Tim Culpan

You Thought China’s Tech Slowdown Was Bad

For the first time in history, China’s two largest technology companies posted a decline in revenue as the nation faces unprecedented growth hurdles and an uncertain outlook. But 2,000 miles away, even bigger challenges await one of Southeast Asia’s biggest companies. Sea Ltd., which operates…

TSMC Chose the US. Now It Must Handle China

As recently as three years ago, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. was trying to sit on the increasingly thorny fence between the US and China. The former is a much bigger buyer of chips, the latter is growing faster, and both are important markets for the world’s most advanced manufacturer of…

Chips Act Skips US Leaders for Asian Winners

Long-awaited funding for the CHIPS Act is a win for a cabal of US chipmakers and foreign companies, but largely ignores the nation’s true semiconductor leaders who have been propping up the domestic sector for two decades. Three-quarters of the $52 billion allocated to the industry by Congress…

If Only Elon Musk Snapped Instead of Tweeted

If Elon Musk does eventually take over Twitter Inc. he will quickly discover the one feature he’s disparaged the most, bots, are the key to the platform’s ongoing growth. Musk may also be glad to see that its main rival in ephemeral social media, Snap Inc., doesn’t even have that same “problem.” …

The Race Is On to Fight a Cyber Threat That Doesn’t Exist

The cybersecurity community was set alight last week by the announcement of new cryptographic algorithms designed to protect our digital futures. Now the race us on to roll out software and hardware that will secure computers against a threat that still only exists in theory. After a six-year…

Twitter Wants You to Build a Bot. So I Did

For all the controversy about bots on Twitter, stoked most recently by Elon Musk’s aborted acquisition plans, it would seem reasonable to expect the company to close access to the platform and shy away from automation. Twitter Inc. is doing just the opposite, instead encouraging people to tap into…

We're Starting to See Clear Signs of Tech Troubles

Samsung Electronics Co. reported just enough earnings data Thursday to tease us about what might be heading our way. Second quarter revenue and operating profit at the South Korean Goliath portend a tough second half for global technology hardware manufacturers. Sales pipped estimates by a…

One Billion Chinese Files Were Likely Leaked by Sloppiness, Not Hacking

The global cybersecurity community was set alight this week by news that data on more than 1 billion people were leaked from a Shanghai police database. The implications could be wide-ranging, yet the most astounding aspect of this case may be the fact that it likely wasn’t a hack that caused it,…

TikTok Is the New Front in Election Misinformation

He’s the son of a brutal dictator, fudged his own educational credentials, and his family owes up to $3.6 billion in estate taxes, yet he still won a landslide election to become the Philippines’s next president. When Bongbong Marcos gets sworn in Thursday, the 64-year-old might want to add Chinese…

China’s Xi Jinping Knows He Needs the Fintechs

President Xi Jinping has a lot going on right now. Just this week he slammed the weaponization of the global financial system, vowed to meet domestic growth goals, and called for the healthy development of China’s fintech sector. They’re all related. In the first reference to economic targets…