AUTOMAKERS
Toyota world output falls
Toyota Motor Corp’s global output sank for the fourth straight month as a shortage of chips and supply-chain disruptions caused by COVID-19 lockdowns in China hurt production. Output fell 8.6 percent last month from a year earlier to 706,547 vehicles, Toyota said in a statement yesterday. Sales declined 7.2 percent to 797,179 units, extending a slump for an 11th consecutive month. The automaker is sticking to its production target of 9.7 million vehicles for the fiscal year ending in March next year. While Toyota’s overseas output climbed to a record for last month, volumes still fell short of target. Output in Japan slid 28.2 percent from a year earlier.
BATTERIES
Freyr, Nidec sign agreement
Freyr Battery SA and Nidec Corp, the world’s largest maker of high-efficiency electric motors, signed a binding deal for lithium-ion batteries from Freyr’s arctic giga-factory. The volume totals 38 gigawatt-hours and equates to projected revenues of more than US$3 billion for Freyr, the Norwegian company said in a statement yesterday. The companies are converting and expanding a previously announced 31 gigawatt-hour conditional off-take agreement to a binding sales agreement running from 2025 to 2030.
FOOD
China halts Tyson imports
China has suspended some meat imports from US processing giant Tyson Foods Inc, the country’s customs office said on Monday. The halt affects products from a plant owned by Tyson Fresh Meats Inc, the beef and pork subsidiary, for shipments from Monday, after some pig trotters from the producer failed inspection, according to a notice published on the customs Web site. The US Department of Agriculture confirmed that the Logansport, Indiana, facility was ineligible for exports to China. The move follows Beijing’s halt on shipments of meat products from two other US plants in the past month or so, citing the presence of ractopamine.
FINANCE
Fintech surging in Africa
Africa’s financial-technology company revenue is forecast to soar to US$30.3 billion by 2025 — eight times higher than in 2020 — as a growing, young and under-banked population gets more access to the Internet, McKinsey & Co said in a report yesterday. The anticipated increase is part of a rapid expansion in financial services income that is expected to grow to US$230 billion from US$150 billion over the same period, the report said. About two-thirds of Africa’s 1.3 billion people do not have a bank account or full access to financial services, and 90 percent of all transactions on the continent are still cash-based, it said. That creates a growth opportunity for fintech companies.
SOCIAL MEDIA
Whistle-blower subpoenaed
Tesla Inc CEO Elon Musk has formally subpoenaed a Twitter Inc whistle-blower to share information about spam accounts at the social network, as the billionaire fights in court to back out of a massive buyout deal. Musk hopes that allegations made by the former Twitter security head Peiter Zatko, about major security gaps and problematic practices at the firm, would bolster his case. According to court documents made public on Monday, Musk’s attorneys on Saturday served Zatko with a subpoena demanding he share any documents or messages regarding the impact of spam and false accounts on Twitter’s activity, dating back to January 2019.
Taiwan’s technology protection rules prohibits Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) from producing 2-nanometer chips abroad, so the company must keep its most cutting-edge technology at home, Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) said yesterday. Kuo made the remarks in response to concerns that TSMC might be forced to produce advanced 2-nanometer chips at its fabs in Arizona ahead of schedule after former US president Donald Trump was re-elected as the next US president on Tuesday. “Since Taiwan has related regulations to protect its own technologies, TSMC cannot produce 2-nanometer chips overseas currently,” Kuo said at a meeting of the legislature’s
GEOPOLITICAL ISSUES? The economics ministry said that political factors should not affect supply chains linking global satellite firms and Taiwanese manufacturers Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) asked Taiwanese suppliers to transfer manufacturing out of Taiwan, leading to some relocating portions of their supply chain, according to sources employed by and close to the equipment makers and corporate documents. A source at a company that is one of the numerous subcontractors that provide components for SpaceX’s Starlink satellite Internet products said that SpaceX asked their manufacturers to produce outside of Taiwan because of geopolitical risks, pushing at least one to move production to Vietnam. A second source who collaborates with Taiwanese satellite component makers in the nation said that suppliers were directly
Top Taiwanese officials yesterday moved to ease concern about the potential fallout of Donald Trump’s return to the White House, making a case that the technology restrictions promised by the former US president against China would outweigh the risks to the island. The prospect of Trump’s victory in this week’s election is a worry for Taipei given the Republican nominee in the past cast doubt over the US commitment to defend it from Beijing. But other policies championed by Trump toward China hold some appeal for Taiwan. National Development Council Minister Paul Liu (劉鏡清) described the proposed technology curbs as potentially having
EXPORT CONTROLS: US lawmakers have grown more concerned that the US Department of Commerce might not be aggressively enforcing its chip restrictions The US on Friday said it imposed a US$500,000 penalty on New York-based GlobalFoundries Inc, the world’s third-largest contract chipmaker, for shipping chips without authorization to an affiliate of blacklisted Chinese chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯). The US Department of Commerce in a statement said GlobalFoundries sent 74 shipments worth US$17.1 million to SJ Semiconductor Corp (盛合晶微半導體), an affiliate of SMIC, without seeking a license. Both SMIC and SJ Semiconductor were added to the department’s trade restriction Entity List in 2020 over SMIC’s alleged ties to the Chinese military-industrial complex. SMIC has denied wrongdoing. Exports to firms on the list