TELECOMS
BT Group shares rise
BT Group PLC shares advanced as much as 9.5 percent following a report that India’s Reliance Industries Ltd is weighing up a possible offer for the UK’s biggest telephone company. Reliance could make an unsolicited offer to buy into the company or even stake a claim for a controlling stake, with some strategic shareholders open to cashing out at the right price, the Economic Times reported. A BT spokesman declined to comment. Separately, the Mail on Sunday reported that private equity firms and investment funds are assessing BT’s infrastructure division Openreach at valuations as high as £40 billion (US$53 billion).
ENERGY
Gazprom profit hits record
Russia’s Gazprom yesterday reported its highest-ever quarterly net profit at 581.8 billion rubles (US$7.8 billion) for the third quarter, reflecting high natural gas prices. The Kremlin-controlled company, which a year earlier suffered a loss of 251 billion rubles, benefited from record-high natural gas prices in Europe, its key source of revenue. Gazprom said its average gas price in Europe and other regions jumped to US$313.40 per 1,000 cubic meters in the third quarter from US$117.2 a year earlier. The company said its July to September revenue rose to 2.4 trillion rubles, also a quarterly record high, from 1.4 trillion a year earlier.
CEMENT MAKERS
PPC sets net-zero target
PPC Ltd, the biggest South African cement maker, has set a target of attaining net zero emissions by 2050. The company aims to cut emissions by 10 percent by 2025 and 27 percent by 2030, it said in its inaugural climate change report yesterday. PPC produces 11.6 million tonnes of cement a year. PPC and other South African industrial companies are under increasing pressure to reduce emissions in a country that is the world’s 12th-biggest producer of greenhouse gases. Across Africa, cement accounts for 32 percent of emissions of the climate-warming gases from manufacturing, according to Mckinsey & Co.
CHINA
Gini coefficient high: official
The country needs to cut its Gini coefficient, a measure of income inequality, to under 0.4 to achieve common prosperity, an adviser to the central bank said. The Gini coefficient should be lowered from 0.47 to close to 0.4 by 2025 and then toward 0.35 by 2035, said Cai Fang (蔡昉), a member of the People’s Bank of China’s monetary policy committee. Cai’s comments are notable, as government officials have not set national numerical targets for the Chinese Communist Party’s common prosperity drive, which was given high-profile backing by President Xi Jinping (習近平) in August.
MACROECONOMY
ECB thinks inflation peaked
The European Central Bank (ECB) believes that inflation peaked this month, meaning it would be premature to raise interest rates as price increases look likely to slow gradually next year, ECB board member Isabel Schnabel said. Inflation would trend back toward 2 percent next year, she told ZDF television yesterday, as supply bottlenecks and energy price growth level off. “Most forecasts actually assume inflation will fall below 2 percent, so there really are no signs of price rises getting out of control,” she said. “If we thought inflation would permanently settle above 2 percent, we would definitely react. However, at the moment, we see no indications of this,” she added.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to