AUTOMAKERS
Inoue to tackle Daihatsu
Toyota Motor Corp has chosen Masahiro Inoue to restore leadership at Daihatsu Motor Co after the unit became entangled in a vehicle certification scandal. Inoue, the CEO of Toyota Latin America, is to replace Soichiro Okudaira effective March 1, the companies said in a joint statement yesterday. Daihatsu’s top posts would be replaced and its operations abroad would folded into Toyota’s oversight, Toyota CEO Koji Sato said yesterday. A new leadership structure for Daihatsu will be announced in April, Inoue said. Daihatsu chairman Sunao Matsubayashi is to step down, and his position left vacant. Daihatsu is to remove itself from a strategic manufacturing alliance with Toyota and Suzuki Motor Corp, it said.
AVIATION
Faury mulls Boeing lessons
Airbus SE chief executive officer Guillaume Faury said rival Boeing Co’s mishap with a 737 MAX-9 model early last month is a lesson for the entire industry to double down on safety. “It’s never good when an incident happens, whatever the type of plane,” Faury said at the World Government Summit in Dubai on Monday. “And this incident makes us very humble.” The accident on the Alaska Airlines aircraft last month, whereby a fuselage panel came off during flight and left a gaping hole in the almost-new jet, has made the European company think over “what should we be doing to not be in that situation,” Faury said.
TOURISM
Thai holiday extended
Thailand’s Cabinet approved an additional holiday for civil servants during the traditional new year festival in April as the Southeast Asian nation seeks to sustain a recovery in its tourism industry. The special holiday on April 12 is to apply to government offices and other state agencies and extend the so-called Songkran festival period to five days until April 16, aiming to boost local tourism and spending. The Thai government targets 35 million foreign arrivals this year, with 8 million expected from China. Tourism revenue from foreign visitors totaled 215 billion baht (US$6 billion) as of Feb. 11, according to the Ministry of Tourism and Sports.
UNITED STATES
Budget deficit widens
The US budget deficit widened in the four months through last month, as debt-servicing costs climbed further. The deficit for the first four months of the 2024 fiscal year reached US$532 billion, or 16 percent more than recorded in the same period in the prior year, Treasury Department data released on Monday showed. Interest costs in the four months through last month were US$357 billion, a 37 percent jump from a year earlier. The US Federal Reserve’s aggressive interest-rate hiking campaign has made debt more expensive, increasing the burden for the US budget.
SWITZERLAND
Inflation unexpectedly eases
Swiss inflation unexpectedly eased last month, a development that could open the door to earlier rate cuts at the Swiss National Bank. Consumer prices rose 1.3 percent from a year earlier, the Swiss statistics office said yesterday. That is much less than the 1.7 percent predicted by economists. The so-called core gauge, which strips out volatile elements like energy and food, also slowed to 1.2 percent. The drop comes as a surprise as many prices in the Swiss economy are regulated and those for electricity rose at the beginning of the year. January also marked a boost in value-added tax to 8.1 percent from 7.7 percent.
FRANC E
Unemployment stable
France’s official jobless rate was stable at 7.5 percent for the final quarter of last year as statistics agency INSEE yesterday revised upwards by 0.1 percent its initial estimate. The fourth quarter saw the number of jobless nationwide rise 29,000 over the third quarter to 2.3 million, with the rate 0.4 percentage points higher than the 40-year-low it had reached at the end of 2022. Unemployment among the young, for those aged 15 to 24, remains stubbornly high, albeit dropping back 0.2 percent in the final quarter of last year to 17.5 percent. The long-term jobless figure, for those out of work for a year or longer, stood at 1.8 percent, a minuscule increase on a year earlier.
EUROZONE
No need for slack: Cipollone
There is no need for the European Central Bank (ECB) to further curb demand in its quest to regain control over inflation, Executive Board member Piero Cipollone said, signaling that interest rates do not need to rise anymore. The Italian official also suggested the struggling eurozone economy could bounce back without prices doing likewise. “With demand still weak and inflation expectations anchored, there is no need for monetary policy to generate further slack to keep inflation in check,” Cipollone said on Monday in Brussels. “The unwinding of supply shocks creates scope for demand to recover without fueling inflation.”
TRAVEL
TUI urges London exit
TUI AG management urged shareholders to support plans to abandon its UK stock listing and trade primarily in Germany, as investors were to vote on the decision at a meeting later yesterday. The German travel company said shifting its primary listing to Frankfurt would simplify its trading structure, given that most of the shares already change hands in Germany. The single listing would also improve liquidity and provide support for EU airline ownership, TUI said. It is among firms including Ryanair Holdings PLC, Allied Minds PLC and YouGov that have considered delisting from the London Stock Exchange in the wake of Brexit.
ENERGY
Diamondback stock surges
Diamondback Energy Inc shares surged in New York trading on Monday after agreeing to buy fellow Permian Basin driller Endeavor Energy Resources LP in a US$26 billion deal that would create the largest explorer focused exclusively on the western hemisphere’s busiest oil field. Diamondback’s advance made it the day’s second-best performer in the S&P 500 Index, an atypical price reaction for the acquirer in such a major transaction. Diamondback’s stock price settled up 9.4 percent at US$165.98.
INVESTMENT
Carlyle eyes rich Europeans
Carlyle Group Inc is readying its first European private credit fund for wealthy people as it joins giants such as Blackstone Inc in a race to tap the trillions of dollars held by the continent’s rich investors. The new fund is to invest across a range of financing strategies and focus on lending to European businesses. There are plans to roll out more in the coming months, both in Europe and the US, Carlyle’s new head of wealth Shane Clifford said in an interview. Carlyle manages just US$6 billion across similar retail funds in the US, a small amount compared with rivals, and about US$50 billion for high-net-worth clients in other structures.
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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