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Super Micro, which has had a bumpy ride since its auditor quit, finally hired a general counsel

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  • Super Micro Computer, the AI-adjacent tech firm that manufactures servers packed with Nvidia’s prized GPUs, has named a general counsel. The appointment is a key recommendation the company’s board made after an independent investigation into management and accounting practices last year. For the high-profile position, Super Micro tapped its current senior vice president of corporate development, who will now also double as general counsel. 

Beleaguered Fortune 500 company Super Micro Computer continues to try to clean up and modernize its internal functions and has named a general counsel, the company announced on Monday. 

Current senior vice president of corporate development, Yitai Hu, will now also serve as chief legal officer at the $20 billion tech manufacturer. According to his LinkedIn bio and California state records, Hu is also a manager of Eponym Investments, a general investment firm. 

Hu’s hiring was announced in conjunction with the appointment of Scott Angel, a new independent director on Super Micro’s board. Angel spent 37 years in audit and assurance at Deloitte until he retired in December 2017. The timing is notable: Super Micro spent the past five months enmeshed in a sprawling accounting mess after its former auditor, EY, quit abruptly last October, raising red flags about the company’s financial controls. 

“Supermicro’s explosive growth has positioned us as a clear industry leader with tremendous opportunities for further value creation, and the appointments of Scott as an independent director and Yitai as General Counsel will support our continued growth,” said Charles Liang, CEO and founder, in a press release.  

Angel is an audit committee financial expert, and spent 25 years as an audit partner in Silicon Valley, according to Super Micro. He served clients in tech and led Deloitte’s semiconductor industry practice from 1993 until 2017. Deloitte & Touche LLP previously served as Super Micro’s independent registered public accounting firm from 2003 until it was dismissed in 2023 when Super Micro hired EY. 

A Super Micro spokesman declined further comment.

The appointments come at a critical time for the hardware manufacturer, which builds high-efficiency servers and data centers and recently partnered with Elon Musk’s xAI Grok team to build a 750,000-square-foot data center in Memphis. Super Micro is a key player in the AI ecosystem, and its star and its stock price rose along with Nvidia, OpenAI, and Anthropic. However, investors’ faith in Super Micro was shaken following its accounting problems, and its share price is down more than 17% the past six months. 

Financial data company S3 Partners told Fortune Super Micro is the second largest short in the technology hardware and equipment industry group with 22.3% of its floating shares shorted—a short interest valued at $3.89 billion. So far this year, short sellers in the company’s stock added 31.2 million shares worth $1.1 billion, an increase of 38%, S3 Managing Director Ihor Dusaniwsky said in a statement. In the past 30 days, short sellers added 10.7 million shares to their positions, an uptick of 10% in total shares shorted. 

“Shorting SMCI has not been a profitable trade for the full year, but recently it has been very profitable,” wrote Dusaniwsky in a statement. Short sellers lost $263 million year to date in mark-to-market losses for a -7.1% return, but they are up $7 million in March alone in profits, an 18.2% return, he said. 

Despite bets that the stock price will continue to fall, Liang has said finally issuing financial filings, after being delinquent for months, marked an important milestone and an end to the distractions. In a call with analysts last month, Liang said the company was focused on meeting a $40 billion revenue target for 2025. However, the fallout from the accounting kerfuffle continues to reverberate; since August, Super Micro and Liang have been hit with at least five lawsuits and face probes from the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Super Micro has said it is cooperating with regulators. 

The company’s troubles reached a boiling point when EY resigned last summer after it brought concerns to the board’s audit committee about Super Micro’s internal controls, governance, and transparency, which resulted in the board forming a special committee and launching an investigation. Last August, the board recruited veteran lawyer Susie Giordano to join the board and serve as the sole member of the special committee to oversee the investigation. As the investigation continued, Super Micro delayed filing its annual financial report to investors as well as two quarterly reports, which prompted Nasdaq to warn the company it was in danger of being delisted from the exchange. 

Super Micro has since wrapped the investigation, issued its financial statements, and announced in February that it was in compliance with Nasdaq rule requirements. The company hired BDO USA as its auditor and named a principal accounting officer and chief accounting officer, promoting two internal finance executives to the roles. Super Micro is also searching for a new chief financial officer with more experience to replace sitting CFO David Weigand, a recommendation also borne from the special committee investigation.  

Hiring a general counsel and a new CFO were two of six key measures the committee pressed following the probe. Furthermore, the board recommended expanding the legal department with more in-house attorneys “to a level commensurate for a company of Super Micro’s size and complexity, particularly in light of its recent rapid growth and future growth ambitions.”  

Hu will report directly to Super Micro CEO Charles Liang, the company told investors. He is licensed in California, where Super Micro is headquartered, and has been with the tech firm for five months. Hu previously spent a year at law firm Norton Rose Fulbright, two years at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, and 10 years at Alston & Bird. 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com



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Canada’s former banker turned prime minister slams Trump’s tariffs as ‘misguided’

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Prime Minister Mark Carney said Thursday that Canada will match U.S. President Donald Trump’s 25% auto tariffs with a tariff on vehicles imported from the United States.

Trump’s previously announced 25% tariffs on auto imports took effect Thursday. The prime minister said he told Trump last week in a phone call that he would be retaliating for those tariffs.

“We take these measures reluctantly. And we take them in ways that is intended and will cause maximum impact in the United States and minimum impact in Canada,” Carney said.

Carney said Canada won’t put tariffs on auto parts as Trump has done, because he said Canadians know the benefits of the integrated auto sector. The parts can go back and forth across the Canada-U.S. border several times before being fully assembled in Ontario or Michigan.

Carney said Canadians are already seeing the impact.

Automaker Stellantis said it shut down its assembly plant in Windsor, Canada, for two weeks from April 7, the local union said late Wednesday. The president of Unifor Local 444, James Stewart, said more scheduling changes were expected in coming weeks.

Carney said that will impact 3,600 auto workers that he met with last week.

Autos are Canada’s second-largest export and the sector employs 125,000 Canadians directly and almost another 500,000 in related industries.

Carney announced last week a CA$2 billion ($1.4 billion) “strategic response fund” that will protect Canadian auto jobs affected by Trump’s tariffs.

Trump previously placed 25% tariffs on Canada’s steel and aluminum. And Carney said Canada can expects further tariffs on pharmaceuticals, lumber and semi-conductors.

“Given the prospective damage to their own people the American administration should eventually change course,” Carney said. “Although their policy will hurt American families, until that pain becomes impossible to ignore, I do not believe they will change direction, so the road to that point may indeed be long. And will be hard on Canadians just as it will be on other partners of the United States.”

Carney, a former two-time central banker in Canada and the U.K, said Trump’s actions will reverberate in Canada and across the world. “They are all unjustified and unwarranted and in our judgement misguided,” Carney said.

Canada’s initial $30 billion Canadian (US$21 billion) worth of retaliatory tariffs remain in place, having been applied on items like American orange juice, peanut butter, coffee, appliances, footwear, cosmetics, motorcycles and certain pulp and paper products.

Carney suspended his election campaign to return to Ottawa to deal with Trump’s tariffs.

Opposition Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre said he would remove the federal tax on Canadian made vehicles.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford, whose province has the bulk of Canada’s auto industry, called Canada’s latest tariffs a “measured response.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com



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One country spared from Trump’s reciprocal tariffs: Mexico—but it’s still fighting other fees

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Mexico celebrated Thursday having dodged the latest round of tariffs from the White House taking aim at dozens of U.S. trading partners around the world, but was also quickly reminded that in a global economy the effects of uncertainty can’t be entirely avoided.

President Claudia Sheinbaum said the free-trade agreement signed by Mexico, Canada and the U.S. during Trump’s first administration had shielded Mexico.

Now her government will focus on the existing 25% U.S. tariffs on imported autossteel and aluminum, while accelerating domestic production to safeguard jobs and reduce imports.

“During my last call with President Trump, I said that, in the case of reciprocal tariffs, my understanding was that there wouldn’t be tariffs (on Mexico), because Mexico doesn’t place tariffs on the United States,” Sheinbaum said.

Economy Secretary Marcelo Ebrard noted that despite having free-trade agreements with the U.S., many countries were targeted by the tariffs U.S. President Donald Trump announced Wednesday on what he dubbed “Liberation Day.” Trump framed the tariffs as a way to bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S.

Noting that Mexico dodged the latest round of tariffs, Ebrard said swaths of Mexican exports including agricultural products like avocados, clothing and electronics will continue to enter the U.S. without import duties.

Sheinbaum, meanwhile, encouraged companies producing in Mexico who had not been exporting under the free-trade agreement for various reasons to take the necessary steps to qualify. She cited major German auto producers as an example.

Qualifying for the free-trade agreement could involve anything from doing paperwork to making adjustments to the sourcing of a product.

Despite Trump’s latest tariffs not being imposed on Mexico, the uncertainty they created and the interconnectedness of the North American auto supply chains meant it didn’t take long for the effects to touch Mexico.

Stellantis, maker of auto brands including Dodge and Jeep, announced that it would pause production at its assembly plant in Toluca west of Mexico City for the month of April while it assesses the tariffs’ impact on its operations. A similar temporary production halt was scheduled for an assembly plant in Canada and some 900 workers were to be temporarily laid off across several plants in the United States.

That uncertainty is part of the reasons why Sheinbaum is pushing Plan Mexico, an initiative to promote and cultivate more domestic production.

As an example, she cited a collaboration between her government, local universities and Mexican companies Megaflux and Dina to produce electric buses for public transportation.

Ebrard said recently that the buses represent not only a technological advance in Mexico, but also a “strategic decision” in favor of Mexico’s industrial sovereignty.

At a factory in Mexico City, the electric buses called Taruk — trail-runner in the Indigenous Yaqui language – are already in production. Megaflux Director General Roberto Gottfried said the company hopes to deliver some 200 by year’s end.

He noted that some 70% of the Taruk’s components are produced in Mexico, including its motor, but the lithium batteries that power them come from China.

In a country where one out of every three people use public transportation every day, developing this sector domestically is critical, Gottfried said.

Despite the global economic challenges presented by the uncertainty caused by tariffs, he said, Mexico’s large internal market gives the initiative a competitive advantage to develop and weather the storm.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com



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