Japan’s consumer prices stopped falling last month for the first time in 13 months, ending the country’s longest deflationary stretch since 2011.
Prices, excluding those for fresh food, were unchanged from a year earlier, the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications reported yesterday in a result that matched an estimate from analysts.
Rising costs for hotels, processed food and energy cushioned the impact of mobile phone rates that have fallen sharply under pressure from outgoing Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga.
Despite last month’s slightly improved reading, Japan’s weak inflation pulse has trapped the Bank of Japan in a holding pattern while the Federal Reserve and other central banks move toward reining in pandemic stimulus. The bank on Wednesday kept its key stimulus tools in place and would likely do so for the foreseeable future.
“At least we can say prices aren’t falling, so the BOJ can continue to keep a close eye on it, without taking additional easing steps,” NLI Research Institute economist Taro Saito said.
While producer prices have jumped, climbing 5.5 percent last month, most Japanese firms aren’t choosing to pass those costs on to customers.
Global supply-chain snags and surging commodities prompted the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development this week to raise its forecast for consumer price inflation this year and next in every G7 country, except Japan.
Last month’s inflation report continued to show the numbers being swayed by government initiatives that analysts say have made it hard to grasp underlying price trends.
The cost of hotel rooms rose nearly 50 percent compared with the level last summer, when the government’s “Go-To Travel” discounts to help the ailing tourism industry had just gone into effect.
Moving in the opposite direction, the cost of mobile phone service fell by almost the same amount, shaving 1.2 percentage points from the overall price index. Getting phone companies to slash rates was a top priority of the Suga administration.
China’s Huawei Technologies Co (華為) plans to start mass-producing its most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip in the first quarter of next year, even as it struggles to make enough chips due to US restrictions, two people familiar with the matter said. The telecoms conglomerate has sent samples of the Ascend 910C — its newest chip, meant to rival those made by US chipmaker Nvidia Corp — to some technology firms and started taking orders, the sources told Reuters. The 910C is being made by top Chinese contract chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯) on its N+2 process, but a lack
NVIDIA PLATFORM: Hon Hai’s Mexican facility is to begin production early next year and a Taiwan site is to enter production next month, Nvidia wrote on its blog Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), the world’s biggest electronics manufacturer, yesterday said it is expanding production capacity of artificial intelligence (AI) servers based on Nvidia Corp’s Blackwell chips in Taiwan, the US and Mexico to cope with rising demand. Hon Hai’s new AI-enabled factories are to use Nvidia’s Omnivores platform to create 3D digital twins to plan and simulate automated production lines at a factory in Hsinchu, the company said in a statement. Nvidia’s Omnivores platform is for developing industrial AI simulation applications and helps bring facilities online faster. Hon Hai’s Mexican facility is to begin production early next year and the
Who would not want a social media audience that grows without new content? During the three years she paused production of her short do-it-yourself (DIY) farmer’s lifestyle videos, Chinese vlogger Li Ziqi (李子柒), 34, has seen her YouTube subscribers increase to 20.2 million from about 14 million. While YouTube is banned in China, her fan base there — although not the size of YouTube’s MrBeast, who has 330 million subscribers — is close to 100 million across the country’s social media platforms Douyin (抖音), Sina Weibo (新浪微博) and Xiaohongshu (小紅書). When Li finally released new videos last week — ending what has
TECH BOOST: New TSMC wafer fabs in Arizona are to dramatically improve US advanced chip production, a report by market research firm TrendForce said With Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) pouring large funds into Arizona, the US is expected to see an improvement in its status to become the second-largest maker of advanced semiconductors in 2027, Taipei-based market researcher TrendForce Corp (集邦科技) said in a report last week. TrendForce estimates the US would account for a 21 percent share in the global advanced integrated circuit (IC) production market by 2027, sharply up from the current 9 percent, as TSMC is investing US$65 billion to build three wafer fabs in Arizona, the report said. TrendForce defined the advanced chipmaking processes as the 7-nanometer process or more
RSS