TECHNOLOGY
Facebook expands in Texas
Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc is going bigger in Texas. The company has leased half of what is to be Austin’s tallest skyscraper, making the social media giant the latest major business to expand in the state. Meta is leasing 54,720m2 across 33 floors, a spokesperson said on Sunday. It would account for the entire commercial half of a 66-story tower under construction in the heart of Austin’s downtown area. Meta is seeking to hire 400 more people in the area, and would have the capacity along with other space in the region for many more, the company said. The tower is scheduled to open next year.
AGRICULTURE
Yara exits Belarus purchase
Norwegian fertilizer maker Yara yesterday said it would wind down its purchase of potash from Belarus by April 1, as international sanctions made it impossible to continue the trade. Yara is a key customer of state-owned Belaruskali, one of the world’s largest producers of potassium salt, or potash, the crop nutrient that is a major foreign currency earner for Belarus. The company said its purchase of potash from Belarus had been in full compliance with the sanctions, but would still have to come to a halt. Yara sources potash from nine suppliers globally, a company sustainability report filed last year showed.
HOTELS
Reliance to buy NY hotel
Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries Ltd has agreed to buy an indirect 73.37 percent stake in Mandarin Oriental New York for US$98.15 million, the company said in a filing on Saturday. Reliance Industrial Investments and Holdings, a wholly owned unit of Reliance Industries, would buy the entire issued share capital of Columbus Centre Corp, a company incorporated in the Cayman Islands, which indirectly owns the stake in the luxury hotel. The company said it would also seek to buy the remaining stake from other owners at the same valuation. The transaction is expected to close by the end of March.
LABOR
Sick, isolated ravage output
Staff shortages caused by COVID-19 illness and mandatory isolation could result in a ￡35 billion (US$47.57 billion) loss in output in the UK over this and next month, according to the Sunday Times. The projected loss is equivalent to 8.8 percent of GDP and based on government planning assumptions of a 25 percent absenteeism rate, the study conducted by the Centre for Economics and Business Research showed. Even a more conservative estimate of 8 percent absenteeism — which is three times the seasonal average — could result in loss in output of ￡10.2 billion, or 2.6 percent of GDP, the center said.
HONG KONG
COVID-19 toll continues
Financial Secretary Paul Chan (陳茂波) expects the territory’s economy to take a hit as a fifth wave of COVID-19 infections sparked by the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 takes hold. The government has yet to give economic forecasts for the year, which is expected during Chan’s annual budget speech next month, but he said in his blog post on Sunday that he would also take into account the global COVID-19 pandemic, supply-chain bottlenecks and changes in monetary policies by western central banks in making his predictions. Economists at Morgan Stanley and Bloomberg Economics have already cut their economic growth forecasts for Hong Kong.
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass
People walk past advertising for a Syensqo chip at the Semicon Taiwan exhibition in Taipei yesterday.
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
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