LUXURY GOODS
Kering profit up 14 percent
France’s second-largest luxury group Kering SA’s profit climbed 14 percent to 3.6 billion euros (US$3.86 billion) last year despite a drop in fourth-quarter earnings at flagship brand Gucci, the company said yesterday. “All our Houses posted record revenues and contributed to higher operating income in 2022. But these good performances were not uniformly up to our ambitions and potential,” group chairman Francois-Henri Pinault said in a statement. Sales soared 15 percent to 20 billion euros. Gucci’s sales dropped 11 percent in the fourth quarter, as sales in China slowed down, financial director Jean-Marc Duplaix said.
BREWERS
Heineken sales jump
Heineken NV yesterday reported a jump in sales last year after the Dutch brewer raised prices in the face of higher inflation, but its net profit fell. The maker of Heineken, Amstel and Sol beers maintained its outlook unchanged for this year, forecasting its operating profit to grow in the mid to high single-digit percentages. The company reported a net profit of 2.7 billion euros for last year, down 19 percent from 2021. Revenue surged more than 30 percent to almost 35 billion euros as the company raised prices due to higher costs while volumes returned to pre-COVID-19 pandemic levels, with a “sharp” rebound in the Asia-Pacific region.
LODGING
Airbnb posts first profit
Airbnb Inc on Tuesday posted record numbers for last year, including its first annual profit, and said it continues to see strong demand for travel carry over into the new year despite economic uncertainty and high inflation. The San Francisco-based company said it earned US$319 million in the fourth quarter, up from US$55 million a year earlier, and US$1.89 billion for the full year. Spurred by an increase in bookings, fourth-quarter revenue rose 24 percent from a year earlier. The company predicted that first-quarter revenue would be US$1.75 billion to US$1.82 billion, which would beat Wall Street expectations.
BANKING
Barclays misses targets
A flurry of volatility in the final three months of last year was not enough for Barclays PLC’s traders, who missed estimates in fixed income and equities. While fixed-income trading revenue rose to ￡976 million (US$1.18 billion), helping the bank notch its best ever performance in markets for the year, the results still fell short of estimates. Equities trading revenue of ￡440 million also missed expectations. The worse-than-expected results weighed on profit before tax, which dropped 8 percent to ￡1.3 billion. That was also worse than the ￡1.44 billion analysts in a Bloomberg survey were expecting.
TOURISM
Japan visitors near 1.5m
Visitors to Japan climbed to nearly 1.5 million last month, the national tourism agency said yesterday, showing an accelerating recovery in tourism after the Japanese government scrapped COVID-19 curbs in October last year. The number of foreign visitors for business and leisure rose to 1,497,300 last month from 1,370,000 in December last year, the Japan National Tourism Organization said in a news release. More than one-third of the arrivals were from South Korea, it said. Arrivals were down 44 percent from January 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic began.
Taiwan’s foreign exchange reserves fell below the US$600 billion mark at the end of last month, with the central bank reporting a total of US$596.89 billion — a decline of US$8.6 billion from February — ending a three-month streak of increases. The central bank attributed the drop to a combination of factors such as outflows by foreign institutional investors, currency fluctuations and its own market interventions. “The large-scale outflows disrupted the balance of supply and demand in the foreign exchange market, prompting the central bank to intervene repeatedly by selling US dollars to stabilize the local currency,” Department of Foreign
Intel Corp is joining Elon Musk’s long-shot effort to develop semiconductors for Tesla Inc, Space Exploration Technologies Corp and xAI, marking a surprising twist in the chipmaker’s comeback bid. Intel would help the Terafab project “refactor” the technology in a chip factory, the company said on Tuesday in a post on X, Musk’s social media platform. That is a stage in the development process that typically helps make chips more powerful or reliable. The chipmaker’s shares jumped 4.2 percent to US$52.91 in New York trading on Tuesday. The Terafab project is a grand plan by Musk to eventually manufacture his own chips for
Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) yesterday said it plans to resume operations at two coal-fired power generators for three months to boost security of electricity supply as liquefied natural gas (LNG) supply risks are running high due to the Middle East conflict. The two coal-fired power generators are at Mailiao Power Plant in Yunlin County’s Mailiao Township (麥寮). The plant, operated by Formosa Plastics Group (台塑集團), supplied electricity to Taipower’s power grid until the end of last year. Taipower’s decision came about one month after Minister of Economic Affairs Kung Ming-hsin (龔明鑫) on March 10 said that the nation had no imminent
Some robotaxi passengers were left stranded in the middle of fast-moving traffic in a major Chinese city after their driverless vehicles stopped running, according to police and media reports on Wednesday. A preliminary investigation indicates more than 100 robotaxis came to a halt because of a “system malfunction,” police in the city of Wuhan said in a statement, without elaborating. No injuries were reported. One passenger told Chinese media that their robotaxi stopped after turning a corner. An instruction on a screen read: “Driving system malfunction. Staff are expected to arrive in 5 minutes.” After no one showed up, the passenger pushed
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