ENERGY
Petronas to invest in Canada
Petronas will embark on a US$35 billion liquid natural gas (LNG) project in Canada following the reversal of Ottawa’s decision to block the Malaysian national oil company’s purchase of Canadian gas producer Progress Energy Resources. At a joint press conference yesterday with his Canadian counterpart, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said this followed from the “approval principally” given for the state energy firm’s US$5.5 billion purchase. Najib announced that Petronas will spend CD$36 billion (US$34.95 billion) to build “all the facilities upstream including investment in a pipeline” which he said was the “largest foreign direct investment in Canada by any country… We believe this project will be mutually beneficial because it will open up Canadian energy to new markets, principally East Asia.”
BRAZIL
Tax deal on foreign profits
The government has reached a deal with big local companies on how to tax their foreign profits, a measure that should help resolve 70 billion reais (US$31.8 billion) in tax disputes and help encourage greater investment abroad, Folha de S.Paulo newspaper reported on Saturday. The deal should give a boost to tax collection of several billion reais, Folha said, at a time when the government is struggling to meet its fiscal savings goal for this year. The companies affected include miner Vale SA, state oil company Petroleo Brasileiro SA and steelmaker Gerdau SA. The deal will allow the companies to enter a special renegotiation of tax debts the government said they owed for profits earned outside the country. The companies will be allowed to set up holding companies to process foreign earnings as long as they are reported transparently and not based in so-called tax paradises, Folha said.
OIL
Kuwait cites ‘good’ price
Kuwaiti Oil Minister Mustafa al-Shamali yesterday said that an oil price of between US$100 to US$110 per barrel is acceptable to both producers and consumers. “These prices are good and acceptable to all parties. They help producers to complete their production and exploration projects, besides they are suitable to consumers and the global economy,” Shamali told al-Seyassah newspaper. The main US contract, West Texas Intermediate for delivery next month, closed the week on Friday at US$103.84 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, up US$0.53 from Thursday’s closing level. Shamali said Kuwait’s current crude production is estimated at 3.2 million barrels per day, up from an average of about 3 million barrels during the past two years.
COMPUTERS
Icahn drops Dell effort
Carl Icahn walked away from his effort to win a higher price for an 8.9 percent stake in Dell Inc less than a month after stating that the US$24.9 billion buyout “greatly undervalues” the computer maker. In a post on Friday on Twitter, Icahn said he was dropping his demand for an independent court appraisal of his 156.5 million Dell shares. Under the law in Delaware, where Dell is incorporated, stockholders can ask the state chancery court for an independent valuation of fair value in a takeover. The billionaire, in a Sept. 9 letter to other Dell shareholders, vowed to pursue appraisal rights even as he conceded defeat after a months-long effort to spur a higher bid or win control of the Round Rock, Texas, 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