JAPAN
Fewer firms file bankruptcies
Bankruptcies last month edged down from a year earlier, suggesting that government measures might be helping keep businesses afloat amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The number of bankruptcies last month fell 1.6 percent to 789 cases, data released yesterday by Tokyo Shoko Research showed. About 89 firms said that the coronavirus was a factor that drove them out of business, with restaurants and hotels hit hardest. There has so far not been a surge of local bankruptcies during the pandemic.
CONSUMER GOODS
Tax risks Unilever’s UK plan
Unilever said that the consumer goods maker would abandon its plan to unify its headquarters in London and scrap its Dutch base if a proposal by an opposition party for a corporate exit tax goes ahead. Unilever said that it believes the proposal, submitted by the opposition Green party, is contrary to international law, but if it were implemented, the company would face a bill of about 11 billion euros (US$12.96 billion). The proposal would need to go through both houses of the Dutch parliament and it is not clear how long that would take, or how probable it would be.
CHINA
Auto sales continue recovery
Auto sales last month rose by 16.4 percent to 2.1 million units from a year earlier in a sign of sustained recovery for the industry’s biggest global market, an industry group said yesterday. The China Association of Automobile Manufacturers reported that sales of passenger cars jumped 8.5 percent to 1.67 million from a year earlier. In the first seven months of this year, passenger vehicle sales tumbled 18.4 percent to 9.5 million from a year earlier, the association said, as many cities imposed shutdowns during the first quarter to battle COVID-19.
UNITED KINGDOM
Q2 employment dipped
The number of employed people fell by 220,000 in the three months after the country was put into lockdown as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, official figures showed yesterday. That quarterly decline, which took the number of employed people to 32.92 million, is the biggest since the deep recession in 2009 in the wake of the global financial crisis. The British Office for National Statistics also said that the number of people on payrolls in the UK last month fell by another 81,000, taking the total decline since the start of the pandemic in March to 730,000. While the number of people on payrolls has fallen to 28.27 million since the start of the pandemic, the country’s official unemployment rate is not rising, holding steady in June at 3.9 percent.
FRANCE
TikTok probe launched
The country’s data watchdog CNIL opened a probe into TikTok, marking another examination of ByteDance Ltd’s (字節跳動) social media app, which is facing broader scrutiny of its privacy policies. A CNIL spokesman said that the agency opened an investigation after receiving a complaint in May, but declined to give details about the grounds of the complaint, or the timing on a ruling. The CNIL “is particularly vigilant with regard to this company, particularly with regard to this complaint and questions and other complaints that the commission is likely to receive,” the spokesman said. TikTok did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to