmed it paid a 25 million euro (US$29.7 million at the current rate of exchange) fine issued by German prosecutors over emissions fraud allegations earlier this year. German authorities last year raided 10 sites as part of a probe into suspected diesel emissions cheating involving Mitsubishi vehicles, with prosecutors saying they had opened a fraud investigation. Mitsubishi Motors said it was issued a fine notice of 25 million euros by the Frankfurt prosecutors office in late March. Bloomberg News said the settlement was sealed in March, but had not been previously disclosed.
TECHNOLOGY
Facebook under fire in EU
The European Consumer Organisation yesterday announced it had lodged a complaint with the European Commission against Facebook Inc’s attempt to modify the terms of service for the WhatsApp messaging service. The US tech titan has sought to nudge users of its messenger platform to accept new terms of service, but Facebook denies that this would allow WhatsApp to share more user data with its main social platform. In a statement announcing its complaint, the European Consumer Organisation accused Facebook of “unfairly” pressuring users to accept the handover and failing to explain it.
UNITED KINGDOM
Household wealth rising
A boom in Britain’s housing market and a surge in global share prices have led to windfall gains for middle-income and richer households during the COVID-19 pandemic, research from the Resolution Foundation think tank showed yesterday. The average British household saw its wealth rise by £7,800 (US$10,811) due to asset price rises and, to a lesser extent, lower day-to-day spending. The biggest percentage increase in wealth came for those in the middle of the wealth distribution, whose net assets increased in value by 9 percent to £80,500 per adult, driven by a sharp rise in house prices.
MEDIA
‘Daily Mail’ to go private
The Rothermere family is considering taking the owner of Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper private following a takeover approach for its insurance and risk division. The Rothermere Continuation Ltd would pay £2.51 for each remaining share of the company, London-based Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT) said in a statement yesterday. That implies an enterprise value of £810 million for the rest of the company, with DMGT assuming £230 million in debt. If the possible offer for Risk Management Solutions is declared unconditional, DMGT would pay a special dividend of cash and noncash assets, valued at about £6.10 per share, including its shares in auto-marketplace start-up Cazoo.
SHIPPING
Suez Canal nets US$5.84bn
The Suez Canal netted Egypt a record US$5.84 billion in the past tax year, Suez Canal Authority (SCA) chairman Osama Rabie said on Sunday. “Despite various challenges, revenues from the canal rose sharply” in the fiscal year ending June 30, Rabie said. Authorities netted “the highest revenues in the history of the canal, hitting $5.84 billion,” a more than 2 percent higher increase from the previous year, he said in a statement. The SCA said that 9,763 ships had passed through the canal in the first six months of the year, 2 percent more than the same period last year. About 19,000 ships passed through the canal last year, it said.
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
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],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained