BANKING
Standard issue snapped up
Standard Chartered, the bank focused on emerging markets, said yesterday that investors snapped up 98.5 percent of its new shares, helping it raise about £3.3 billion (US$5.3 billion) to meet new global banking rules. Standard last month said it planned to raise the amount to help meet Basel III, which stipulates that banks must hold capital equal to at least 7 percent of their assets. The British bank said in a statement that it had received valid acceptances “representing approximately 98.5 percent of new ordinary shares offered.” The bank had offered a new share for eight existing ones at a heavily discounted price of £12.80 per share.
ENERGY
Shell sells Woodside stake
Royal Dutch Shell PLC said its Australian subsidiary would sell a 10 percent stake in Perth-based gas and oil producer Woodside Petroleum Ltd to Swiss bank UBS AG, for about US$3.33 billion. Shell’s sale of 78.34 million shares to UBS at A$42.23 per share is a discount to Woodside’s most recent closing price of A$45.86. Shell said the move was natural, given its recent US$3.05 billion joint purchase with PetroChina of Australia’s Arrow Energy, a maker of coal bed methane. Shell CEO Peter Voser said Shell was selling its stake in Woodside because it preferred “direct interest in assets and joint ventures, rather than indirect stakes.”
ENERGY
E.ON restructuring: report
E.ON, Germany’s leading energy company, is poised to announce a major reorganization that could see it shedding some of its least profitable sectors, Spiegel magazine reported. Over the next two or three years, E.ON head Johannes Teyssen wants to sell or open to partnerships less lucrative areas of Spiegel said, citing com the company, pany sources, in its edition yesterday. That may include selling its E.ON Ruhrgas division that sells natural gas to about 15 million consumers in Germany. E.ON is expected to announce its detailed quarterly results tomorrow.
ENERGY
Gazprom net profit up 66%
The world’s biggest gas firm, Gazprom, said yesterday that its net profit for the first half of this year rose more than 66 percent to 508.2 billion rubles (US$16.5 billion). Total sales increased 17 percent to 1.7 trillion rubles in the first half compared with the same period the year earlier, it said in a statement. Sales of gas expanded 6 percent to 1 trillion rubles due to higher volumes of gas sold in all of Gazprom’s areas of activity, which compensated for price falls in Europe and the former Soviet Union.
ENERGY
Siemens sets green target
Siemens AG aims to grow revenue from solar equipment, wind turbines and other products designed to save energy to 40 billion euros (US$55 billion) by 2014 as it jostles with General Electric Co for market share. Revenue from environmental products totaled about 28 billion euros in the fiscal year through September, the company said in a statement yesterday. The company had previously targeted revenue of at least 25 billion euros by next year. Siemens’ renewable-energy unit generated the highest orders among the 14 divisions in the third quarter, and the company is predicting strong volume growth for both orders and sales in the final three months of the year. GE is investing about US$10 billion in green technology by 2015 and has a revenue goal of US$20 billion for this year.
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
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
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],”
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