INDUSTRY
FPG to build Texas plant
Formosa Plastics Group (FPG, 台塑集團), Taiwan’s biggest diversified industrial company, plans to spend about US$800 million building ethylene and propylene plants in the US to tap demand for the chemicals. The proposed plants in Texas will be able to produce 450,000 tonnes of ethylene and 400,000 tonnes of propylene a year, Lee Chih-tsuen (李志村), a member of the company’s executive board, told reporters yesterday. Construction may start in 2012, he said. Formosa Plastics needs the plants for raw materials that will be made into products for the US, and Central and Southern American markets, he said. “We don’t have enough of them,” Lee said. The plants will use natural gas as a raw material, he said.
CHEMICALS
Russia signs fertilizer deal
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev yesterday oversaw the signing of a US$1 billion deal with Japanese and Chinese firms for a fertilizer plant. Russian government-affiliated Ammoni signed a contract with Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Sojitz Corporation and China National Chemical Engineering Corporation, to build a plant producing ammonia and methanol. The plant, to be located in the central Russian region of Tatarstan about 1,000km east of Moscow, is expected to come online in 2015. It will produce just over 2,000 tonnes of ammonia a day, among other fertilizers.
MINING
Xstrata invests in Mauritania
Swiss mining group Xstrata is to invest about US$6 billion (4.4 billion euros) in the production of iron in Mauritania, the country’s mining minister Mohammad Abdallah Ould Oudaa said during a mining conference in Mauritania that ended on Thursday. Xstrata on Friday said it was “far too early in the process to commit to numbers but Xstrata is committed to creating a world-class iron ore business and clearly Mauritania will play a key part in that objective.” The company also disclosed that it now controlled 50.1 percent of the Australian group Sphere Minerals, which is part of a 50-50 joint venture with the Mauritanian national industry and mining company SNIM in three projects.
AVIATION
Vibrations a ‘minor issue’
An engine problem which caused vibrations on a domestic Qantas flight, prompting the pilot to turn back, was a “minor issue,” the airline’s chief executive said yesterday. A Boeing 767 with 234 passengers on board returned to Perth, in Western Australia, 10 minutes after taking off to fly to Melbourne on Friday after its crew detected something unusual in one engine. The incident comes after Qantas grounded its entire fleet of Airbus A380 superjumbos after a mid-air blowout on one of the planes’ Rolls-Royce engines earlier this month prompted serious safety worries.
AUTOMOBILES
GM IPO oversubscribed
General Motors Co’s landmark initial public offering has already garnered US$60 billion in orders, six times the amount it had planned to raise. The shares are expected to start trading on the New York and Toronto stock exchanges on Thursday. It will likely price around the top end of the US$26 to US$29 per share range and the full over-allotment option — additional shares underwriters can sell to help stabilize the stock after it begins trading — will likely be exercised, three people familiar with the matter said.
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