PT Adaro Energy, the holding company of Indonesia’s second-largest coal producer, may raise as much as 12.53 trillion rupiah (US$1.34 billion) in the country’s biggest domestic initial public offering (IPO).
The firm will sell as many as 11.14 billion new shares, or 35 percent of its enlarged capital, president Boy Garibaldi Thohir told reporters in Jakarta yesterday.
Adaro joins companies, including PT Indika Energy, which owns 46 percent of Indonesia’s third-biggest coal producer, in tapping the stock market for funds after prices of the fuel surged. Indika priced the shares at the top of a proposed range after investors sought 17 times the amount of stock on offer, the company said in an e-mailed statement yesterday.
The measure that tracks Jakarta’s 15 mining stocks has more than doubled in the past year while the key Jakarta Composite index rose 18 percent. Shares of PT Indo Tambangraya Megah, a unit of Thailand’s Banpu Pcl, have more than doubled since their Jakarta trading debut in December as record crude oil prices pulled coal prices higher.
Adaro will sell the shares in the range of 1,050 to 1,125 rupiah apiece, or 7.2 to 7.7 times the estimated earnings for next year, said the arranger of the sale, PT Danatama Makmur.
Shares of PT Bumi Resources, Indonesia’s largest coal producer, have quadrupled in the past 12 months and traded at 7,550 rupiah at the noon break in Jakarta, or 12 times the estimated earnings for next year, Bloomberg calculations show.
The company’s IPO will be the largest since November 1995, when PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia raised US$1.6 billion.
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
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
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],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts