AUTOMAKERS
VW to rehaul truck activities
Volkswagen (VW) wants to rehaul its trucking activities by boosting its interest in Sweden’s Scania while transferring its share in German truck firm MAN to its Nordic rival, the weekly Der Spiegel reported. In its edition to appear today, Der Spiegel said Volkswagen’s plans would see the German auto giant boosting its share in Scania to between 75 to 80 percent — compared with the current 46 percent — and transferring its 30 percent stake in MAN to Scania. Scania would then make an offer to MAN shareholders to be the main owner and ultimately merge with MAN, Spiegel reported. MAN currently holds a 13.4 percent stake in Scania.
COMMUNICATIONS
Dentsu to offer Internet radio
Dentsu Inc will set up a company with 13 Japanese radio broadcasters to offer radio programs through the Internet to users of smartphones and personal computers, the Nikkei Shimbun said yesterday, without citing anybody. On Wednesday, Dentsu said in a statement to the Tokyo Stock Exchange that it and Apple Inc would cooperate to offer the iAd mobile advertising service in Japan early next year.
CHEMICALS
LG Chem to raise output
LG Chem Ltd, South Korea’s largest chemicals maker, plans to raise production capacity for car batteries almost 10-fold in the next three years to meet increasing demand for hybrid and electric vehicles. Annual capacity at domestic and overseas plants will jump by 2013 to 80 million batteries, sufficient for more than 350,000 electric cars, from the current 8.5 million, Seoul-based LG Chem said in an e-mailed statement yesterday. LG will invest 1 trillion won (US$887 million) to expand to 60 million batteries annual capacity at an 8.5 million-cell plant in Ochang, south of Seoul, which began operating in June. It will also spend US$300 million to build a plant in Holland, Michigan, that can turn out an additional 20 million a year. LG Chem targets 20 percent of the market for car batteries, a business it expects to generate more than 3 trillion won of revenue by 2015.
TELECOMS
KDDI to release tablet
KDDI Corp, Japan’s -second-largest mobile phone operator, will on Friday start sales of a tablet computer developed by Onkyo Corp, competing with Softbank Corp and NTT DoCoMo Inc in the domestic market for the device, the Nikkei Shimbun said. A number of handset makers are betting on growth in the tablet market. Sales of the devices will almost triple worldwide to 54.8 million units next year as they invade the markets for netbooks, e-readers, gaming devices and media players, researcher Gartner Inc said in a report last month. Apple Inc had captured 95 percent of the global tablet market in the third quarter, according to researcher Strategy Analytics.
AIRLINES
Qantas’ A380s stay grounded
Qantas will keep all its flagship A380 superjumbos on the ground until further notice in response to a midair engine disintegration that revealed a problem of potentially disastrous oil leaks in some motors on the world’s largest jetliner, the company’s chief executive said on Saturday. “We’re not going to rush anybody, we’re not going to be putting a deadline on it. We’re going to make sure it’s absolutely right before we have this aircraft start flying again,” Alan Joyce said at a celebration of the 90th anniversary of his airline, which began as a small-scale flier transporting farmers and miners across the Outback.
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
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],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained