■ Wind power
China plans offshore plant
China plans to start work next year on a 9 billion yuan (US$1.1 billion) wind power project off the coast of northern Hebei Province to meet energy demand, the official Xinhua News Agency said, citing a government official. The plant, the country's first offshore wind power project, will have a generation capacity of 1 million kilowatts, the report said, citing Gao Xihai (高希海), a vice director at Huanghua Port Development Zone (黃驊港開發區). The plant will be built by Guohua Energy Investment Co (國華投資公司) and the development zone, it said. The initial phase of the plant will cost 500 million yuan and may generate 50,000 kilowatts of electricity when it starts operating in the third quarter of next year, Xinhua said. The whole plant is scheduled to be completed by 2020, it said.
■ Semiconductors
TSMC, UMC at full capacity
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) and United Microelectronics Corp (UMC, 聯電) are using all the advanced technology available in their factories to meet demand for their goods, a Chinese-language newspaper in Taipei said. TSMC is benefiting from Microsoft Corp's orders for graphics chips used in Xbox360 game consoles, and UMC has orders from Qualcomm Inc and Freescale Semiconductor Inc, the paper reported, without saying where it got the information. Advanced technology allows the companies to shrink chip sizes to cut costs.
■ Patents
Microsoft to pay settlement
Teknowledge Corp, a company that sells software to the financial services industry, said that Microsoft Corp agreed to pay US$250,000 to settle a patent infringement lawsuit. The settlement resolves a federal lawsuit over technologies that notify computer users of updates on Web pages. Microsoft had countersued Teknowledge claiming infringement of two related patents, Palo Alto, California-based Teknowledge said in a regulatory filing. The two companies "will cross-license the patents at issue," the filing said. Teknowledge had also sued Yahoo! Inc and Time Warner Inc in 2003 over the same patent.
■ Internet
Cisco sees growth in Mexico
Cisco Systems Inc, the world's largest maker of equipment that directs Internet traffic, said it expects to grow as much as 30 percent in Mexico in the next year. Cisco sees Mexico as having growth potential on expectations that companies and government agencies will invest in broadband infrastructure, Carlos Carnevali, Cisco's vice president for Latin America, said. Carnevali estimated there are less than 5 million high-speed Internet connections in Mexico including both fixed telephone lines and cellphones.
■ Automakers
Toyota to raise production
Toyota Motor Corp, Japan's biggest automaker, plans to nearly double production capacity at its plant in South Africa by 2007 as part of a strategy to expand overseas, a newspaper reported yesterday. The plant, operated by the subsidiary Toyota South Africa Motors, will raise its output capacity to 200,000 vehicles a year, from its current level of 110,000 vehicles, the Nihon Keizai said without citing a source. By 2007, the plant is expected to be assembling up to 120,000 of Toyota's IMV series pickups and sport utility vehicles a year. The vehicles will be exported to the European market, the newspaper said.
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