INSURANCE
ING to sell arm to Gruposura
ING Groep NV said in Amsterdam it has agreed to sell most of its Latin American businesses to Gruposura for about 2.68 billion euros (US$3.81 billion). ING says it will receive 2.615 billion euros in cash and Gruposura will take on 65 million euros in debt for the businesses, which include ING’s insurance, investment management and pension management activities. The deal does not include ING’s 36 percent stake in Brazilian insurer Sul America SA. The deal should close by year end pending regulatory approval and ING said yesterday it expects to book a 1 billion euro gain.
FINANCE
Yorkshire to buy Egg
British mortgage lender Yorkshire Building Society is to buy the mortgage and savings business of Egg Banking from American bank Citigroup, as Citi continues to sell non-core assets after its bailout during the credit crisis. Yorkshire, owned by its customers, said the Egg businesses it was acquiring were comprised of a £2.5 billion (US$4.1 billion) savings book and a £430 million mortgage book. It added that it would also acquire the Egg brand. Yorkshire did not disclose how much it paid for the Egg businesses.
AUTOMOBILE
Honda recalls 200,000 cars
Japan’s Honda Motor said in Tokyo yesterday it would recall about 200,000 passenger cars globally because of defective engine parts. The company said it had received 63 customer reports in Japan of engine malfunctions as a result of the defect, but added that none had led to accidents. In Japan alone, the car maker will recall more than 50,000 units of three models — the Stream, Civic and Crossroad — that were produced at its domestic plants between July 2008 and July last year, it said. Honda will exchange engine bolts that may cause trouble with the motor cooling system and that could eventually cause the engines to stop.
AUTOMOBILE
Earthquake recovery mixed
Japanese automakers are reporting mixed vehicle production figures as the industry pushes toward recovery from the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. Nissan Motor Co made 419,831 vehicles worldwide last month, up 18.5 percent from the same time last year. It said yesterday that the figure was an all-time record for a single month. Global sales rose more than 13 percent. Toyota’s global production fell 9.2 percent to 593,839 vehicles. The result is a vast improvement from the 49 percent plunge it recorded in May. Toyota Motor Corp forecasts a return to full production later this year. Honda Motor Co is facing a rockier road. Its output worldwide in June fell 44.5 percent to 168,373 vehicles. Domestic sales slumped 36 percent and exports plunged more than 60 percent.
ELECTRONICS
Loscher to stay at Siemens
Siemens is to extend the contract of its boss Peter Loscher until 2017, according to a report in German daily Handelsblatt that was due to be published yesterday. Sources close to the German company quoted by the newspaper said that Siemens’ supervisory board would take the decision next week, a year before Loscher’s contract is due to end. Loscher, who is Austrian, joined Siemens in 2007 following a corruption scandal that lost the company more than 1 billion euros in fines and legal bills and forced several senior executives to stand down. He was the first outsider to become director of Siemens and subsequently overhauled the company.
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