Mining company Teck Resources Ltd said on Friday it is selling a 17 percent stake to China Investment Corp (CIC, 中國投資公司) for C$1.74 billion (US$1.5 billion) in a bid to reduce its debt load.
The Vancouver-based company said CIC, the world’s largest commodity buyer, will buy 101.3 million class B voting shares for C$17.21 each. CIC will hold onto the stock for at least a year, the mining company said.
The proceeds from the private placement will go toward paying down nearly US$10 billion in bank debt and will also give the company a chance to forge a partnership with a major foreign investor, Teck’s chief executive said in a conference call.
“We will have a financial relationship with a very deep-pocketed investor who would potentially participate in future development projects,” CEO Don Lindsay said.
The sale, which is still subject to regulatory approval, is slated to close on July 14.
Teck has been selling assets and cutting costs to pay down the debt acquired after the US$9.8-billion purchase of Fording Canadian Coal Trust last year.
China, on the other hand, has been aggressively pursuing major acquisitions or investments in commodity companies. In the oil industry, the Chinese have become the most aggressive deal makers, taking advantage of low oil prices to help feed the country’s energy needs.
Last week, China’s Sinopec Corp (中國石化) announced it will acquire oil explorer Addax Petroleum for US$7.2 billion, in what would be the largest overseas takeover ever by a Chinese company.
Sinopec, a refiner, would gain access to substantial reserves in West Africa and the Middle East if the takeover of Addax is approved.
China National Offshore Oil Corp (中國海洋石油), meanwhile, may continue to bid for oilfields in Iraq after the Gulf country awarded a contract to its bigger rival, China National Petroleum Corp (中國石油天然氣).
“We may continue to participate in the second round,” China National Offshore president Fu Chengyu (傅成玉) said yesterday in Beijing.
Iraq plans to award contracts for oil and gas field exploration and development in a second licensing round to be held before the end of the year, Abdul Mahdy al-Ameedi, deputy director general of the Petroleum Contracts Licensing Dept, said on Thursday.
Iraq gave the development contract for Rumaila, the largest oilfield in the Middle Eastern nation, to BP Plc and China National Petroleum, and failed to award most of the contracts offered in an auction on June 30. The government aims to boost oil output to 4 million barrels a day within the next five years, from about 2.4 million barrels.
The BP-led group agreed to develop the field at a cost of US$2 a barrel after recovering investment, lower than the prices BP and Exxon initially bid, the ministry said in a statement then.
China National Offshore, the nation’s third-biggest oil explorer and the parent of Hong Kong-listed CNOOC Ltd, offered bids for different fields in the June 30 auction, Fu said.
“Our costs are higher then US$2 a barrel; we couldn’t lower that to a level that the Iraqi government can accept,” he 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],”
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