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.
DAMAGE REPORT: Global central banks are assessing war-driven inflation risks as the law of unintended consequences careens around the world, spiking oil prices Central banks from Washington to London and from Jakarta to Taipei are about to make their first assessments of economic damage after more than two weeks of conflict between the US and Iran. Decisions this week encompassing every member of the G7 and eight of the world’s 10 most-traded currency jurisdictions are likely to confirm to investors that the specter of a new inflation shock is already worrying enough to prompt heightened caution. The US Federal Reserve is widely expected to do exactly what everyone anticipated weeks ahead of its March 17-18 policy gathering: hold rates steady. The narrative surrounding that
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) share of the global foundry market rose to almost 70 percent last year amid booming demand for artificial intelligence (AI), market information advisory firm TrendForce Corp (集邦科技) said on Thursday. The contract chipmaker posted US$122.54 billion in revenue, up 36.1 percent from a year earlier, accounting for 69.9 percent of the global market, TrendForce said. Its share was up from 64.4 percent in 2024, it said. TSMC’s closest rival, Samsung Electronics, was a distant second, posting US$12.63 billion in sales, down 3.9 percent from a year earlier, for a 7.2 percent share of the global market. In the
HEADWINDS: The company said it expects its computer business, as well as consumer electronics and communications segments to see revenue declines due to seasonality Pegatron Corp (和碩) yesterday said it aims to grow its artificial intelligence (AI) server revenue more than 10-fold this year from last year, driven by orders from neocloud solutions clients and large cloud service providers. The electronics manufacturing service provider said AI server revenue growth would be driven primarily by the Nvidia Corp GB300 server platform. Server shipments are expected to increase each quarter this year, with the second half likely to outperform the first half, it said. The AI server market is expected to broaden this year as more inference applications emerge, which would drive demand for system-on-chip, application-specific integrated circuits
At a massive shipyard in North Vancouver, Canadian workers grind metal beams for a powerful new icebreaker crucial to cementing the country’s presence in the increasingly contested arctic. Icebreakers are specialized, expensive vessels able to navigate in the frozen far north. And “this is the crown jewel,” said Eddie Schehr, vice president of production at the Seaspan shipyard. For Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who heads to Norway next Friday to observe arctic defense drills involving troops from 14 NATO states, Canada’s extreme north has emerged as a strategic priority. “Canada is and forever will be an Arctic nation,” he said ahead of
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