17/10/2025

BIZ & FINANCE FRIDAY | OCT 17, 2025

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RBI deployed US$5b life jacket to aid struggling rupee: Bankers

DBS, Banque Saudi Fransi join forces to boost payment flows across Asia, GCC SINGAPORE: DBS Group, the largest bank in Southeast Asia, said yesterday that it has partnered with Riyadh-based Banque Saudi Fransi tostrengthen trade finance and payment flows between Asia and Saudi Arabia. The partnership, aimed at capitalising on the economic ties within the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region, will involve collaboration on trade settlement, financing and regional currency-clearing solutions, Singapore-based DBS said in a statement. The agreement comes as economic flows between the GCC and Asian nations accelerate. Trade between Southeast Asia and the GCC reached about US$130.7 billion in 2023 and is expected to grow by another US$50 billion by 2027, according to DBS. The tie-up was formalised at the sidelines of Sibos financial services conference in Frankfurt, and will also facilitate joint financing of client transactions, the statement said, adding that the trade volumes between China and GCC countries are projected to double to US$1.9 trillion by 2035. “Asia and the Middle East are growing increasingly interconnected as businesses, investors and talent pursue opportunities in these dynamic markets,” Sriram Muthukrishnan, DBS’s group head of global transaction services product management, said in the statement. Saudi Arabia, the GCC’s largest economy, is expected to play a key role in driving growth across the corridor, DBS said. – Reuters The exact scale of the RBI’s intervention is difficult to determine since it operates through multiple state-run banks, and non-deliverable forward activity is harder to measure. – Reuters MUMBAI: The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is estimated to have sold US$3 billion (RM12.7 billion) to US$5 billion in spot and non-deliverable forward markets to support the rupee on Wednesday, traders said, marking its largest intervention in months. Seven traders from private, state-run and foreign banks provided the estimates, with two suggesting sales of US$5 billion, citing significant activity in the non-deliverable forward market. The RBI did not respond to an e-mailed request for comment. The interventions helped the rupee post its biggest single-day advance in four months on Wednesday. The rally continued into yesterday, with the currency reaching an intraday high of 87.70 per US dollar. The rupee had come under pressure in recent weeks due to punitive US tariffs, weak equity flows, and demand for gold imports. Prior to the central bank stepping in, the rupee was hovering near its all-time low of 88.80. The rupee had depreciated “beyond expectations, and yesterday’s central bank move, though bigger, was not entirely surprising”, said Alok Singh, group head of treasury at CSB Bank in Mumbai. From here, “the rupee should appreciate”, he added.

The TSMC logo is seen at its headquarters in Hsinchu. – AFPPIC

AI boom delivers record net profit for TSMC NT$452.3 billion (RM62 billion), a quarterly record.

ramping up orders for high-end chips as well,” Dilin Wu, research strategist at Pepperstone, told AFP ahead of the earnings release. “It shows TSMC’s technology and capacity are still hard to replicate, and that underpins both margins and valuations for the company.” Looking ahead, Wu said companies “might pull forward shipments to avoid restrictions, so basically front-running the tariffs”. That would be “especially AI chip and GPU clients, certainly in the Chinese market”, she said. The concentration of production in Taiwan has long been seen as a “silicon shield” protecting it from an attack by China, which claims it as part of its territory – and an incentive for the United States to defend it. While TSMC plans to invest an additional US$100 billion in the United States, Washington has been pressuring Taipei to shift more production to US soil. US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said recently he had proposed to Taiwan a 50-50 split in chip production, which Taipei rejected. – AFP At the last G7 meeting, held in Canada in June, the group’s member states and Australia decided to collaborate on establishing benchmarks that are “prerequisites for the development of quantum technologies”. Teams at France’s LNE are already working on establishing benchmarks to measure the performance of future quantum computers. Alongside other international labs, they are also looking into quantum bits – or qbits – and sensors. “If you want to objectively compare the speed of a quantum computer against other computers, you need to build global benchmarks that are as widely shared as possible; otherwise, everyone will create their own,” Grenon said. “We need to develop metrics that allow for comparison.” The G7 nations are the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the UK. – AFP

o Taiwanese company’s technology and capacity still hard to replicate: Analyst TAIPEI: Taiwanese tech titan TSMC reported yesterday a record net profit for the third quarter on skyrocketing demand for microchips used to power iPhones and artificial intelligence. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world’s largest contract chipmaker, has been a massive beneficiary of the frenzy in AI investment. TSMC’s clients Nvidia and Apple are among firms pouring many billions of dollars into chips, servers and data centres, fuelling concerns about a financial bubble. “AI demand actually continues to be very strong – stronger than we thought three months ago,” TSMC chairman and chief executive CC Wei told a briefing. TSMC said net profit for the three months to September soared 39.1% from a year ago to agreement” regarding quantum technology on Wednesday, France’s national metrology lab told AFP. The deal between laboratories involved in the science of measurement hopes to establish benchmarks regarding progress in areas such as quantum computers. The field has seen leading tech giants claim breakthroughs in recent years that have later been questioned by researchers. The goal of the new agreement “is to work together better and faster on major yet still very emerging quantum technologies”, Thomas Grenon, the director-general of France’s National Metrology and Testing Laboratory (LNE), told AFP. For 150 years, the International Bureau of Weights and Measures has provided the framework for a common system of measurements for the countries that signed up

The figure beat expectations of NT$406.67 billion, according to a Bloomberg News survey of analysts. Third-quarter revenue was up 30%, also higher than forecasts. TSMC’s announcement follows a flare-up in trade tensions between Washington and Beijing, and concerns about US export restrictions to China and possible tariffs on chips. China’s rare earth export curbs and bid to ramp up its own chip industry has also sparked fears about the impact on AI. Even if the Chinese market were not available to TSMC and its customers, Wei said “AI growth will be very dramatic” and “very positive”. AI-related spending is soaring worldwide, and is expected to reach approximately US$1.5 trillion by 2025, according to US research firm Gartner, and over US$2 trillion in 2026 – nearly 2% of global GDP. “It’s not just Apple’s new iPhone driving sales. AI clients like Nvidia and AMC are to the Metre Convention. “This is what allows the kilogramme, for example, to have the same value in Paris and New York, today or tomorrow,“ Grenon said. “It seems completely obvious, but if you think about it, it absolutely is not – the kilogramme does not exist in nature, it is a human projection.” Wednesday’s deal hopes to set standards for quantum technology in the same spirit. Quantum computing uses principles of quantum physics – the science that governs the behaviour of particles at the smallest scales – to unlock new ways of processing information. And as scientific understanding progresses, so do our definitions. Until 2019, the kilogramme was defined as the mass of one litre of water. However, since then, it has been defined by what is known as Planck’s constant, which relates to the quantum nature of energy.

G7 and Australia sign deal on quantum tech benchmarks PARIS: Scientists from the G7 nations and Australia signed an “unprecedented