■BANKING
Bank of Taiwan to sell Mega
Chinatrust Financial Holding Co (中信金控) named Bank of Taiwan (臺灣銀行) to sell its stake in Mega Financial Holding Co (兆豐金控) after the regulator ordered the share disposal. Chinatrust, Taiwan’s fifth-largest listed financial-services company, and its subsidiaries will transfer their Mega shares to government-owned Bank of Taiwan, which will sell the stock before Mega’s annual shareholder meeting in 2012, the Taipei-based company said in a filing on Friday night. Chinatrust had been ordered to sell the shares by June this year, it said. The regulator in July 2006 told Chinatrust to sell its shares in Mega, after alleging they had been purchased illegally using funds earmarked for customer loans.
■COMPUTERS
DRAM revamp moves ahead
The government’s effort to revamp the local ailing dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chip industry will move a step forward as Taiwan Memory Co (TMC, 台灣記憶體公司) will soon announce its strategic cooperation partner, sources said on Friday. John Hsuan (宣明智), who is overseeing the establishment of TMC, said at a March 10 news conference that he expected to finalize assessments and negotiations with Japan’s Elpida and the US-based Micron on the formation of strategic partnership before the end of this month.
■STEEL
Boashan profits plunge
Baoshan Iron & Steel (寶鋼), the listed unit of China’s largest steel maker, reported that its net profit for last year plunged 49.2 percent because of steep falls in demand and high costs. The company said its operations would continue to struggle because China’s steel industry has been left reeling by the global financial crisis. The Shanghai-listed steelmaker said its net profit for the 12 months ended Dec. 31 fell to 6.46 billion yuan (US$950 million) from 12.72 billion yuan in the previous year. Revenue rose 4.7 percent to 200.64 billion yuan from 191.56 billion yuan a year earlier, the company said, adding that it expected to post revenue of 145.7 billion yuan (US$21.3 billion) this year.
■INDIA
Spice Group withdraws bid
India’s Spice Group announced on Friday it was temporarily withdrawing from the race for scandal-tainted Satyam Computer Services, complaining the bidding process was not transparent, a report said. Satyam’s government-appointed board is looking for a buyer for Satyam to infuse funds into the company and ensure its survival after its finances were left in a shambles by the country’s biggest accounting fraud. “The withdrawal is for the moment,” a senior company official told the Press Trust of India.
■BREWERY
Tsingtao chooses Bangkok
China’s Tsingtao Brewery Co (青島啤酒) has set up a joint venture with Thai partners to invest 2 billion baht (US$55.5 million) in beer production near Bangkok, media reports said yesterday. Theparak Luengsuwan, one of the Thai investors, said at a press conference that Tsingtao has chosen Thailand over Malaysia for its first-ever overseas brewery partly because of a free trade agreement the kingdom has in place with Australia. Theparak said top Tsingtao executives would finalize the investment with Thai Industry Minister Charnchai Chairungrueng, who is to travel to Beijing on Wednesday through April 4 to promote investment in Thailand.
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