Japanese electric motor maker Nidec raised its full-year operating profit forecast by 4.3% on Tuesday off the back of a recovery in demand for hard drive motors amid efforts to raise its profitability and a weaker yen. The company raised its expectations for operating profit in the financial year to the end of March 2025 to 240 billion ( 1.53 billion), versus an earlier forecast of 230 billion and an average analyst view of 246.9 billion. Operating profit for the April-June quarter totaled 60.3 billion, largely in line with 60.2 billion in the same period a year earlier and compared with the average estimate of 58.4 billion in a survey of four analysts by LSEG. "Nidec expects rapid demand expansion of power generators which are essential to data centers," the company said in a statement. It said it saw demand for hard drive disk motors recovering and that for water-cooling modules for artificial intelligence expanding rapidly. The company said last month its business in water-cooling modules for generative AI data centers could expand to 1 trillion in sales in the future.

Samsung Electronics has reported a nearly 10-fold jump in first-quarter operating profit amid the recovery of its key memory chip business. The tech giant, the flagship subsidiary of Samsung Group, South Korea's largest family-controlled conglomerate, said that operating profit rose to 6.61 trillion won ( 4.85bn) in the first three months of the year on the back of strong sales of its flagship Galaxy S24 smartphone and higher prices for memory semiconductors. Overall revenue rose to 71.9 trillion won ( 52 billion), an increase of nearly 13 percent. The world's biggest memory chip maker said revenues had also been helped by the weakness of the won against the dollar, which boosted earnings by about 0.3 trillion won. "In the second half of 2024, business conditions are expected to remain positive with demand – mainly around generative AI – holding strong, despite continued volatility relating to macroeconomic trends and geopolitical issues," the company said in a statement.

Samsung has failed to recover from the sharp decline in profit it experienced in 2022. In its latest earnings report, the Korean company has reported KRW 258.94 trillion ( 194 billion) in annual revenue and KRW 6.57 trillion ( 4.9 billion) in operating profit for the fiscal year of 2023. Those are markedly smaller numbers than the previous fiscal year's, especially the latter's -- Samsung posted an operating profit of KRW 43.38 trillion ( 35 billion) for 2022, which was already 6.9 billion smaller than the year before due to the weak demand for its chips and smartphones. According to The Wall Street Journal, these numbers represent Samsung's weakest earnings in over a decade. The company says its memory business showed signs of recovery, but not enough to stop it from incurring KRW 2.18 trillion ( 1.63 billion) in operating losses for the fourth quarter of 2023.

Near future air taxi operations with electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft will be constrained by the need for frequent recharging of eVTOLs, limited takeoff and landing pads in vertiports, and subject to time-varying demand and electricity prices, making the eVTOL dispatch problem unique and particularly challenging to solve. Previously, we have developed optimization models to address this problem. Such optimization models however suffer from prohibitively high computational run times when the scale of the problem increases, making them less practical for real world implementation. To overcome this issue, we have developed two deep reinforcement learning-based eVTOL dispatch algorithms, namely single-agent and multi-agent deep Q-learning eVTOL dispatch algorithms, where the objective is to maximize operating profit. An eVTOL-based passenger transportation simulation environment was built to assess the performance of our algorithms across $36$ numerical cases with varying number of eVTOLs, vertiports, and demand. The results indicate that the multi-agent eVTOL dispatch algorithm can closely approximate the optimal dispatch policy with significantly less computational expenses compared to the benchmark optimization model. The multi-agent algorithm was found to outperform the single-agent counterpart with respect to both profits generated and training time.

The cybersecurity firm Darktrace has warned that since the release of ChatGPT it has seen an increase in criminals using artificial intelligence to create more sophisticated scams to con employees and hack into businesses. The Cambridge-based company, which reported a 92% drop in operating profits in the half year to the end of December, said AI was further enabling "hacktivist" cyber-attacks using ransomware to extort money from businesses. The company said it had seen the emergence of more convincing and complex scams by hackers since the launch of the hugely popular Microsoft-backed AI tool ChatGPT last November. "Darktrace has found that while the number of email attacks across its own customer base remained steady since ChatGPT's release, those that rely on tricking victims into clicking malicious links have declined while linguistic complexity, including text volume, punctuation and sentence length among others, have increased," the company said. "This indicates that cybercriminals may be redirecting their focus to crafting more sophisticated social engineering scams that exploit user trust." However, Darktrace said that the phenomenon had not yet resulted in a new wave of cybercriminals emerging, merely changing the tactics of the existing cohort.

