■INVESTMENT
Nomura eyes Lehman Bros
The president of Japan’s biggest brokerage house, Nomura Holdings, said the company was considering buying a stake in troubled US investment bank Lehman Brothers, a report said yesterday. The move would be part of a plan to spend more than ¥200 billion (US$1.9 billion) on investment in US and European financial institutions, Kenichi Watanabe said in an interview in the Yomiuri Shimbun. Lehman “is one of the candidates in which we plan to invest,” Watanabe said without elaborating.
■LABOR
Strike on at Boeing
Despite a 48-hour contract extension, negotiations between Boeing Co and Machinists union officials have failed and the union declared: “The strike is on!” The Machinists bargain for about 25,000 aircraft assembly workers in the Puget Sound area and about 2,000 more in Wichita, Kansas, and Portland, Oregon. Picket lines went up in Wichita early yesterday and West Coast machinists were due to walk out at 12:01am PDT (7:01 GMT).
■ECONOMY
Indonesia turns to deficit
Indonesia recorded its first current account deficit in almost three years for the second quarter of this year as oil prices increased. Southeast Asia’s biggest economy turned to a US$1.5 billion deficit in its current account in the three months to June, from a US$2.3 billion surplus in the first quarter, the nation’s central bank said in a statement dated Friday. Indonesia’s trade surplus narrowed as growth in non-oil exports slowed, while its oil trade deficit widened.
■MINING
Vale breaks ground in Peru
Brazilian mining company Vale broke ground on Friday on a US$479 million phosphate mine in Peru, becoming the second Brazilian company to announce a major investment there this week. Vale’s Bayovar mine, set to open in 2010 in the northern province of Piura, will produce about 3.9 million tonnes of phosphate a year, Companhia Vale do Rio Doce SA announced in a statement. The mine has 238 million tonnes of phosphate reserves, which are mostly used to produce phosphate fertilizers. The investment will turn Peru into an exporter of phosphorous rock and eventually of phosphate fertilizer, Peruvian President Alan Garcia said at the inauguration ceremony.
■AVIATION
Bank denies Alitalia rumor
The bank overseeing the relaunch of Italy’s ailing national airline Alitalia denied a report on Friday that it had offered a stake of between 10 percent and 20 percent to Air France-KLM, the ANSA news agency said. “There is absolutely no basis” to the report in the French daily La Tribune, the agency quoted a spokesman for the Intesa Sanpaolo bank as saying. La Tribune had said Intesa Sanpaolo offered the stake in secret and “held out the possibility that Air France-KLM could become the majority shareholder in five years’ time, in 2013,” according to an unsourced report.
■LABOR
Unionists paralyze exports
Staff from Ivory Coast’s coffee and cocoa marketing body BCC have launched an unlimited strike over back pay that is paralyzing exports, an official for the BCC said on Friday. “The unionists have ransacked” the hall dealing with export operations, leading to a “paralysis” in the coffee-cocoa trade, senior BCC official Kouassi Konan said. Konan said the strike had no connection with an ongoing corruption probe that has implicated many top BCC executives.
MULTIFACETED: A task force has analyzed possible scenarios and created responses to assist domestic industries in dealing with US tariffs, the economics minister said The Executive Yuan is tomorrow to announce countermeasures to US President Donald Trump’s planned reciprocal tariffs, although the details of the plan would not be made public until Monday next week, Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) said yesterday. The Cabinet established an economic and trade task force in November last year to deal with US trade and tariff related issues, Kuo told reporters outside the legislature in Taipei. The task force has been analyzing and evaluating all kinds of scenarios to identify suitable responses and determine how best to assist domestic industries in managing the effects of Trump’s tariffs, he
TIGHT-LIPPED: UMC said it had no merger plans at the moment, after Nikkei Asia reported that the firm and GlobalFoundries were considering restarting merger talks United Microelectronics Corp (UMC, 聯電), the world’s No. 4 contract chipmaker, yesterday launched a new US$5 billion 12-inch chip factory in Singapore as part of its latest effort to diversify its manufacturing footprint amid growing geopolitical risks. The new factory, adjacent to UMC’s existing Singapore fab in the Pasir Res Wafer Fab Park, is scheduled to enter volume production next year, utilizing mature 22-nanometer and 28-nanometer process technologies, UMC said in a statement. The company plans to invest US$5 billion during the first phase of the new fab, which would have an installed capacity of 30,000 12-inch wafers per month, it said. The
Taiwan’s official purchasing managers’ index (PMI) last month rose 0.2 percentage points to 54.2, in a second consecutive month of expansion, thanks to front-loading demand intended to avoid potential US tariff hikes, the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) said yesterday. While short-term demand appeared robust, uncertainties rose due to US President Donald Trump’s unpredictable trade policy, CIER president Lien Hsien-ming (連賢明) told a news conference in Taipei. Taiwan’s economy this year would be characterized by high-level fluctuations and the volatility would be wilder than most expect, Lien said Demand for electronics, particularly semiconductors, continues to benefit from US technology giants’ effort
‘SWASTICAR’: Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s close association with Donald Trump has prompted opponents to brand him a ‘Nazi’ and resulted in a dramatic drop in sales Demonstrators descended on Tesla Inc dealerships across the US, and in Europe and Canada on Saturday to protest company chief Elon Musk, who has amassed extraordinary power as a top adviser to US President Donald Trump. Waving signs with messages such as “Musk is stealing our money” and “Reclaim our country,” the protests largely took place peacefully following fiery episodes of vandalism on Tesla vehicles, dealerships and other facilities in recent weeks that US officials have denounced as terrorism. Hundreds rallied on Saturday outside the Tesla dealership in Manhattan. Some blasted Musk, the world’s richest man, while others demanded the shuttering of his
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