Media
Bloomberg denies report
Bloomberg LP has no interest in acquiring either Dow Jones or the Washington Post, a Bloomberg LP spokesman wrote on Twitter. “There have been no conversations with anyone or either organization about an acquisition,” spokesman Ty Trippet wrote on Twitter, a comment that was retweeted by billionaire owner Michael Bloomberg. News Web site Axios reported on Friday that Bloomberg was interested in acquiring either Wall Street Journal parent company Dow Jones from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, or the Washington Post from Amazon.com Inc CEO Jeff Bezos. A spokesperson for the Washington Post, which Bezos bought in 2013, said on Friday it was not for sale.
China
Budget deficit could rise
China might need to set a budget deficit target at above 3 percent of GDP next year, as the country strives to improve its economic performance, former finance minister Lou Jiwei (樓繼偉) said. Fiscal policy should continue to focus on cutting taxes and fees, Lou said on Sunday at a forum. A deficit ratio of above 3 percent would be higher than the target of 2.8 percent set for this year. He also suggested increasing the quota for local governments to issue special bonds. Part of that could still be used to cut the outstanding implicit debt of local governments, said Lou, who stepped down as finance minister in 2016.
Japan
Insurers to halt coverage
Japan’s buyers of Russian liquefied natural gas are assessing how imminent changes to shipping insurance — triggered by the ongoing war in Ukraine — would affect supplies from the key Sakhalin-2 project in Russia’s Far East. Three Japanese insurance companies — Tokio Marine Holdings Inc, Sompo Holdings Inc and MS&AD Insurance Group Holdings Inc — would stop providing cover for marine hull war risks in Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian territorial waters from Jan. 1, the companies said. Any further disruption in shipments of the fuel would add to difficulties for Japan, which relies heavily on imports, particularly from Sakhalin.
Russia
Rosatom exports increase
Rosatom expects its exports growth to hit 15 percent this year, while its foreign order portfolio has remained stable at US$200 billion, the state nuclear energy company’s chief executive officer Alexei Likhachev told the newspaper Izvestia. “[Exports will grow] by about 15 percent, but one must understand that this is far from the limit,” Izvestia quoted Likhachev as saying in remarks published yesterday. The growth comes, among others, from contracts already being implemented, supplies of fuel, enriched uranium products, as well as conversion services, Likhachev said. It also includes the construction of 23 nuclear power units at projects in a dozen countries, he added.
Cinema
Avatar popular on opening
Walt Disney Co’s science-fiction epic Avatar: The Way of Water battled winter storms in the US and Canada to bring in an estimated US$56 million in ticket sales over the weekend. It garnered another US$168.6 million in theaters internationally over the weekend, for a total haul of US$855.4 million globally since its Dec. 16 release, Disney said in a statement. The company predicted the film would take in US$82 million domestically over the four days after Christmas.
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
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],”
Huawei Technologies Co’s (華為) latest smartphones carry a version of the advanced made-in-China processor it revealed last year, results from an independent analysis showed. This underscored the Chinese company’s ability to sustain production of the controversial chip. The Pura 70 series unveiled last week sports the Kirin 9010 processor, research firm TechInsights found during a teardown of the device. This is a newer version of the Kirin 9000s, made by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯) for the Mate 60 Pro, which had alarmed officials in Washington who thought a 7-nanometer chip was beyond China’s capabilities. Huawei has enjoyed a resurgence since