SoftBank Group Corp. and video game-makers are emerging as rare beneficiaries of the weaker yen, which no longer offers the clear advantage to Japan's corporate sector that it did a decade ago. Automakers and electronics-makers including Sony Group Corp. once welcomed a softer yen to bolster their competitiveness abroad and inflate the value of their repatriated profits. But after shifting production overseas in recent years to secure growth and resilient supply chains, many of them see a mixed -- or mostly neutral -- effect from the yen's free fall to 20-year lows, according to industry executives and analysts. For some consumer-facing companies, including Uniqlo owner Fast Retailing Co., the latest slump in the yen is a negative factor, exacerbating the impact of surging raw materials costs and higher energy prices amid Russia's war in Ukraine. "It's no longer the case that the weak yen benefits many firms in the manufacturing sector," Morningstar Research analyst Kazunori Ito said.

South Korean tech giant Samsung Electronics said Thursday its operating profit rose 53.3 percent in the fourth quarter of 2021, as record sales helped overcome pandemic-induced supply chain challenges. The world's biggest smartphone maker said its operating profit rose to 13.87 trillion won ($11.55 billion) for the October-December period in 2021, up from nine trillion won in the same quarter the previous year. Thanks to high memory chip prices and strong consumer demand, Samsung had its highest annual sales of 279.6 trillion won in 2021, an 18 percent jump from a year earlier, the company said in a regulatory filing. Samsung achieved "record sales thanks to competitive products, despite continuing uncertainty," the tech giant said in a statement, singling out solid demand for its premium smartphone lines. While the Covid-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on the global economy, it has helped many tech companies boom.

Almost half a century after founding his pioneering motor-maker on the family farm, Japanese billionaire Shigenobu Nagamori is handing over leadership of Nidec Corp. to a former Nissan Motor Co. executive to lead an ambitious pivot into the electric-vehicle space. Jun Seki will take over from Nagamori as chief executive officer, the Kyoto-based company said last week as it announced better-than-projected annual results. The leadership change, which comes a little over a year after Seki's move from Nissan, will be finalized when Nidec's board meets June 22. Nagamori, who founded Nidec in a shack in 1973, will remain chairman. Seki, 59, was appointed president of Nidec after leaving Nissan, where he was vice chief operating officer and an unsuccessful contender for CEO after Hiroto Saikawa resigned amid a compensation scandal, following the shock arrest of former chairman Carlos Ghosn.

Almost half a century after founding his pioneering motor maker on the family farm, Japanese billionaire Shigenobu Nagamori is handing over leadership of Nidec Corp. to a former Nissan Motor Co. executive to lead an ambitious pivot into the electric-vehicle space. Jun Seki will take over from Nagamori as chief executive officer, the Kyoto-based company said last week as it announced better-than-projected annual results. The leadership change, which comes a little over a year after Seki's move from Nissan, will be finalized when Nidec's board meets June 22. Nagamori, who founded Nidec in a shack in 1973, will remain chairman. Seki, 59, was appointed president of Nidec after leaving Nissan, where he was vice chief operating officer and an unsuccessful contender for CEO after Hiroto Saikawa resigned amid a compensation scandal, following the shock arrest of former chairman Carlos Ghosn.

As the global chip shortage disrupts industries from home electronics to autos, a few small Japanese suppliers are stepping in to meeting the ballooning demand. Staying at home during the pandemic is fueling increased purchases of laptops, smartphones and games, which in turn has led to a shortage of semiconductors used in other industries. Large automakers have been forced to cut production -- globally, the sector could lose $60 billion in sales in 2021 as a result, according to IHS Markit. "Chip suppliers are doing well because orders of automotive and large household appliance chips are expanding," said Shoichi Arisawa, an analyst at Iwai Cosmo Securities Co. In addition, the auto sector is embarking on a long-term shift to add more high-performance chips for 5G wireless and autonomous driving systems.