CONSUMER GOODS
Reckitt might sell unit
Reckitt Benckiser Group PLC’s plan to review its infant nutrition unit and weigh options, including a potential sale, boosted shares of the maker of Lysol. The British consumer goods company is reviewing the business globally and has been informally gauging buyer interest in the operations, Bloomberg reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the situation. The unit could be worth £5.5 billion (US$7.4 billion), an estimate by Jefferies showed.
INTERNET
PriceRunner sues Google
Alphabet Inc’s Google is being sued by Nordic price comparison provider PriceRunner AB for about 22 billion kronor (US$2.4 billion) at Sweden’s patent and market court. The lawsuit follows the conclusion of a legal ruling in the EU that established Google has breached antitrust laws by manipulating search results in favor of its own comparison-shopping services, PriceRunner said in a statement yesterday. It is also about job opportunities and a matter of survival for many European entrepreneurial companies, it said.
TRAVEL
Crystal Cruises ships seized
Two Crystal Cruises ships operating under a Genting Hong Kong Ltd (雲頂香港) unit have been seized in the Bahamas after a fuel supplier sought their arrest for US$4.6 million in unpaid bills, according to a video filmed by crew and the Cruise Law News Web site. The Crystal Symphony and Crystal Serenity were seized late on Friday night in Freeport in the Bahamas, said Cruise Law News, a site run by Jim Walker, a maritime lawyer based in Florida. The luxury cruise ships were anchored in Freeport on Saturday.
CUBA
New tax for food sales
Havana on Saturday announced a new 10 percent tax on retail food sales, as the nation endures economic woes marked by rampant inflation. The levy, which took effect yesterday, targets self-employed people and small and medium-sized companies in the retail food sector, said the decree published in the official government gazette. The sales were only allowed starting in August last year as part of government reforms. The nation imports 80 percent of the food it consumes.
EUROZONE
Investors bet on rate change
Investors are betting that the European Central Bank (ECB) raises the deposit rate by 25 basis points in September and takes it to zero by the end of the year, following a shift in tone at last week’s Governing Council meeting. That is more aggressive than the time line that Klaas Knot, one of the ECB’s most hawkish policymakers, laid out in a TV interview on Sunday. A first hike could come in the fourth quarter, with a second one possibly following in the spring, he said.
REAL ESTATE
Home to be sold as NFT
A home along Florida’s Gulf Coast is to be auctioned off this week as a non-fungible token (NFT) in what is believed to be among the first such transactions in the US. In the case of the four-bedroom home in Gulfport, Florida, California-based real-estate technology company Propy is to mint the property rights into a digital token and host an online auction, with bids starting at US$650,000. Minting property rights into an NFT would allow owners to sell a home as quickly as a Venmo transaction, said Leslie Alessandra, the home’s current owner.
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
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
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],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts