Cashed-up French energy giant Total is scouring Australia for acquisition opportunities as part of an aggressive expansion of its gas strategy, a report said yesterday.
It follows an announcement on Friday that Total will join with Japanese oil and gas producer Inpex to invest in the US$34 billion Ichthys LNG gas project off northern Australia. Inpex will take a 72.8 percent stake, while Total will hold 24 percent.
“There is no limitation for Total to invest more in Australia,” Jean-Marie Guillermou, the company’s senior vice president for exploration and production in Asia, told the Australian Financial Review. “Australia is a core asset and is part of our future. If tomorrow we have the opportunity to find another Ichthys, we have the money to invest and develop it alone.”
Guillermou said acquisitions could involve individual assets in gas, including shale gas, or takeovers, with the company expecting to spend up to US$14 billion in Australia over the next five years.
Meanwhile, South Korean shipbuilder Samsung Heavy Industries said yesterday it had won a 2.6 trillion won (US$2.26 billion) deal to build a gas processing plant in Australia for Inpex.
Work on the 100,000-tonne plant will begin in 2013, the shipbuilder said in a statement, adding that a full agreement with Inpex will be signed next month.
It said the structure, to be 110m both in height and width when delivered by the end of 2015, would be listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s largest offshore plant.
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