AUTOMAKERS
Inoue to tackle Daihatsu
Toyota Motor Corp has chosen Masahiro Inoue to restore leadership at Daihatsu Motor Co after the unit became entangled in a vehicle certification scandal. Inoue, the CEO of Toyota Latin America, is to replace Soichiro Okudaira effective March 1, the companies said in a joint statement yesterday. Daihatsu’s top posts would be replaced and its operations abroad would folded into Toyota’s oversight, Toyota CEO Koji Sato said yesterday. A new leadership structure for Daihatsu will be announced in April, Inoue said. Daihatsu chairman Sunao Matsubayashi is to step down, and his position left vacant. Daihatsu is to remove itself from a strategic manufacturing alliance with Toyota and Suzuki Motor Corp, it said.
AVIATION
Faury mulls Boeing lessons
Airbus SE chief executive officer Guillaume Faury said rival Boeing Co’s mishap with a 737 MAX-9 model early last month is a lesson for the entire industry to double down on safety. “It’s never good when an incident happens, whatever the type of plane,” Faury said at the World Government Summit in Dubai on Monday. “And this incident makes us very humble.” The accident on the Alaska Airlines aircraft last month, whereby a fuselage panel came off during flight and left a gaping hole in the almost-new jet, has made the European company think over “what should we be doing to not be in that situation,” Faury said.
TOURISM
Thai holiday extended
Thailand’s Cabinet approved an additional holiday for civil servants during the traditional new year festival in April as the Southeast Asian nation seeks to sustain a recovery in its tourism industry. The special holiday on April 12 is to apply to government offices and other state agencies and extend the so-called Songkran festival period to five days until April 16, aiming to boost local tourism and spending. The Thai government targets 35 million foreign arrivals this year, with 8 million expected from China. Tourism revenue from foreign visitors totaled 215 billion baht (US$6 billion) as of Feb. 11, according to the Ministry of Tourism and Sports.
UNITED STATES
Budget deficit widens
The US budget deficit widened in the four months through last month, as debt-servicing costs climbed further. The deficit for the first four months of the 2024 fiscal year reached US$532 billion, or 16 percent more than recorded in the same period in the prior year, Treasury Department data released on Monday showed. Interest costs in the four months through last month were US$357 billion, a 37 percent jump from a year earlier. The US Federal Reserve’s aggressive interest-rate hiking campaign has made debt more expensive, increasing the burden for the US budget.
SWITZERLAND
Inflation unexpectedly eases
Swiss inflation unexpectedly eased last month, a development that could open the door to earlier rate cuts at the Swiss National Bank. Consumer prices rose 1.3 percent from a year earlier, the Swiss statistics office said yesterday. That is much less than the 1.7 percent predicted by economists. The so-called core gauge, which strips out volatile elements like energy and food, also slowed to 1.2 percent. The drop comes as a surprise as many prices in the Swiss economy are regulated and those for electricity rose at the beginning of the year. January also marked a boost in value-added tax to 8.1 percent from 7.7 percent.
FRANC E
Unemployment stable
France’s official jobless rate was stable at 7.5 percent for the final quarter of last year as statistics agency INSEE yesterday revised upwards by 0.1 percent its initial estimate. The fourth quarter saw the number of jobless nationwide rise 29,000 over the third quarter to 2.3 million, with the rate 0.4 percentage points higher than the 40-year-low it had reached at the end of 2022. Unemployment among the young, for those aged 15 to 24, remains stubbornly high, albeit dropping back 0.2 percent in the final quarter of last year to 17.5 percent. The long-term jobless figure, for those out of work for a year or longer, stood at 1.8 percent, a minuscule increase on a year earlier.
EUROZONE
No need for slack: Cipollone
There is no need for the European Central Bank (ECB) to further curb demand in its quest to regain control over inflation, Executive Board member Piero Cipollone said, signaling that interest rates do not need to rise anymore. The Italian official also suggested the struggling eurozone economy could bounce back without prices doing likewise. “With demand still weak and inflation expectations anchored, there is no need for monetary policy to generate further slack to keep inflation in check,” Cipollone said on Monday in Brussels. “The unwinding of supply shocks creates scope for demand to recover without fueling inflation.”
