ENTERTAINMENT
‘Mario Bros’ holds No. 1
The Super Mario Bros. Movie easily held its first-place position on North American movie screens this weekend, while its accumulated global total pushed past the US$1 billion mark, analysts said on Sunday. The video game-based film earned an estimated US$40 million for the Friday-through-Sunday period in the US and Canada for a domestic total so far of US$490 million, industry watcher Exhibitor Relations reported. With overseas earnings at US$532 million, its accumulated global total has reached US$1.02 billion. That makes The Super Mario Bros. Movie — a joint project of Universal Pictures, Nintendo Co and Illumination — the year’s first film to pass the billion-dollar mark and only the 10th animation ever to do so, The Hollywood Reporter said.
PHARMACEUTICALS
Astellas to buy Iveric
Japanese drugmaker Astellas Pharma Inc has agreed to acquire Iveric Bio Inc, which develops drugs to treat age-related blindness, for about US$5.9 billion. The deal, which is to be funded by cash and debt, is for 100 percent of Iveric Bio for US$40 per share, a premium of 75 percent to the drugmaker’s 30-day volume-weighted average price through the end of March 31, the companies said in a statement yesterday. Iveric Bio shares closed at US$32.89 on Friday. The acquisition gives Astellas a key product to offer therapies for blindness and eye conditions, a growth area identified by the company as it seeks to make up for declining sales of other products. Iveric Bio is developing a drug to treat geographic atrophy, a condition that leads to the loss of retinal tissue in the eye.
FRANCE
Fitch cuts credit rating
The nation’s credit rating was cut by Fitch Ratings in another blow to politically embattled President Emmanuel Macron as he tries to bolster the country’s public finances with unpopular overhauls. Fitch reduced France’s credit rating to “AA-” from “AA,” with a stable outlook, bringing the eurozone’s second-largest economy to the same notch as countries including Ireland and the Czech Republic. France’s projected budget deficits for this year and next year “are well above” the median for countries with AA ratings, Fitch said in a note. It is only the second time France has been downgraded since Macron took office in 2017 and the first time by one of the three major rating firms. In 2020, DBRS Morningstar cut France to “AA (high)” from the top-notch “AAA.”
EDUCATION
Byju’s offices raided
Byju’s, India’s most valuable start-up, sought to reassure employees and partners after a weekend raid of the education company’s offices by the agency that investigates money laundering in the country. Indian Directorate of Enforcement officials searched the Bengaluru-based start-up’s offices and seized documents and digital data, the agency wrote in a post on Twitter. The probe is occurring under the Foreign Exchange Management Act, it said. The investigations come as the company, valued at US$22 billion, is in talks with investors to raise funds to address a liquidity crunch. The firm had also been trying to appease creditors seeking restructuring of a US$1.2 billion term loan after the once high-flying start-up missed deadlines to file financial accounts for the year to March 31 last year. The company, which claims to have 150 million registered students, offers education programs through an app service.
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
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
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