■AUTOMOBILES
Toyota to keep it in family
The grandson of Toyota Motor Corp’s founder will take the helm of the automaker in June, newspapers said yesterday. Toyota’s top executives will hold a board meeting as early as Monday to endorse the appointment of Akio Toyoda, said the Nikkei daily, a top business newspaper, citing no sources. Apart from the Nikkei daily, Japan’s Yomiuri newspaper and the Mainichi daily said in their evening editions yesterday that Toyoda will take over the top job in June. It will mark the first time in 14 years that a member of Toyota’s founding family will run the auto giant. Neither of the papers cited any sources.
■CHINA
Plan receives revamp
China has updated an ambitious blueprint to aggressively revamp the country’s key manufacturing region — a plan that has already helped cause many low-end factories to move or shut down. The sweeping new plan, released on Thursday in Beijing, covers the next 12 years and targets the booming Pearl River Delta in Guangdong Province. The National Development and Reform Commission says the general goal is to transform the region into a base for advanced manufacturing, innovation and heavy industry. The plan calls for the creation of 10 China-based multinationals, each with annual sales of US$20 billion by 2020. It will be home to two to three big automakers with output worth more than 100 billion yuan (US$14.6 billion) each by 2020.
■TELECOMS
Palm Inc unveils smartphone
Palm Inc, a pioneer in handheld devices but suffering hard times lately, unveiled a touch-screen smartphone on Thursday that impressed reviewers and sent its stock price soaring. The Palm Pre, released at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, runs on a new operating system, the Palm webOS mobile platform, developed by the company. Palm said the Pre would be available through US carrier Sprint by this summer. It did not reveal the price for the device, which notably allows users to move seamlessly from one application to another like with a desktop computer and run multiple applications at the same time.
■TELECOMS
Skype turns to cellphones
Skype, which brought cheap and free calls to the Internet, is doing the same for cellphones. The Web-based voice and text messaging service owned by auction giant eBay announced on Thursday at the Consumer Electronics Show that it was bringing its Internet communications software to cellphones. It said it had developed a “lite” version of Skype that can be downloaded for free to more than 100 models of Java-enabled cellphones or those using Google’s open-source Android platform. The T-Mobile G1 runs Android software, while phones from LG, Motorola, Nokia, Samsugn and Sony Ericsson are Java-enabled.
■COMPUTERS
Dell to cut Irish workforce
US computer maker Dell Inc announced on Thursday it will slash its Irish work force and shift its European manufacturing operations to Poland in a move certain to undermine Ireland’s recession-hit economy. Dell is Ireland’s second-largest corporate employer, its biggest exporter and in recent years has contributed about 5 percent to the national GDP. Economists warn that each Dell job underpins another four to five jobs in Ireland. Managers told its approximately 4,300 Irish employees that 1,900 of them would lose their jobs between this April and January next year.
DISCONTENT: The CCP finds positive content about the lives of the Chinese living in Taiwan threatening, as such video could upset people in China, an expert said Chinese spouses of Taiwanese who make videos about their lives in Taiwan have been facing online threats from people in China, a source said yesterday. Some young Chinese spouses of Taiwanese make videos about their lives in Taiwan, often speaking favorably about their living conditions in the nation compared with those in China, the source said. However, the videos have caught the attention of Chinese officials, causing the spouses to come under attack by Beijing’s cyberarmy, they said. “People have been messing with the YouTube channels of these Chinese spouses and have been harassing their family members back in China,”
The Central Weather Administration (CWA) yesterday said there are four weather systems in the western Pacific, with one likely to strengthen into a tropical storm and pose a threat to Taiwan. The nascent tropical storm would be named Usagi and would be the fourth storm in the western Pacific at the moment, along with Typhoon Yinxing and tropical storms Toraji and Manyi, the CWA said. It would be the first time that four tropical cyclones exist simultaneously in November, it added. Records from the meteorology agency showed that three tropical cyclones existed concurrently in January in 1968, 1991 and 1992.
GEOPOLITICAL CONCERNS: Foreign companies such as Nissan, Volkswagen and Konica Minolta have pulled back their operations in China this year Foreign companies pulled more money from China last quarter, a sign that some investors are still pessimistic even as Beijing rolls out stimulus measures aimed at stabilizing growth. China’s direct investment liabilities in its balance of payments dropped US$8.1 billion in the third quarter, data released by the Chinese State Administration of Foreign Exchange showed on Friday. The gauge, which measures foreign direct investment (FDI) in China, was down almost US$13 billion for the first nine months of the year. Foreign investment into China has slumped in the past three years after hitting a record in 2021, a casualty of geopolitical tensions,
‘SOMETHING SPECIAL’: Donald Trump vowed to reward his supporters, while President William Lai said he was confident the Taiwan-US partnership would continue Donald Trump was elected the 47th president of the US early yesterday morning, an extraordinary comeback for a former president who was convicted of felony charges and survived two assassination attempts. With a win in Wisconsin, Trump cleared the 270 electoral votes needed to clinch the presidency. As of press time last night, The Associated Press had Trump on 277 electoral college votes to 224 for US Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party’s nominee, with Alaska, Arizona, Maine, Michigan and Nevada yet to finalize results. He had 71,289,216 votes nationwide, or 51 percent, while Harris had 66,360,324 (47.5 percent). “We’ve been through so
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