Acer extends Gateway offer
Acer Inc said yesterday that it would extend its US$710 million offer for Gateway Inc of the US until 5pm EDT next Wednesday, the company said in a statement.
The company originally set a deadline for the offer at midnight EDT on Monday.
Acer said the extension was made to allow US regulators, Committee on Foreign Investment, sufficient time to complete a review of the deal which was first announced on Aug. 27.
Acer began acquiring Gateway shares in the open market on Sept. 4 and it has secured 371 million shares, or nearly 80.68 percent, of Gateway as of Monday, it said.
Ministry to sell steel shares
The Ministry of Finance plans to raise about NT$5.52 billion (US$169 million) selling shares of China Steel Corp (中鋼) and Central Reinsurance Co (中央再保). The sale is to help fund the government's budget, the Chinese-language Economic Daily News said yesterday.
The ministry is seeking an arranger to sell 97.9 million shares of the steelmaker and 45.6 million shares in the insurer in an after-market tender, according to a public auction notice on the government's Web site dated yesterday.
The notice didn't give a reason for the sale, or say how many shares the government will hold after completion.
The government will raise NT$4.79 billion (US$147 million) from the sale of China Steel shares and NT$725 million through selling the insurer's stock, based on the shares' closing price on Monday.
Taiwan will post a budget deficit of NT$142.3 billion, given government income forecast at NT$1.49 trillion, the government's statistics bureau said in June.
Greenspan warns of bubble
The Shanghai stock market has all the hallmarks of a bubble, former US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan said on Monday.
"The Shanghai market has got all the characteristics of a bubble," Greenspan said in a public talk here to promote his new book.
"If you ever wanted to get a definition of a bubble in the works, this is it," he said.
The Shanghai Composite Index jumped 45 percent over the third quarter, one of the strongest performances among global equity markets during that period.
TransAsia extends offer
TransAsia Airways Corp (復興航空) said yesterday that it would extend an offering of a 50 percent discount for travel between Taipei and Kaohsiung till next month.
Last week, the air carrier announced a fare of NT$1,090 for the Taipei-Kaohsiung route, available through the end of this month, to counterbalance the impact from the high speed rail.
TransAsia said it would continue offering the preferential fares after seeing passenger load increase dramatically in the last few days to nearly 90 percent from 30 percent previously.
The airline's offering of NT$1,090 are NT$400 lower than fares offered by the nation's bullet train service on the route, as well as lower than those of three other domestic carriers, including Far Eastern Air Transport Corp (遠東航空), Mandarin Airlines (華信航空) and Uni Airways Corp (立榮航空).
HSBC to offer online services
HSBC Holdings Plc said it plans to introduce its Internet-based banking and savings service into as many as four more countries next year.
The HSBC Direct service was started in Canada, the US, Korea and Taiwan between November 2005 and June this year, London-based HSBC said in slides posted on its Web site today. The slides were used in a speech by chief executive officer Michael Geoghegan at a Merrill Lynch & Co conference for investors in London.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
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
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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],”