■ENERGY
Taipower touts green effort
Taiwan Power Co’s (Taipower, 台電) plan to give discounts to those who conserve electricity has borne fruit, the state-owned company said yesterday. Since the incentive measures were introduced in July 2008, the public had conserved 7.3 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity — 2.593 billion in 2008, 3.756 billion last year and 984 million in the first four months of this year. Under the incentive plan, if residents use less electricity over a two-month period than they did during the same period the previous year, the company charges them a discounted rate. The conservation efforts cut electricity fees by NT$24.94 billion (US$785 million), an average of NT$2,010 for each of Taiwan’s 12.41 million households. Taipower also cut its fuel costs by NT$28.958 billion and carbon dioxide emissions by 4.66 million tonnes during the period.
■MINING
Billiton-Rio merger in doubt
BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto might re-evaluate plans to merge their Western Australian iron ore operations if an agreement is not reached by the end of the year, the Wall Street Journal said yesterday. It reported BHP chief executive Marius Kloppers as saying that said the deal’s completion was hampered by a proposed new Australian tax on mining profits. “I still want to do it,” the Journal quoted Kloppers as saying on Friday. “We have many hurdles to jump through, and the tax brings in uncertainty.” The new 40 percent resource rent tax has angered the mining industry generally and sparked talk among some of reconsidering Australian projects.
■AUTOMOBILES
Daimler might exit NYSE
German car maker Daimler AG wants to pull its shares off the New York Stock Exchange because of low trading volume and to reduce the complexity of its financial reports, the company said on Friday. Daimler, the maker of Mercedes-Benz and Smart automobiles and one-time owner of Chrysler, told the stock exchange of its intentions on Friday, and has applied to delist with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, spokesman Han Tjan said. Normally it takes about 10 business days from the application date for shares to be removed from the exchange, Tjan said.
■AVIATION
EasyJet founder resigns
EasyJet founder Stelios Haji-Ioannou has resigned from the airline’s board, the British group announced on Friday, amid a row over strategy. He was joined in stepping down from the board by fellow non-executive director Bob Rothenberg. “The stated reason for their resignation is that Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou wishes to gain greater freedom to exercise EasyGroup’s rights as a shareholder in the company to seek a change in the company’s strategy,” EasyJet said in a statement.
■EUROZONE
Spain considers tax hike
Spain’s government, under pressure from markets and its EU partners, said on Friday that it is considering taxes hikes to help slash the public deficit, in addition to other unpopular measures already announced. “We are considering the situation, and we don’t rule out anything,” Deputy Prime Minister Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega said in reply to a question about the possibility of a tax increase. The remark came after Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero on Wednesday announced a 15-billion-euro austerity package, including a 5 percent pay cut for civil servants.
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
VERTICAL INTEGRATION: The US fabless company’s acquisition of the data center manufacturer would not affect market competition, the Fair Trade Commission said The Fair Trade Commission has approved Advanced Micro Devices Inc’s (AMD) bid to fully acquire ZT International Group Inc for US$4.9 billion, saying it would not hamper market competition. As AMD is a fabless company that designs central processing units (CPUs) used in consumer electronics and servers, while ZT is a data center manufacturer, the vertical integration would not affect market competition, the commission said in a statement yesterday. ZT counts hyperscalers such as Microsoft Corp, Amazon.com Inc and Google among its major clients and plays a minor role in deciding the specifications of data centers, given the strong bargaining power of
RSS