TRAVEL
TUI urges London exit
TUI AG management urged shareholders to support plans to abandon its UK stock listing and trade primarily in Germany, as investors were to vote on the decision at a meeting later yesterday. The German travel company said shifting its primary listing to Frankfurt would simplify its trading structure, given that most of the shares already change hands in Germany. The single listing would also improve liquidity and provide support for EU airline ownership, TUI said. It is among firms including Ryanair Holdings PLC, Allied Minds PLC and YouGov that have considered delisting from the London Stock Exchange in the wake of Brexit.
ENERGY
Diamondback stock surges
Diamondback Energy Inc shares surged in New York trading on Monday after agreeing to buy fellow Permian Basin driller Endeavor Energy Resources LP in a US$26 billion deal that would create the largest explorer focused exclusively on the western hemisphere’s busiest oil field. Diamondback’s advance made it the day’s second-best performer in the S&P 500 Index, an atypical price reaction for the acquirer in such a major transaction. Diamondback’s stock price settled up 9.4 percent at US$165.98.
INVESTMENT
Carlyle eyes rich Europeans
Carlyle Group Inc is readying its first European private credit fund for wealthy people as it joins giants such as Blackstone Inc in a race to tap the trillions of dollars held by the continent’s rich investors. The new fund is to invest across a range of financing strategies and focus on lending to European businesses. There are plans to roll out more in the coming months, both in Europe and the US, Carlyle’s new head of wealth Shane Clifford said in an interview. Carlyle manages just US$6 billion across similar retail funds in the US, a small amount compared with rivals, and about US$50 billion for high-net-worth clients in other structures.
IN THE AIR: While most companies said they were committed to North American operations, some added that production and costs would depend on the outcome of a US trade probe Leading local contract electronics makers Wistron Corp (緯創), Quanta Computer Inc (廣達), Inventec Corp (英業達) and Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶) are to maintain their North American expansion plans, despite Washington’s 20 percent tariff on Taiwanese goods. Wistron said it has long maintained a presence in the US, while distributing production across Taiwan, North America, Southeast Asia and Europe. The company is in talks with customers to align capacity with their site preferences, a company official told the Taipei Times by telephone on Friday. The company is still in talks with clients over who would bear the tariff costs, with the outcome pending further
WEAKER ACTIVITY: The sharpest deterioration was seen in the electronics and optical components sector, with the production index falling 13.2 points to 44.5 Taiwan’s manufacturing sector last month contracted for a second consecutive month, with the purchasing managers’ index (PMI) slipping to 48, reflecting ongoing caution over trade uncertainties, the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) said yesterday. The decline reflects growing caution among companies amid uncertainty surrounding US tariffs, semiconductor duties and automotive import levies, and it is also likely linked to fading front-loading activity, CIER president Lien Hsien-ming (連賢明) said. “Some clients have started shifting orders to Southeast Asian countries where tariff regimes are already clear,” Lien told a news conference. Firms across the supply chain are also lowering stock levels to mitigate
NEGOTIATIONS: Semiconductors play an outsized role in Taiwan’s industrial and economic development and are a major driver of the Taiwan-US trade imbalance With US President Donald Trump threatening to impose tariffs on semiconductors, Taiwan is expected to face a significant challenge, as information and communications technology (ICT) products account for more than 70 percent of its exports to the US, Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) president Lien Hsien-ming (連賢明) said on Friday. Compared with other countries, semiconductors play a disproportionately large role in Taiwan’s industrial and economic development, Lien said. As the sixth-largest contributor to the US trade deficit, Taiwan recorded a US$73.9 billion trade surplus with the US last year — up from US$47.8 billion in 2023 — driven by strong
RESHAPING COMMERCE: Major industrialized economies accepted 15 percent duties on their products, while charges on items from Mexico, Canada and China are even bigger US President Donald Trump has unveiled a slew of new tariffs that boosted the average US rate on goods from across the world, forging ahead with his turbulent effort to reshape international commerce. The baseline rates for many trading partners remain unchanged at 10 percent from the duties Trump imposed in April, easing the worst fears of investors after the president had previously said they could double. Yet his move to raise tariffs on some Canadian goods to 35 percent threatens to inject fresh tensions into an already strained relationship, while nations such as Switzerland and New Zealand also saw increased
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