■ELECTRONICS
Sanyo forecasts loss
Japan’s Sanyo Electric Co yesterday forecast a net loss of ¥30 billion (US$330 million) for the current financial year to March, partly due to the cost of recalling faulty washing machines. Sanyo — which is being bought by its bigger rival Panasonic Corp — had previously estimated that it would just break even with zero net profit, after a loss of ¥93.2 billion the previous year. The group left unchanged its projections for annual revenue of ¥1.66 trillion and an operating loss of ¥25 billion.
■ELECTRONICS
Fujitsu president resigns
Japanese electronics maker Fujitsu Ltd said yesterday that its president Kuniaki Nozoe, 62, had resigned due to illness after about one year in the job. Fujitsu chairman Michiyoshi Mazuka, 65, will take on the additional role while Nozoe will become an adviser to the group, it said in a statement. The company lost more than US$1 billion in the year to March as it overhauled its operations in response to the global economic crisis.
■FINANCE
HSBC chief heads to London
HSBC on Friday said that its chief executive Michael Geoghegan will move to Hong Kong from London so that he is closer to the banking group’s “largest and most important region” of operation. HSBC, founded in Hong Kong and Shanghai in 1865, said it would remain headquartered in London. “There is absolutely no question of HSBC pulling away from London. We will operate from two equally strategically important centers for the company,” chairman Stephen Green said in a statement.
■CONSUMER PRODUCTS
Unilever to buy Sara Lee unit
Consumer products maker Unilever NV says it has agreed to buy the personal care products businesses of Sara Lee Corp for 1.28 billion euros (US$1.88 billion). Unilever makes Dove soaps and Axe deodorants, while the Sara Lee businesses to be acquired are known for the Sanex, Radox and Duschdas brands, Unilever said. The Anglo-Dutch company says the businesses are complementary and have room to grow in developing markets. Unilever said in a statement yesterday the deal must be approved by regulators.
■SINGAPORE
Industrial output rises
Singapore’s industrial output rose 12.3 percent year-on-year last month, its second straight monthly expansion amid signs the city-state was recovering from a recession, government data showed yesterday. The biomedical industry was the main driver for the surge in industrial output with an expansion of 97.8 percent from a year ago, the Economic Development Board (EDB) said. The strong showing from the biomedical sector cushioned declines in other industries, including electronics, which dropped 6.4 percent year-on-year last month, it said.
■INTERNET
Google sorry for outage
Google apologized on Thursday for a Gmail outage which left some users of the free Web-based email service cut off for the second time in a month. The Internet giant announced at 10:29am that an unspecified problem was preventing a “small subset of users” from accessing their Gmail accounts. About an hour later, the Internet giant said service had been restored for some users and at 12:58pm it said the problem had been resolved. The disruption came just more than three weeks after an outage that left millions of users without Gmail for more than an hour and a half.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
WHAT WAS ALL THAT FOR? Jaw Shaw-kong said that Cheng Li-wen had pushed for more drastic cuts and attacked him, just for the outcome to be nearly identical to his bill The legislature yesterday passed a supplementary budget bill to fund the purchase of separate packages of US military equipment, with the combined amount of spending capped at NT$780 billion (US$24.8 billion). The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) used their legislative majority to pass the bill, which runs until 2033 and has two main funding provisions. One was for NT$300 billion of arms sales already approved by the US for Taiwan on Dec. 17 last year, the other was for NT$480 billion for another arms package expected to be announced by Washington. The bill, which fell short of the NT$1.25
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
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