■ INVESTMENT
Tingyi plans TDR sale
Tingyi Holding (Cayman Islands) Corp (康師傅控股) may sell more than NT$10 billion (US$309 million) in shares in the form of Taiwan depository receipts (TDRs), the Chinese-language Economic Daily News reported yesterday, citing unnamed brokerages. Tingyi Holding is 36.6 percent owned by Ting Hsin International Group (頂新集團), which operates the biggest instant noodle maker in China and runs Wei Chuan Foods Corp (味全食品) in Taiwan. The paper said Ting Hsin was assessing the possibility of allowing Tingyi to issue TDRs and might submit its application to the Taiwan Stock Exchange by the first quarter of next year. No decision has been made yet, the paper said, citing sources from Ting Hsin.
■EMPLOYMENT
PRC migrants back at work
Nearly all the migrant Chinese workers laid off last year during the global economic crisis have returned to jobs in the cities because of an improvement in the employment situation, an official said yesterday. “Currently, 96 percent [of] rural workers who went back to the countryside have already returned to the cities to work or do business,” vice agriculture minister Chen Xiaohua (陳曉華) told reporters. “In certain places, there are even problems of a lack of workers.” By the latest estimate, China had 225 million migrant workers.
■INVESTMENT
Toyota lifts sales forecast
Toyota Motor Corp has raised its global sales forecast for the year to March next year by 3 percent to 6.7 million cars, the Tokyo Shimbun daily reported yesterday, in the latest sign of a nascent recovery in auto demand. Toyota, the world’s largest automaker, is also raising its production in Japan by 8 percent to 6.45 million vehicles for 2009-2010, thanks to the impact of government subsidies and tax incentives on new fuel efficient cars, the paper said.
■AUTOMAKERS
Ford Canada to cut output
The Canadian Auto Workers union says Ford Canada intends to slash its Canadian manufacturing production from 13 percent of the company’s total North American output to 8 percent despite requests from its union to the contrary. Ford and the union have been negotiating a new labor contract since Sept. 8, but the two sides have reached an impasse over how much production the company intends to keep in Canada.
■LABOR
Argentine workers removed
Argentine police have used force to remove laid-off workers occupying a Kraft Foods plant in Buenos Aires since last month. The court-ordered evacuation could resolve a standoff that started when Kraft Foods Inc laid off about 160 of the plant’s several thousand workers. The union demanded the jobs back and seized the plant. They also occupied a major freeway, demanding government help. Argentina’s labor ministry and company executives met on Friday, reaching a deal to resume operations tomorrow morning and keep the plant’s remaining jobs.
■BANKING
BBVA to sell properties
Spain’s second-largest bank, BBVA, said on Friday it had reached an agreement to sell 948 property assets in Spain to a Deutsche Bank investment fund for 1.15 billion euros (US$1.7 billion) in a “sale and leaseback” deal. The sale of the assets, “most of which are offices,” will book BBVA some 830 million euros in gross capital gains, it said in a statement.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to