China Mobile Ltd (中國移動), the world’s biggest phone company by market value, has begun working on listing its shares in the domestic market, chairman and chief executive officer Wang Jianzhou (王建宙) said.
It hopes regulators will allow the listing soon, Wang said yesterday at the World Economic Forum meeting in Dalian. Authorities are working on rules that will facilitate listings of so-called “red-chip” companies, or overseas-incorporated Chinese firms, he said.
The China Securities Regulatory Commission held an internal meeting in July to discuss setting up an international board on the Shanghai exchange on which overseas companies will trade for the first time, according to people with knowledge of the plans. Red-chip companies such as China Mobile and CNOOC Ltd (中國海洋石油) will also be allowed to list in the country, they said.
HSBC Holdings, Europe’s biggest bank, has hired advisers for a possible listing in Shanghai, spokesman David Hall said last month. Lenovo Group Ltd (聯想), China’s biggest personal-computer maker, “looks forward” to listing its stock in the country, Chairman Liu Chuanzhi (柳傳志) said last month.
Separately, China Mobile has continued talks with Apple Inc. about offering the iPhone handset in China, Wang said. Rival China Unicom (Hong Kong) Ltd (中國聯通) last month said it reached a deal with the US company to sell the device in the fourth quarter.
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
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