AUTOMAKERS
Mercedes beats guidance
Mercedes-Benz AG said that its earnings last year beat guidance after rising vehicle prices helped the luxury automaker claw its way back from an autumn lowpoint amid a global chip crunch. Adjusted returns on sales in its cars and vans segment hit 12.7 percent, exceeding guidance for a result in a 10 to 12 percent range, Mercedes said. Strong new and used vehicle pricing helped achieve the result, it said. Adjusted earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) at the division was about 14 billion euros (US$16 billion) for the full year, it said. Mercedes shares gained as much as 2.9 percent on the news. The company now expects the restructuring move to boost group EBIT by 9 billion to 10 billion euros, the company said. This one-time effect has no impact on cash flow and no material impact on taxes, it said.
ENERGY
Rosneft income hits record
Rosneft PJSC yesterday reported its highest-ever annual net income amid booming energy prices, paving the way for record dividends. Russia’s largest oil producer is the latest to channel the benefits of high crude prices to shareholders, after global peers including BP PLC, Shell PLC and TotalEnergies SE boosted investor returns. “Taking into account the company’s commitment to the dividend policy, the earnings of 2021 will provide a record level of dividends,” Rosneft chief executive officer Igor Sechin said in a statement. Rosneft’s net income reached 883 billion rubles (US$11.9 billion) last year, despite a drop in fourth-quarter profit, the statement said. That drop was anticipated and could be due to a writedown associated with its acquisition of an additional 37.5 percent stake in the PCK Schwedt refinery in Germany from Shell, analysts said before the earnings report. The company has already paid record-high interim dividends of above 18 rubles per share so far for last year, following strong earnings in the first half of the year.
ECONOMY
Peru raises interest rates
Peru on Thursday raised interest rates for a seventh straight month to try to damp the effects of global inflation on the local economy. Central Reserve Bank of Peru increased its policy rate by half a percentage point to 3.5 percent, in line with the forecasts of all 10 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg. “The board is especially attentive to new information on inflation and inflation expectations, and the behavior of economic activity to consider, if necessary, changes in the monetary policy stance,” the bank said in a statement. Just hours before Peru’s decision, Mexico also raised its policy rate by half a percentage point to 6 percent.
ELECTRIC VEHICLES
Biden unveils chargers plan
The administration of US President Joe Biden on Thursday unveiled a plan to award nearly US$5 billion over five years to build thousands of electric vehicle (EV) charging stations. The US Congress approved the funding to states as part of a US$1 trillion infrastructure bill in November last year. The White House wants to prod Americans to move away from gasoline-powered vehicles even as efforts to win substantial additional funding for EVs in Congress have stalled. The administration is to make US$615 million available this year, but states must first submit plans and win federal approval. By 2030, Biden wants 50 percent of all new vehicles sold to be electric or plug-in hybrid electric models and 500,000 new EV charging stations.
Napoleon Osorio is proud of being the first taxi driver to have accepted payment in bitcoin in the first country in the world to make the cryptocurrency legal tender: El Salvador. He credits Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s decision to bank on bitcoin three years ago with changing his life. “Before I was unemployed... And now I have my own business,” said the 39-year-old businessman, who uses an app to charge for rides in bitcoin and now runs his own car rental company. Three years ago the leader of the Central American nation took a huge gamble when he put bitcoin
Demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips should spur growth for the semiconductor industry over the next few years, the CEO of a major supplier to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said, dismissing concerns that investors had misjudged the pace and extent of spending on AI. While the global chip market has grown about 8 percent annually over the past 20 years, AI semiconductors should grow at a much higher rate going forward, Scientech Corp (辛耘) chief executive officer Hsu Ming-chi (許明琪) told Bloomberg Television. “This booming of the AI industry has just begun,” Hsu said. “For the most prominent
Former Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) chairman Mark Liu (劉德音) yesterday warned against the tendency to label stakeholders as either “pro-China” or “pro-US,” calling such rigid thinking a “trap” that could impede policy discussions. Liu, an adviser to the Cabinet’s Economic Development Committee, made the comments in his keynote speech at the committee’s first advisers’ meeting. Speaking in front of Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰), National Development Council (NDC) Minister Paul Liu (劉鏡清) and other officials, Liu urged the public to be wary of falling into the “trap” of categorizing people involved in discussions into either the “pro-China” or “pro-US” camp. Liu,
Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) yesterday said Taiwan’s government plans to set up a business service company in Kyushu, Japan, to help Taiwanese companies operating there. “The company will follow the one-stop service model similar to the science parks we have in Taiwan,” Kuo said. “As each prefecture is providing different conditions, we will establish a new company providing services and helping Taiwanese companies swiftly settle in Japan.” Kuo did not specify the exact location of the planned company but said it would not be in Kumamoto, the Kyushu prefecture in which Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC, 台積電) has a
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