UNITED KINGDOM
Living standards plummet
Living standards in the country fell at the fastest pace in more than eight years in February as wages lagged further behind the rate of inflation. Average earnings excluding bonuses rose 4.1 percent from a year earlier, the Office for National Statistics said yesterday. Adjusted for prices over the same period, they dropped 1.3 percent, the most since late 2013. The figures show how the soaring cost of living is depriving Britons of the benefits of a strong labor market. Unemployment fell to 3.8 percent in the three months through February, the lowest since the end of 2019 and matching levels not seen since the 1970s. Meanwhile, job vacancies rose to a new record of almost 1.28 million last month, reflecting an acute shortage of workers.
GERMANY
Confidence in recovery dips
Confidence in the country’s economic recovery slid for a second month as investors worry that price spikes driven by Russia’s war in Ukraine will dampen output. The ZEW institute’s gauge of expectations dropped to minus-41 this month from minus-39.3 last month, hitting the lowest level since the COVID-19 pandemic erupted in 2020. An index of current conditions also worsened. “The experts are pessimistic about the current economic situation and assume that it will continue to deteriorate,” ZEW president Achim Wambach said in a statement yesterday. “The decline in inflation expectations, which cuts the previous month’s considerable increase by about half, gives some cause for hope. However, the prospect of stagflation over the next six months remains.”
TELECOMS
Nokia pulling out of Russia
Telecoms equipment maker Nokia Oyj is pulling out of the Russian market, CEO Pekka Lundmark told reporters, going a step further than rival Ericsson AB, which said on Monday it was indefinitely suspending its business in the country. Hundreds of foreign companies are cutting ties with Russia following its Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine and after Western sanctions against Moscow. While several sectors, including telecoms, have been exempted from some sanctions on humanitarian or related grounds, Nokia said it had decided that quitting Russia was the only option. Lundmark said the company would continue to support customers during its exit and it was not possible to say at this stage how long the withdrawal would take. Nokia and Ericsson made a low single-digit percentage of sales in Russia, where Chinese companies, such as Huawei and ZTE (中興), have a bigger share.
BANKING
Lenders shun oil refiner
India’s HDFC Bank and some foreign banks have stopped offering trade credit for oil imports to Nayara Energy, a Russian-backed refiner, and some suppliers are seeking payment upfront to avoid potential problems resulting from Western sanctions against Moscow, four banking and industry sources said. Nayara has not been sanctioned as part of the international response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but Russian energy giant Rosneft, which owns 49 percent of the Indian refiner, has been. To avoid the need for credit to fund overseas trade, the Mumbai-headquartered company is selling more of its refined fuels in India, two of the sources said. Nayara imports crude oil worth about US$1 billion every month on average for its 400,000 barrels per day Vadinar refinery in India’s Gujarat State, the two sources told reporters.
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
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],”
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
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day