Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing (李嘉誠) has invested US$60 million in the popular US-based social networking Web site Facebook with a right to acquire another US$60 million stake, a report said yesterday.
Citing unnamed sources, the Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital blog said Asia's richest man is not making the investment through his Hong Kong conglomerates -- Cheung Kong (Holding) Ltd (
In October, Microsoft bought a US$240 million stake in Facebook in a deal valuing the Web site at US$15 billion.
The report said the deal came through a Facebook investor, who introduced the company to Solina Chau (周凱旋), director of the Li Ka-shing Foundation and a major stockholder in Tom.com, a Chinese media company in which Li has an interest.
His investment could give Tom.com a leg up in possible partnerships with Facebook in China, the report added.
A spokeswoman for Hutchison Whampoa would not comment on the report.
The 79-year-old, whose fortune was valued at US$23 billion by Forbes, has investments across the world, including telecommunications, real estate, the Internet, shipping and retail.
Facebook is a social networking Web site that allows people to interact. Facebook has some 5 million members around the world and sees an average of 250,000 new users each day.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's decision to turn down offers to buy the Web site outright look to be paying dividends.
Zuckerberg claims to have rejected an offer from Yahoo Inc to purchase the Web site after the search giant reduced a verbal offer of US$1 billion to a firm offer of US$900,000.
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],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
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