China Steel Corp (中鋼), Taiwan’s biggest steelmaker, is planning to sell shares it bought back late last year on the open market to its employees as part of measures to reward employees as business improves from the global economic downturn late last year, a company official said yesterday.
The Kaohsiung-based company is considering distributing these shares to employees sometime next month, public relations official Hung Jui-bin (洪瑞彬) told the Taipei Times by telephone yesterday, confirming a report by the Chinese-language Apple Daily.
“The management is still evaluating when is the most appropriate time to sell these buyback shares to our employees,” Hung said.
China Steel’s plan to reward employees with repurchased shares as a type of bonus came after Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) chairman Morris Chang (張忠謀) announced on Saturday the company would give employees a half-month bonus next month because of good third-quarter performance.
In July, TSMC offered employees a half-month salary as a bonus to reflect its strong second-quarter sales.
China Steel conducted a share-repurchase program between Oct. 8 and Dec. 7 last year, buying back 108 million shares at NT$23.24 per share on average, the newspaper said.
The company may sell these shares to employees at NT$23 per share, with the maximum amount of 10,000 shares per employee, the paper said.
Hung declined to confirm the report about the price per share and the number of shares the company is going to sell to employees.
However, as there will be no lockup up period on the shares employees purchase, employees will be able to make a profit if they sell these shares at market prices right away, he said. Some employees might opt to hold these shares as a long-term investment, however, he said.
China Steel’s share prices ended at NT$30.2 per share on the Taiwan Stock Exchange yesterday. The stock has risen 30.74 percent so far this year, underperforming a rise of 68.88 percent on the benchmark TAIEX over the same period.
Hung said the move — selling shares to employees — was unrelated to the company’s slow recovery in cash-flow generation, especially after Taiwan Ratings Corp (中華信評) last month lowered its credit ratings on China Steel on concerns of the steelmaker’s financial risk profile.
“It’s true that the company is facing financing pressure because we need to fund the construction of two blast furnaces at our subsidiary, Dragon Steel Corp [中龍], in Taichung over the next two years,” Hung said.
“But the planned share sale is a way to thank employees for their hard work at a time when many of them have had their pay cuts early this year,” he said.
China Steel reported a loss of NT$18.62 billion (US$567.6 million) in the fourth quarter of last year, its first quarterly loss in its nearly 40-year history, and experienced another quarterly loss of NT$7.18 billion in the January-to-March period, before seeing the balance recover to a profit of NT$724.5 million in the April-to-June period.
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