AGRICULTURE
More investment needed
Agricultural investment in developing countries will need to be “substantially increased” to meet the food demand of 9 billion people in 2050, farm ministers gathered in Berlin said on Saturday. Average annual net investment in agriculture in those countries will have to be at least US$83 billion, according to estimates by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the ministers said in a statement. Non-food use of crops can affect food security, they said. Biofuel production from agricultural commodities has contributed to surging world food prices in the past decade, Nestle SA chairman Peter Brabeck-Letmathe told the conference. Blaming the tripling of the price of some food products on speculation is “completely wrong,” and politicians have failed to consider the link with energy markets, he said.
SHIPBUILDING
Hyundai wins new order
Hyundai Heavy Industries yesterday said it has won a US$1.1 billion order from Norway’s Statoil ASA to install a topside facility on a spar hull being built by the South Korean company. It said it would build the 21,000-tonne topside facility, capable of producing 23 million cubic meters of oil and gas a day, by March 2016. Hyundai has already won an US$800 million order from Statoil to build the spar hull about 300km off the northwest coast of Norway. The company said the cylindrical, partially submerged offshore facility would be able to store 160,000 barrels of gas condensate when it is completed in the second half of 2015.
LUXURY GOODS
Firms planning joint venture
Swiss luxury goods group Richemont and the world’s largest jewelry chain, Hong Kong-based Chow Tai Fook (周大福珠寶), have agreed to create a joint venture, Swiss daily Le Temps reported in its online edition late on Saturday. Citing a source inside Richemont, the newspaper said that the two luxury brands would each control 50 percent of the new company, which would distribute watches made by Richemont luxury watchmaking brand Baume & Mercier in China. It will be tasked with boosting the Geneva brand’s sales in China, the world’s second-largest market for luxury goods, Le Temps reported. Chow Tai Fook views the deal as a way to accelerate its watch distribution business, according to the report. The Hong Kong company already distributes a long line of Swiss brands, several of them owned by Richemont. No financial details of the deal were revealed.
TRADE
ITC backs wind tower duties
The US International Trade Commission (ITC) on Friday narrowly approved punitive duties for five years on hundreds of millions of US dollars of wind towers from China and Vietnam. The commission voted 3-3 that US producers were either materially injured or threatened with material injury by unfairly priced and subsidized imports from the two countries. A tie vote goes to the petitioner in US anti-dumping and countervailing duty cases. The US imported US$222 million of wind towers from China last year and about US$79 million from Vietnam. US producers have complained that unfair Asian competition was forcing them to close plants and shed jobs. The vote clears the way for the US Department of Commerce to issue anti-dumping and countervailing duty orders on the wind towers.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
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
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
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],”