Advanced Semiconductor Engineering Inc (ASE, 日月光半導體), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing company, announced yesterday that its board had approved a tender offer for motherboard maker Universal Scientific Industry Co (USI, 環隆電氣), the company said in a statement.
Along with its two subsidiaries — J&R Holding Ltd and Singapore-based ASE Test Ltd (福雷電子), ASE said it planned to purchase all of the outstanding shares of USI that it doesn’t already own through the cash-and-stock tender offer at NT$21 per share.
That price represented a 6.9 percent premium on USI shares, which ended limit-up at NT$19.65 per share yesterday on the Taiwan Stock Exchange. ASE shares closed 1.38 percent lower at NT$28.5.
Currently, ASE and its subsidiaries own 18.2 percent of USI’s common shares, with the Kaohsiung-based chip packager holding a 16.42-percent stake in USI.
In the filing to the stock exchange, ASE said it launched the tender offer in a bid to support further integration of technology within the group and to better utilize company assets. The company will begin the tender offer today and end it on Jan. 6, it said.
Under the terms of the offer, USI’s shareholders will receive 0.34 ASE common shares for each USI common share plus cash, with the amount of the cash derived by NT$21 minus the average trading price of ASE shares prior to the closing date of the offer multiplied by 0.34.
USI also manufactures computer peripherals, network storage items and communications products in addition to computer motherboards.
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