Chinese electrical appliance giant GOME (國美) said its chairman Chen Xiao (陳曉) had resigned with effect from yesterday, five months after he survived a bid to oust him in a bitter feud with the firm’s jailed founder.
The company had been embroiled in a power struggle between its board members and founder Huang Guangyu (黃光裕) — once China’s richest man — who was jailed in May last year for 14 years on bribery and insider-trading charges.
GOME said in a statement that Zhang Dazhong (張大中), founder of appliances retail chain Beijing Dazhong Electrical Appliances Co (大中電器), would succeed Chen, who was resigning “for family reasons.”
Zhang sold his firm to GOME in December 2007 for 3.6 billion yuan (US$550 million).
Since his jailing, Huang had waged a high-profile war from his cell against company executives, calling for his allies to be installed on GOME’s board and its chairman to be sacked — but both proposals were rejected by shareholders in September.
A sign of a possible resolution to the row came two months later when Hong Kong-listed GOME Electrical Appliances (國美電器) announced it had signed a memorandum of understanding with Huang’s Shinning Crown Holdings to appoint two non-executive directors picked by Shinning Crown to the board.
GOME said in its statement on Wednesday that Zhang was joining the board as a non-executive director and also named accountant Conway Lee (李港衛) as an independent non-executive director.
Huang’s imprisonment marked a spectacular fall from grace in a case that also ensnared several top Chinese police officials. He has stepped down from the board, but remains the company’s single biggest shareholder.
Beijing’s High Court freed Huang’s wife, Du Juan (杜鵑), on parole in August after commuting her three-year prison term for insider trading, but upheld his sentence. Huang was also fined 800 million yuan (US$120 million).
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