■ Mobile Phones
Motorola doubles CEO's pay
Motorola Inc, the world's second-biggest maker of mobile phones, more than doubled chief executive Christopher Galvin's pay last year, when it lost US$2.49 billion and its shares fell 42 percent. Galvin, 53, received US$2.8 million in salary, bonus and other compensation last year, Motorola said in an annual proxy filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. A year earlier, he was paid US$1.29 million in salary, bonus and other compensation. Galvin and four other Motorola executives received bonuses because the company returned to profitability in the second half of the year, spokeswoman Jennifer Weyrauch said.
■ Finance
Argentina to lift freeze
The Argentine government is set to start lifting a controversial banking freeze on long-term certificates of deposit, Economy Minister Roberto Lavagna said Thursday. He said the measure, expected to be signed later Thursday, would initially target certificates of up to 42,000 pesos (US$14,500), which would be repaid partly in pesos and partly in bonds. Later certificates of up to 100,000 pesos (US$34,500) will be repaid and after that those above that amount, Lavagna said at a news conference, adding that the process should take four months. In December, Argentina lifted the much-reviled freeze on most banking accounts, but continued to restrict access to the fixed-term certificates, which total about 12 billion pesos (US$4 billion).
■ Steel
Japan blasts US tariffs
Japan assailed US steel tariffs in a report yesterday, warning that the EU and developing countries such as China are retaliating by erecting trade barriers of their own. The Trade Ministry's annual report comes days after the WTO ruled that the US violated global trade rules when it imposed tariffs on steel last year to give its domestic industry time to recover from a downturn. "US safeguards triggered widespread protectionism in the trade in steel," said the report, which outlines the ministry's policy for the coming year. "The spread of abuse and misuse of anti-dumping measures is observed on the part of developing countries including China, India, Indonesia, and Thailand," it said, referring to taxes to protect domestic goods from overly cheap imports.
■ Music
Sony cuts workforce
Sony Corp's music subsidiary was to begin cutting an estimated 1,000 workers, or 10 percent of its worldwide workforce, yesterday in a move expected to save the company US$100 million a year, the Wall Street Journal said in an article posted on its Web site. The cuts under chairman Andrew Lack are part of a much larger reorganization at Sony Music Entertainment, a unit of the world's second-largest consumer-electronics maker, the report said. About two-thirds of the cuts will be outside the US, with a third coming from the company's manufacturing division, the report said. "There were a lot of separate entities which had developed their own support structures that created a lot of overhead," Lack told the newspaper. The reorganization is intended to "get the company looking at itself as one company that makes music, distributes it, sells it and markets it with one set of eyes, not eight sets of eyes."
A subsidiary of a Hong Kong-based company that has lost control of two critical ports on the Panama Canal said it is seeking US$2 billion of compensation in damages from Panama over its “illegal” takeover of the ports. Panama Ports Co, a unit of Hong Kong’s CK Hutchison Holdings (長江和記實業), on Friday said in a statement that it is demanding the sum under international arbitration proceedings that it had already started. The Panamanian government last week seized control of the Balboa and Cristobal ports on each end of the Panama Canal, after the country’s Supreme Court declared earlier that a concession allowing
DETERRENCE: With 1,000 indigenous Hsiung Feng II and III missiles and 400 Harpoon missiles, the nation would boast the highest anti-ship missile density in the world With Taiwan wrapping up mass production of Hsiung Feng II and III missiles by December and an influx of Harpoon missiles from the US, Taiwan would have the highest density of anti-ship missiles in the world, a source said yesterday. Taiwan is to wrap up mass production of the indigenous anti-ship missiles by the end of year, as the Chungshan Institute of Science and Technology has been meeting production targets ahead of schedule, a defense official with knowledge of the matter said. Combined with the 400 Harpoon anti-ship missiles Taiwan expects to receive from the US by 2028, the nation would have
POSSIBILITIES EMERGE: With Taiwan’s victory and Japan’s narrow win over Australia, Taiwan now have a chance to advance if South Korea also beat the Aussies Taiwan has high hopes that the national baseball team would advance to the World Baseball Classic (WBC) quarter-finals after clinching a crucial 5-4 victory over South Korea in a nail-biting extra-inning game at the Tokyo Dome yesterday. Boosted by three home runs — two solo shots by Yu Chang (張育成) and Cheng Tsung-che (鄭宗哲) and a two-run homer by Stuart Fairchild — the triumph gave Taiwan a much-needed second victory in the five-team Pool C, where only the top two finishers would advance to the knockout stage in Miami, Florida. Entering extra innings with the game tied at four apiece, Taiwan scored
MISSION OF PEACE: The foreign minister urged Beijing to respect Taiwan’s existence as an independent nation, and work together to ensure peace and stability in the region Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) yesterday rejected Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi’s (王毅) comments about Taiwan, criticizing China as a “troublemaker” in the international community and a disruptor of cross-strait peace. Speaking at a news conference on the sidelines of the Chinese National People’s Congress, Wang said that Taiwan has always been a territory of China and that it would be impossible for it to become its own country. The “return” of Taiwan to China was the natural outcome of the Chinese people’s resistance against Japan in World War II, and that any pursuit of independence was “doomed
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