BANKING
Europe in good shape
European banks are in “extremely solid” shape and their situation is not similar to that of some US lenders, Banque de France Governor Francois Villeroy de Galhau said yesterday, amid fears of a crisis in the sector. The failure of two US lenders has raised fears of contagion to the wider sector, with troubled European banking giant Credit Suisse having to borrow up to US$54 billion from the Swiss central bank. “European banks are not in the same situation as certain American banks for a very simple reason which is that they are not subjected to the same rules,” Villeroy de Galhau told BFM Business television. Basel III rules that were set after the 2008 financial crisis to ensure that banks have adequate capital and liquidity have been “effective,” he said. Four hundred European banking groups are subject to the Basel III requirements compared with only 13 in the US, he said.
SOFTWARE
Microsoft Office goes AI
Microsoft Corp is infusing artificial intelligence (AI) tools into its Office software, including Word, Excel and Outlook. The company on Thursday said the new feature, named Copilot, is a processing engine that would allow users to do things like summarize long e-mails, draft stories in Word and animate slides in PowerPoint. Microsoft spokesperson Jessica Dash said the new Office features are currently only available for 20 enterprise customers. It will roll it out for more enterprise customers over the coming months. Microsoft is marketing the feature as a tool that would allow workers to be more productive by freeing up time they usually spend in their inbox, or allowing them to more easily analyze trends in Excel. The firm is also to add a chat function called Business Chat. It takes commands and carries out actions — such as summarizing an e-mail about a particular project to co-workers — using user data.
AVIATION
Firms look to India for talent
Boeing Co and Airbus SE are increasingly looking to India for highly skilled, low-cost engineers to meet a boom in demand for aircraft and expand their manufacturing presence in the world’s fifth-largest economy. Airbus plans to hire 1,000 people in India this year out of 13,000 globally. Boeing and its suppliers, which already employ about 18,000 workers in the nation, have been growing by about 1,500 staff every year, the US jet manufacturer’s India head Salil Gupte told Bloomberg News in an interview. With about 1.5 million engineering students graduating annually, India is a rich source of talent for planemakers facing record orders from airlines as travel surges again after the COVID-19 pandemic. Boeing can hire an engineer in Bengaluru, India, for 7 percent of the cost of a similar role in Seattle, salary data compiler Glassdoor said.
CHINA
PBOC cuts reserve ratio
The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) yesterday said it would cut the amount of cash that banks must hold as reserves to release liquidity and support the economy. The bank said it would cut the reserve requirement ratio (RRR) for all banks, except those that have implemented a 5 percent reserve ratio, by 25 basis points, effective March 27. That follows a reduction of 25 basis points for all banks in December last year. The PBOC has promised to make its policy “precise and forceful” this year to support the economy, keeping liquidity reasonably ample and lowering funding costs for businesses. It said weighted average RRR for financial institutions is 7.6 percent after the latest cut.
UNCONVINCING: The US Congress questioned whether the company’s Chinese owners pose a national security risk and how the app might influence young users TikTok chief executive officer Shou Chew (周受資), confronted with an unforgiving, distrustful US Congress, tried to give answers in his testimony on Thursday that avoided offending either the US government or China. However, his evasiveness left Congress unsatisfied, with representatives hungrier than ever to punish TikTok for ties to its parent company ByteDance Ltd (字節跳動), based in Beijing. He did not bring his company any closer to a resolution. Politically, TikTok is in a tougher spot. Its executives had been discussing divesting from ByteDance to resolve US national security concerns, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. However, China this week said
Sanofi SA’s drug Dupixent succeeded in a late-stage trial for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), raising the odds that the blockbuster would be the first biologic medicine cleared to treat the lung disorder. Dupixent, which is already prescribed for asthma and some skin conditions, showed a 30 percent reduction in the rate at which patients’ COPD worsened compared with those who received a placebo during the stage-three Boreas trial, the company said in a statement yesterday. The positive data could herald a new era of cutting-edge treatments for the life-threatening respiratory affliction and provide another major boost in demand for the French
Microsoft Corp has threatened to cut off access to its Internet search data, which it licenses to rival search engines, if they do not stop using it as the basis for their own artificial intelligence (AI) chat products, people familiar with the dispute have said. The software maker licenses the data in its Bing search index — a map of the Internet that can be quickly scanned in real time — to other companies that offer Web search, such as Apollo Global Management Inc’s Yahoo and DuckDuckGo. Last month, Microsoft integrated a cousin of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s AI-powered chat technology, into Bing. Rivals
SEMICONDUCTOR EQUIPMENT: The international trade group said the sector would recover from a slump, with spending expected to rise 4.2 percent to US$24.9 billion Taiwan is to retain its position as the top spender on semiconductor front-end equipment and facilities next year, with spending expected to increase 4.2 percent year-on-year to US$24.9 billion, international trade group SEMI said yesterday. The spending forecast matches an expected recovery in global semiconductor equipment and facilities investment next year, it said. International equipment spending is to return to growth next year, SEMI said in a report, forecasting 21 percent growth to US$92 billion. The expansion would manly be driven by robust demand for semiconductors in the automotive and high-performance computing segments, the association said. “This quarter’s SEMI World Fab Forecast update
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