FINANCE
Buffett lunch tops US$2m
Double-dip recession or not, people will still pay any price to have lunch with Warren Buffett. The annual charity auction for lunch with the legendary 80-year-old investor began on Sunday night and by midday on Monday, bids had already topped US$2 million. The six bids placed thus far have come from two anonymous bidders. Last year’s winner paid US$2.63 million for the right to dine with Buffett at the Manhattan steakhouse Smith & Wollensky. The price nearly tripled on the last day, as nine qualified bidders made 77 bids.
BANKING
ING online gets two bids
General Electric Co (GE) and Capital One Financial Corp submitted bids for ING Groep NV’s US online bank last week in a sale that could raise about US$9 billion, people with direct knowledge of the matter said. The Dutch lender may reach an agreement to sell the ING Direct USA unit as soon as this month, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity. GE made an all-cash bid, while the offer from McLean, Virginia-based Capital One includes some stock, the people said. “The process to prepare a divestment of ING Direct USA is continuing,” Raymond Vermeulen, a spokesman for Amsterdam-based ING, said by telephone. He declined to comment on any potential bidders or the value.
AUTOMAKERS
Losses from India strike rise
Maruti Suzuki India — India’s largest passenger car maker — has lost an estimated US$20 million since the start of a strike at its factory in the north of the country, a company source said yesterday. The source said production losses since the start of the strike on Saturday were between 800 million and 900 million rupees (US$17.9 million to US$20.1 million). The stoppage has led to a loss in production of about 1,800 cars since the walk-out by a group of workers demanding recognition of a new union. The Japanese-controlled firm on Monday sacked 11 of its 2,000-strong employees on its production line at Manesar in the northern state of Haryana.
PAPER
Temple-Inland rejects bid
Packaging and building materials maker Temple-Inland Inc has rejected a US$3.3 billion unsolicited takeover bid from larger rival International Paper Co, saying the offer is too low and would face heavy regulatory scrutiny. Memphis-based International Paper proposed a bid of US$30.60 per share — or about US$3.3 billion — for all outstanding shares of Austin, Texas-based Temple-Inland. That represents a premium of about 45 percent over Temple-Inland’s closing price of US$21.01 on Monday. Temple-Inland controls about 12 percent of the North American market for corrugated packaging materials. A combined company would control about 40 percent of that market, Temple-Inland said.
ENERGY
BP may sell stake to Rosneft
British energy group BP could sell part of its stake in Russian joint venture TNK-BP to revive an Arctic exploration deal with the Russian state oil company Rosneft, the Wall Street Journal said yesterday. The newspaper, citing unnamed sources, said top BP executives had informed Russian billionaire shareholders in TNK-BP of the plan to sell part of its 50 percent stake to Rosneft. A person close to BP told the paper there had been “no decision to sell any of BP’s shares in TNK-BP.” However, the paper said a formal announcement outlining the plan would be included in a letter that would shortly be sent to shareholders.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to