■FINANCE
Taiwan may sell stake
Taiwan’s government plans to sell its 3.8 percent stake in China Development Financial Holding Co (中華開發金控) next year, the Commercial Times reported yesterday, citing Minister of Finance Lee Sush-der (李述德). The Chinese-language newspaper said the government would sell the stake before China Development Financial elects a new board in the middle of next year.
■ELECTRONICS
Mediatek may invest in TMC
Mediatek Inc (聯發科), Taiwan’s biggest chip designer, and three other Taiwanese companies are evaluating a possible investment in Taiwan Memory Co (TMC, 台灣創新記憶體公司). Mediatek, China Development Financial Holding Corp (中華開發金控), King Yuan Electronics Co (京元電子) and Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶電腦) haven’t decided whether to invest in TMC, the four companies said in separate exchange filings on Friday. Siliconware Precision Industries Co (矽品精密) said on Thursday its board approved plans to invest up to NT$2 billion (US$61 million) in TMC.
■AUTOMOBILES
Qatar to buy more VW
Qatar Holding has announced it will acquire a 17 percent stake in Volkswagen AG, which is merging with Porsche, in a deal that will exceed US$10 billion. This comes after the Porsche and Piech families said they would sell a 10 percent stake of their shares to the Gulf company. In a statement released late on Friday, Qatar Holding said it would now be the third largest shareholder in VW, after Porsche and Lower Saxony. The purchase follows the UAE’s Aabar Investment acquisition in March of a 10 percent stake of Daimler AG.
■BANKING
Regulators close Colonial
US regulators on Friday shut down Colonial BancGroup Inc., a lender in real estate development, in the biggest US bank failure this year, and also closed four banks in Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania. The closures boosted to 77 the number of federally insured banks that have failed this year, compared with 25 last year and three in 2007. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp was appointed receiver of the banks: Montgomery, Alabama-based Colonial; Community Bank of Arizona, based in Phoenix; Union Bank, based in Gilbert, Arizona; Community Bank of Nevada, based in Las Vegas; and Dwelling House Savings and Loan Association, located in Pittsburgh.
■INVESTMENT
Berkshire reveals purchases
Billionaire Warren Buffett’s company revealed on Friday that it had bought a new stake in medical supply company Becton, Dickinson & Co and boosted its holdings in Johnson & Johnson during the second quarter. Berkshire Hathaway Inc disclosed those investments and several other changes to its roughly US$49 billion US stock portfolio in documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
■OIL
Petrobas profits fall 12%
Brazil’s state-run oil company Petrobras saw profits fall 12 percent in the second quarter of this year mainly because of lower oil prices, the company said on Friday. Net income was 7.73 billion reals (US$4.2 billion) compared with 8.78 billion reals in the same quarter last year, Petroleo Brasileiro SA said in its earnings report. The decrease was caused by a 53 percent drop in oil prices, which went from an average US$109 a barrel in the first half of last year to an average US$52 a barrel in the first half of this year.
IN THE AIR: While most companies said they were committed to North American operations, some added that production and costs would depend on the outcome of a US trade probe Leading local contract electronics makers Wistron Corp (緯創), Quanta Computer Inc (廣達), Inventec Corp (英業達) and Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶) are to maintain their North American expansion plans, despite Washington’s 20 percent tariff on Taiwanese goods. Wistron said it has long maintained a presence in the US, while distributing production across Taiwan, North America, Southeast Asia and Europe. The company is in talks with customers to align capacity with their site preferences, a company official told the Taipei Times by telephone on Friday. The company is still in talks with clients over who would bear the tariff costs, with the outcome pending further
NEGOTIATIONS: Semiconductors play an outsized role in Taiwan’s industrial and economic development and are a major driver of the Taiwan-US trade imbalance With US President Donald Trump threatening to impose tariffs on semiconductors, Taiwan is expected to face a significant challenge, as information and communications technology (ICT) products account for more than 70 percent of its exports to the US, Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) president Lien Hsien-ming (連賢明) said on Friday. Compared with other countries, semiconductors play a disproportionately large role in Taiwan’s industrial and economic development, Lien said. As the sixth-largest contributor to the US trade deficit, Taiwan recorded a US$73.9 billion trade surplus with the US last year — up from US$47.8 billion in 2023 — driven by strong
A proposed 100 percent tariff on chip imports announced by US President Donald Trump could shift more of Taiwan’s semiconductor production overseas, a Taiwan Institute of Economic Research (TIER) researcher said yesterday. Trump’s tariff policy will accelerate the global semiconductor industry’s pace to establish roots in the US, leading to higher supply chain costs and ultimately raising prices of consumer electronics and creating uncertainty for future market demand, Arisa Liu (劉佩真) at the institute’s Taiwan Industry Economics Database said in a telephone interview. Trump’s move signals his intention to "restore the glory of the US semiconductor industry," Liu noted, saying that
AI: Softbank’s stake increases in Nvidia and TSMC reflect Masayoshi Son’s effort to gain a foothold in key nodes of the AI value chain, from chip design to data infrastructure Softbank Group Corp is building up stakes in Nvidia Corp and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the latest reflection of founder Masayoshi Son’s focus on the tools and hardware underpinning artificial intelligence (AI). The Japanese technology investor raised its stake in Nvidia to about US$3 billion by the end of March, up from US$1 billion in the prior quarter, regulatory filings showed. It bought about US$330 million worth of TSMC shares and US$170 million in Oracle Corp, they showed. Softbank’s signature Vision Fund has also monetized almost US$2 billion of public and private assets in the first half of this year,
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