Hon Hai plans GDR
Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), the world’s largest contract maker of electronics, plans to sell as many as 370 million new shares overseas.
Hon Hai will seek shareholder approval for the issue of global depositary receipts at its annual shareholders’ meeting on April 16, the Taipei-based company said in a stock exchange filing on Wednesday.
The company will raise as much as NT$21.8 billion (US$650 million) from the share sale, based on the stock’s closing price on Wednesday.
Taishin delays share offer
Taishin Financial Holding Co (台新金控), the nation’s second-worst performing financial stock last year, yesterday postponed a share sale plan after halving the offer.
The company said on Nov. 27 that the board had approved plans to sell 1.4 billion shares in the first quarter to raise funds to boost its capital adequacy ratio.
However, in a filing to the Taiwan Stock Exchange yesterday, Taishin Financial said it would only offer 700 million new shares at NT$5 each to raise NT$3.5 billion (US$104 million) and would delay the issuance to the second quarter,
Siliconware books losses
Siliconware Precision Industries Co (矽品精密), the nation’s second-largest chip packaging and testing company, said yesterday it booked a loss of NT$2.6 billion (US$77.5 million) to reflect the decline in value of its investments in ChipMOS Technologies (Bermuda) Ltd (南茂科技) and Phoenix Precision Technology Corp (全懋精密).
Siliconware Precision said in a statement it booked a loss of NT$2.14 billion for its holdings in ChipMOS shares, and a loss of NT$454 million for its Phoenix holdings.
Singapore unveils stimulus
The Singaporean government unveiled a multibillion dollar plan to boost spending and cut taxes in a bid to ease the worst recession in the city-state’s history.
The government will lower corporate taxes, subsidize wages, guarantee bank loans and spend more on infrastructure as part of the S$20.5 billion (US$13.6 billion) stimulus package, Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam said in a televised speech yesterday.
The spending surge will widen this year’s fiscal deficit to a record for Singapore and will be partly paid for by tapping S$4.9 billion in reserves, he said.
Singapore on Wednesday slashed its growth forecast for this year, saying the economy could shrink as much as 5 percent as global demand for the country’s exports collapses.
Nokia’s Q4 profit plummets
Nokia, the world’s leading mobile phone maker, yesterday reported a nearly 69 percent drop in its fourth-quarter net profit to 576 million euros (US$749 million) amid falling sales and lower prices for its handsets.
Nokia chief executive officer Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said the global financial crisis had dampened demand for mobile phones, but insisted the company would continue to invest in future growth, although it needed to cut costs.
“We are taking action to reduce overall costs and to preserve our strong capital structure. This is clearly our top priority in the current economic environment,” Kallasvuo said in a statement.
Kallasvuo said the financial crisis had made the macroeconomic situation worse in recent weeks and the company cut its guidance for this year for global mobile device volumes.
Nokia said it now expects such volumes to decline some 10 percent this year from last year’s level compared with its previous forecast of a 5 percent fall.
NetApp tops employers
NetApp tops the list of the 100 best companies to work for, most of which have open positions and are hiring, Fortune magazine said yesterday.
Coming in second on Fortune’s 12th annual list was Edward Jones, followed by Boston Consulting Group. The list was published online on fortune.com/bestcompanies and contained in an issue set to hit newsstands on Monday.
NetApp, based in Sunnyvale, California, provides storage and data management services to businesses.
It employs 5,000 people and topped the list because of its “employee enthusiasm for the legendary egalitarian culture,” Fortune said.
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