NEC Corp, Japan's biggest maker of telecommunications equipment, may sell new shares to boost capital, the company's new president said.
The sale would be one option, but not necessarily the most desirable method, the company has at its disposal, Akinobu Kanasugi said after a press conference in Tokyo, his first since becoming president of NEC.
NEC wants to strengthen its capital, which was eroded by a record loss last fiscal year and a charge associated with a change in the regulation of pension funds, Kanasugi told reporters at the news conference. NEC's capital adequacy ratio, a measure of how little a company relies on borrowed money, was 14 percent as of Dec. 31, compared with 20 percent as of March 2001.
The option more favored by NEC to raise capital would be to double operating profit to about ?200 billion (US$1.7 billion) in the fiscal year starting April 1, Kanasugi said. Kanasugi declined to disclose a capital adequacy ratio target for NEC or when the company may sell new shares.
"We got to show investors that we can double operating profit before selling new shares to them," Kanasugi said.
Kanasugi cites rising sales of mobile phones in China and Europe and computer-system services as boosting profit.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained