※[Global Morning Briefing] summarizes global news delivered by Seoul Economic Daily.
China Chip Phobia Grips the Market
Concerns are mounting that China's technological self-sufficiency in semiconductors could arrive faster than expected.
The Information reported that a state-owned enterprise headquartered in Shanghai, China, has begun manufacturing immersion deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography equipment. Lithography equipment, which projects light onto wafers to draw circuits, is essential in the semiconductor manufacturing process. It is divided into extreme ultraviolet (EUV) and DUV depending on the light wavelength.
The company aims to produce five DUV machines this year and 20 next year. Chinese media reported that the equipment produced this year will be delivered to Chinese semiconductor manufacturers including Changxin Memory Technologies (CXMT), SMIC and Hua Hong Semiconductor. While China developed an EUV prototype last year but faced difficulties in actual use, DUV is now entering the commercialization stage.
With China succeeding in localizing lithography equipment dominated by the Netherlands' ASML, ripple effects are expected across the memory market.
Meanwhile, the KOSPI closed at 6,023.66 on the 28th, plunging 10.84% from the previous session. It briefly fell to 5,992.91 during the session, dropping below the 6,000 mark for the first time in about three months since April 14 this year.
Even China Joint Venture Fails... Porsche to Cut 21% of Workforce
Porsche has embarked on restructuring that will reduce its total workforce by 20%. As parent company Volkswagen struggles to advance its plan to cut 100,000 jobs, the subsidiary is tightening its belt first.
According to Reuters and other outlets, Porsche management and union representatives agreed to carry out an additional 5,000 job cuts through natural attrition and voluntary retirement programs by 2035. Combined with cuts already underway, this amounts to restructuring 9,000 jobs, or one in five of the total workforce. The total of 9,000 cuts represents about 21% of the 42,600 total employees as of the end of 2024.
Porsche's sweeping restructuring stems from the judgment that not only its poor performance in the Chinese market but also its electric vehicle strategy, which did not match its luxury car image, has failed.
Microsoft: "90% of Chinese Hacker Attacks Last Year Used AI... 15,000 Per Second, Humans Can't Stop Them"
As hacking problems equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) grow more serious, AI tools that defend against AI attacks are drawing attention.
Microsoft (MS) unveiled its agent-based security platform "Project Perception" and its first proprietary security-dedicated AI agent "MAI-Cyber-1 Flash" on the 27th in San Francisco.
Microsoft said that running MAI-Cyber-1 Flash on Project Perception can achieve industry-leading model performance at 50% of the cost. When the model was used together with the general-purpose GPT-5.4, it recorded a CyberGym score of 95.95% on the benchmark. This is more than 10 percentage points higher than OpenAI's GPT-5.5 Cyber (85.6%) or Anthropic's Mithos5 (83.8%).
Microsoft stressed that defensive AI has become important as AI hacking spreads.
LVMH Chairman Opens X Account at 77... First Post Targets Le Monde
Following Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Bernard Arnault, chairman of Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy (LVMH), has opened a social networking service (SNS) account and begun communicating. Chairman Arnault, who had appeared only at carefully calculated public events, has begun communicating with an unspecified general audience. This is interpreted as a judgment to defend against critical coverage from traditional media and take control of public opinion.
According to The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on the 27th, Chairman Arnault created an account on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) and then published a three-page open letter titled "Thank You." The letter is his response to coverage by the influential French daily Le Monde. He rebutted a six-part series covering his political connections, media ownership and succession issues, but did so ironically with a mix of humor.
His SNS communication is a strategy to deliver his voice directly to the public without going through traditional media, blocking negative public opinion and preventing the spread of controversy.
Recently, global corporate moguls have been using social media as a channel to announce important company news or visions and gauge customer reactions. CEOs personally step forward to announce corporate visions and reveal their human charm to build a positive image.
