■COFFEE SHOPS
85˚C plans share sale
85˚C Bakery Cafe (美食達人), which aims to expand its network in Taiwan to 180 stores this year, plans to sell shares for the first time as early as this year on the Taiwan Stock Exchange, the Chinese-language newspaper Apple Daily reported yesterday, citing company spokeswoman Cathy Chung (鐘靜如). Yuanta Securities Co (元大證券) is the underwriter for the sale, the report said.
■TOURISM
Chinese spent big: report
More than 600,000 Chinese tourists visited Taiwan last year, state-run media reported yesterday, amid warming relations between the two sides. The 606,100 visitors each spent nearly US$1,800 during their stay, tourism officials were quoted by the China Daily newspaper as saying. “Years of isolation between the two sides have made Taiwan an attractive place for mainland tourists,” said Zheng Lijuan, deputy general manager of a unit of travel group CITS International (中國國際旅行社).
■TELECOMS
China Mobile denies buyout
China Mobile Ltd (中國移動), the world’s biggest phone company by market value, denied a report that it was in talks to buy Tencent Holdings Ltd (騰訊). Tencent, operator of China’s biggest online chat software, is the country’s largest Internet company by market value. “We have no plans to buy Tencent,” Rainie Lei (雷雨), a spokeswoman at China Mobile, said by telephone yesterday. China’s DoNews.com reported on Friday that China Mobile chairman Wang Jianzhou (王建宙) visited Tencent’s headquarters in Shenzhen to discuss a possible takeover, citing people it didn’t identify.
■AUTOMAKERS
Hyundai puts out plant fire
Hyundai Motor Co has extinguished a blaze that broke out at a plant in Ulsan yesterday, South Korea’s largest automaker said. The fire occurred at about 11:25am, Hyundai said in an e-mail. Police are investigating the cause of the blaze, the automaker said. The fire damaged a cooling tower at the plant, which makes Hyundai’s sport-utility vehicles Santa Fe and Tucson, Yonhap News reported. The incident won’t affect production, the company said. No one was injured in the fire, Hyundai said. The plant is about 400km south of Seoul.
■ECONOMY
Indonesia beats forecasts
Indonesia’s budget deficit totaled 87.2 trillion rupiah (US$9.3 billion), or 1.6 percent of GDP, last year, less than a forecast 129.8 trillion rupiah, the Finance Ministry said on its Web site on Friday. Revenues and grants totaled 866.8 trillion rupiah, or 0.5 percent below the estimate, while spending amounted to 954 trillion rupiah, or 4.7 percent less than targeted, it said. Indonesia’s economy probably grew 4.3 percent to 4.4 percent last year, while inflation last year was “about 3 percent,” the statement said.
■INSURANCE
Allianz predicts recovery
Germany’s insurance giant Allianz foresees a massive recovery for the country’s economy this year, with growth exceeding official forecasts and unemployment rising only marginally, a report said on Friday. The daily Bild quoted the group’s chief economist Michael Heise as saying growth would reach 2.8 percent, comfortably above the German central bank’s prediction of 1.6 percent and the strongest since 2006. He said the good performance would be spurred by a boom in exports, stable domestic consumption, government recovery programs and recent tax cuts.
WASHINGTON’S INCENTIVES: The CHIPS Act set aside US$39 billion in direct grants to persuade the world’s top semiconductor companies to make chips on US soil The US plans to award more than US$6 billion to Samsung Electronics Co, helping the chipmaker expand beyond a project in Texas it has already announced, people familiar with the matter said. The money from the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act would be one of several major awards that the US Department of Commerce is expected to announce in the coming weeks, including a grant of more than US$5 billion to Samsung’s rival, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), people familiar with the plans said. The people spoke on condition of anonymity in advance of the official announcements. The federal funding for
HIGH DEMAND: The firm has strong capabilities of providing key components including liquid cooling technology needed for AI servers, chairman Young Liu said Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday revised its revenue outlook for this year to “significant” growth from a “neutral” view forecast five months ago, due to strong demand for artificial intelligence (AI) servers from cloud service providers. Hon Hai, a major assembler of iPhones that is also known as Foxconn, expects AI server revenues to soar more than 40 percent annually this year, chairman Young Liu (劉揚偉) told investors. The robust growth would uplift revenue contribution from AI servers to 40 percent of the company’s overall server revenue this year, from 30 percent last year, Liu said. In the three-year period
LONG HAUL: Largan Energy Materials’ TNO-based lithium-ion batteries are expected to charge in five minutes and last about 20 years, far surpassing conventional technology Largan Precision Co (大立光) has formed a joint venture with the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI, 工研院) to produce fast-charging, long-life lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles, mobile electronics and electric storage units, the camera lens supplier for Apple Inc’s iPhones said yesterday. Largan Energy Materials Co (萬溢能源材料), established in January, is developing high-energy, fast-charging, long-life lithium-ion batteries using titanium niobium oxide (TNO) anodes, it said. TNO-based batteries can be fully charged in five minutes and have a lifespan of 20 years, a major advantage over the two to four hours of charging time needed for conventional graphite-anode-based batteries, Largan said in a
Taiwan is one of the first countries to benefit from the artificial intelligence (AI) boom, but because that is largely down to a single company it also represents a risk, former Google Taiwan managing director Chien Lee-feng (簡立峰) said at an AI forum in Taipei yesterday. Speaking at the forum on how generative AI can generate possibilities for all walks of life, Chien said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) — currently among the world’s 10 most-valuable companies due to continued optimism about AI — ensures Taiwan is one of the economies to benefit most from AI. “This is because AI is