ENERGY
Total, Sinopec in venture
French energy giant Total SA has reached an agreement with China’s Sinopec on a joint venture for shale gas and refining, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday. The US daily also quoted Total’s chief executive, Christophe de Margerie, as saying that Chinese authorities now own a stake of 2 percent in the French company. It said Total reached a pact with China Petrochemical Corp (中國石化), or Sinopec, to search for and produce shale gas, a potentially lucrative market tapping natural gas trapped in rock formations. Total is also in talks for the right to market fuel and petrochemicals in China produced by a planned refinery complex in the country’s south, de Margerie was quoted as saying.
EUROZONE
Portugal is next at risk
The head of bond investor PIMCO said in an interview that heavily-indebted Portugal is at risk of following Greece’s downhill path. German news magazine Der Spiegel quoted Mohamed El-Erian, CEO of the giant bond mutual fund company, as saying that Portugal is likely to need a second bailout package which will cast further doubt on the country’s solvency. El-Erian told Der Spiegel in the interview published on Sunday that Portugal will come under increased scrutiny and “financial markets will be nervous because they are worried about a participation of the private sector.”
GOLD
Tax to slash India’s imports
Gold imports by India, the world’s biggest bullion buyer, will fall 35 percent this year after the government increased taxes, Prithviraj Kothari, president of the Bombay Bullion Association said yesterday in a phone interview. India last year imported a record 969 tonnes of bullion, according to the World Gold Council. Retail gold prices in the country will rise 6.3 percent after the levy changes, Kothari said.
TRADE
India, Africa eye huge boost
Indian and African leaders on Sunday agreed to sharply increase bilateral trade to US$90 billion by 2015 as the two sides discussed potential deals. The South Asian country is aiming to boost its trade and diplomatic ties with Africa where China has already made major inroads by striking multiple deals, building infrastructure projects and offering soft loans. The goal of achieving US$90 billion in trade between India and Africa in three years “is a significant improvement, considering the fact that a decade ago the trade was US$3 billion,” Indian Commerce Secretary Anand Sharma said.
ALUMINUM
Rusal suffers big profit drop
The world’s biggest aluminum producer Rusal yesterday reported a 91.7 percent drop in net profit last year as it wrestles with a management dispute among its Russian shareholders. The Moscow-based firm attributed the drop in profit to US$237 million (189 million euros) to a write-down of its holding in the Norilsk Nickel miner and a steep drop in aluminum prices last year. The company posted a net loss of US$974 million for the fourth quarter of last year, compared with a net profit of US$1.45 billion the previous year.
SOFTWARE
Visa Equity to buy Misys
British financial services software firm Misys said yesterday it has agreed to a US$2.01 billion takeover by private equity group Vista Equity Partners. The deal comes after the London-listed firm scrapped merger talks with Swiss rival Temonos last week.
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