Vietnam has chosen to partner Japan in mining rare earth minerals and building a nuclear power plant in the Southeast Asian country, Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan said yesterday, as Tokyo seeks to reduce its dependence on China.
Japan, the world’s third-biggest nuclear power generator, is also eyeing fast-growing markets to develop nuclear plants as electricity demand in the country is likely to stay flat or rise slightly due to its ageing society and industries going abroad.
“Prime Minister [Nguyen Tan] Dung told me this decision was a political and strategic one,” Kan told reporters after meeting Dung.
PHOTO: AFP
Japan has said shipments of rare earths from China were blocked during a diplomatic row sparked by the arrest of a Chinese trawlerman in disputed waters.
Japan’s stockpile of the minerals could be exhausted by March or April without fresh imports from China, officials have said.
China gave repeated assurances at an Asia-Pacific summit in Hanoi that ended on Saturday that it would remain a “reliable supplier” of the high-tech ores used in lasers, superconductors, computers and other electronics.
Nevertheless, Japan and other countries, including the US, say they want to diversify their sources of supplies.
Last week, Japan and India decided to seek cooperation in developing, recycling and finding substitutes for rare earths and rare metals.
Japan believes it has secured the mining rights for a mine in Lai Chau Province of northwestern Vietnam, another Japanese government official said.
feasibility study
Japan’s Sojitz Corp and Toyota Tsusho Corp and a Vietnamese firm are conducting a feasibility study at a deposit in Lai Chau, and the project could produce 3,000 tonnes of rare earth minerals a year or about 10 percent of annual demand in Japan, a Japanese trade ministry official said.
Tokyo is certain that Vietnam will choose out of the three Japanese nuclear plant makers to build two reactors at a nuclear power plant site in central Vietnam, a Japanese government official said.
“Vietnam confirms that the Vietnamese government chooses Japan as a cooperation partner to build two nuclear reactors”, their joint statement said.
joint venture
The three are Hitachi Ltd, allied with General Electric, Toshiba Corp, which controls US power firm Westinghouse, and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which has a joint venture with Areva, he said.
Kan also told Dung that Japan, Vietnam’s biggest donor, would provide about ¥79 billion (US$982.7 million) in yen loans to Vietnam for infrastructure projects, a joint statement between the two leaders showed.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by