Toyota Motor Corp’s global output sank for the fourth straight month as a shortage of chips and supply-chain disruptions caused by COVID-19 lockdowns in China hurt production. Output fell 8.6 percent last month from a year earlier to 706,547 vehicles, Toyota said in a statement yesterday. Sales declined 7.2 percent to 797,179 units, extending a slump for an 11th consecutive month. The automaker is sticking to its production target of 9.7 million vehicles for the fiscal year ending in March next year. While Toyota’s overseas output climbed to a record for last month, volumes still fell short of target. Output in Japan slid 28.2 percent from a year earlier.

Freyr Battery SA and Nidec Corp, the world’s largest maker of high-efficiency electric motors, signed a binding deal for lithium-ion batteries from Freyr’s arctic giga-factory. The volume totals 38 gigawatt-hours and equates to projected revenues of more than US$3 billion for Freyr, the Norwegian company said in a statement yesterday. The companies are converting and expanding a previously announced 31 gigawatt-hour conditional off-take agreement to a binding sales agreement running from 2025 to 2030.

China has suspended some meat imports from US processing giant Tyson Foods Inc, the country’s customs office said on Monday. The halt affects products from a plant owned by Tyson Fresh Meats Inc, the beef and pork subsidiary, for shipments from Monday, after some pig trotters from the producer failed inspection, according to a notice published on the customs Web site. The US Department of Agriculture confirmed that the Logansport, Indiana, facility was ineligible for exports to China. The move follows Beijing’s halt on shipments of meat products from two other US plants in the past month or so, citing the presence of ractopamine.

Africa’s financial-technology company revenue is forecast to soar to US$30.3 billion by 2025 — eight times higher than in 2020 — as a growing, young and under-banked population gets more access to the Internet, McKinsey & Co said in a report yesterday. The anticipated increase is part of a rapid expansion in financial services income that is expected to grow to US$230 billion from US$150 billion over the same period, the report said. About two-thirds of Africa’s 1.3 billion people do not have a bank account or full access to financial services, and 90 percent of all transactions on the continent are still cash-based, it said. That creates a growth opportunity for fintech companies.

Tesla Inc CEO Elon Musk has formally subpoenaed a Twitter Inc whistle-blower to share information about spam accounts at the social network, as the billionaire fights in court to back out of a massive buyout deal. Musk hopes that allegations made by the former Twitter security head Peiter Zatko, about major security gaps and problematic practices at the firm, would bolster his case. According to court documents made public on Monday, Musk’s attorneys on Saturday served Zatko with a subpoena demanding he share any documents or messages regarding the impact of spam and false accounts on Twitter’s activity, dating back to January 2019.

SPECULATION: A report by JPMorgan said that the chipmaker’s four major clients slashed orders, prompting it to shut four EUV lithography machines Shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s biggest contract chipmaker, came under pressure yesterday amid speculation that its major clients have cut their orders. The stock faced a sell-off on the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TWSE) after the Chinese-language Economic Daily News reported that four major TSMC clients — MediaTek Inc (聯發科), Advanced Micro Devices Inc, Qualcomm Inc and Nvidia Corp — have scaled back their orders, citing a JPMorgan Chase & Co report. The order cut has led TSMC to shut down four extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines, which roll out high-end chips, the report said. According to the report,

INFLATIONARY PRESSURE: Economic headwinds are expected to worsen consumer sentiment and contract the market over the next six quarters, a research firm said Global PC shipments are forecast to drop significantly this year from last year, with further contraction expected next year due to persistent headwinds, research firm International Data Corp (IDC) said on Thursday last week. Worldwide PC shipments are forecast to decrease 12.8 percent on an annual basis to 305.3 million units this year, due to higher inflationary pressure, a weakening global economy and a higher comparison base last year, IDC said in a research report. The latest forecast was IDC’s second downward revision this year. The firm in February predicted global PC shipments would drop 1 percent annually to 345 million units

Fifteen years after its launch, a Google Maps feature that lets people explore faraway places as though standing right there is providing a glimpse of the “metaverse” being heralded as the future of the Internet. There was not yet talk of online life moving to virtual worlds when a “far-fetched” musing by Google cofounder Larry Page prompted Street View, which lets users of the company’s free navigation service see imagery of map locations from the perspective of being there. Now the metaverse is a tech-world buzz, with companies including Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc investing in creating online realms where people represented

EXPANSION EXPENSES: China’s waning dependence on Taiwanese chips and growing investment costs overseas are to weigh on profit growth, a local credit agency said The local semiconductor industry is expected to face earnings challenges in 2025 as profit growth is likely to peak this year, the Taipei-based China Credit Information Service Ltd (CCIS, 中華徵信所) said in a report on Tuesday last week. Industry profit declines are to become more apparent in 2025 as the US, Europe, South Korea and Japan, which compete with Taiwan in the semiconductor industry, are scheduled to fulfill their expansion plans by that year as they strive for a higher share of the global semiconductor market, the report said. Additionally, China is expected to reduce its dependence on Taiwan’s semiconductor exports, which