More than 6,500 employees at South Korea's Samsung Electronics began a three-day mass strike on Monday (July 8), demanding an extra day of paid annual leave, higher pay raises and changes to the way performance bonuses are currently calculated. This is the largest organized strike in Samsung Electronics' more than half century of existence, and the union said that if this strike does not push employees' demands to be met, a new strike may be called. One of the core issues of the current dispute between the labor union and Samsung Electronics is raising wages and increasing the number of paid vacation days. The second demand is a pay rise. The union originally wanted a pay rise of more than 3% for its 855 employees, but last week they changed their demand to include all employees (rather than just 855). The third issue involves performance bonuses linked to Samsung's outsized profits - chip workers did not receive the bonuses last year when Samsung lost about Won15tn and, according to unions, fear they will still not get the money even if the company manages to turn around this year.

SEOUL, July 9 (Reuters) - Samsung Electronics (005930.KS), opens new tab said on Tuesday it won an order from Japanese artificial intelligence company Preferred Networks to make chips for AI applications using the South Korean firm's 2-nanometre foundry process and advanced chip packaging service. It is the first order Samsung has revealed for its cutting-edge 2-nanometre chip contract manufacturing process. Samsung did not elaborate on the size of the order. The chips will be made using high-tech chip architecture known as gate all-around (GAA) and multiple chips will be integrated in one package to enhance inter-connection speed and reduce size, Samsung said in a statement. South Korea's Gaonchips Co (399720.KQ), opens new tab designed the chips, Samsung said. The chips will go toward Preferred Networks' high-performance computing hardware for generative AI technologies such as large language models, Junichiro Makino, Preferred Networks vice president and chief technology officer of computing architecture, said in the statement.

Recently, according to the FT, citing the latest forecast data of the market research institute SemiAnalysis, AI chip giant NVIDIA will ship more than 1 million new NVIDIA H20 acceleration chips to the Chinese market this year, and it is expected that the cost of each chip is between $12,000 and $13,000. This is expected to generate more than $12 billion in revenue for Nvidia. Affected by the United States export control policy, Nvidia's advanced AI chip exports to China have been restricted, H20 is Nvidia based on H100 specifically for the Chinese market to launch the three "castration version" GPU among the strongest performance, but its AI performance is only less than 15% of H100, some performance is even less than the domestic Ascend 910B. When Nvidia launched the new H20 in the spring of this year, there were reports that due to the large castration of H20 performance, coupled with the high price, Chinese customers' interest in buying is insufficient, and they will turn more to choose China's domestic AI chips. Then there are rumors that Nvidia has lowered the price of the H20 in order to improve its competitiveness. However, the latest news shows that due to supply issues caused by the low yield of the Ascend 910B chip, Chinese manufacturers in the absence of supply and other better options, Nvidia H20 has started to attract new purchases from Chinese tech giants such as Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and Bytedance. Analysts at both Morgan Stanley and SemiAnalysis said the H20 chip is now being shipped in bulk and is popular with Chinese customers, despite its performance degradation compared to chips Nvidia sells in the United States.

Amazon official said that the freight from the Chinese warehouse will be lower than the traditional FBA(Fulfillment by Amazon) fee, similar to the domestic air delivery small package service, which will undoubtedly greatly reduce the logistics costs of sellers. In addition to logistics, Amazon is also responsible for promotion and traffic, of course, sellers can still independently carry out product advertising, pricing and promotion activities, to maintain the personalized and independent brand. Many industry insiders said that Amazon launched the "low-price store" move to fight China's cross-border e-commerce platforms Temu, Shein, AliExpress and so on. Although it provides another platform for China's e-commerce to go to sea, many sellers said that the cost of settling in Amazon cross-border e-commerce has become lower, and they have asked about the conditions of settling in, but the rules look down, in fact, it is not so friendly for sellers.

July 9 (Reuters) - German sportscar maker Porsche (P911_p.DE), opens new tab said on Tuesday that global vehicle deliveries were down 7% in the first half of the year compared to the same period in 2023, primarily driven by a 33% year-on-year drop in China. Porsche, majority-owned by Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE), opens new tab, is highly exposed to the EU-China tariff tensions, with deliveries to China accounting for nearly 20% of global deliveries. An HSBC analyst pointed to weakness in the European car market, saying that "the market is, understandably, worried about China pricing weakness and the prospect of needing to pay dealer compensation." Overall, Porsche delivered 155,945 cars worldwide during the first six months of the year. In North America, deliveries were down 6% year-on-year. Meanwhile, in Porsche’s home market of Germany, deliveries increased by 22% to 20,811 vehicles.