China Steel Corp (CSC, 中鋼) yesterday said it plans to invest NT$285 million (US$9.69 million) to form a joint venture with China-based Enley Auto Parts Co (英利汽車部件) to produce a new steel product to make car skeletons.
CSC, the nation’s only integrated steel maker, said it will have a 30 percent stake in the new venture.
The two companies will build a research center and the headquarters of the new venture in Taiwan, along with another plant in Changchun, China, CSC said.
The division in Taiwan will have a capacity of 500,000 units of hot stamping steel product by 2016, while the Changchun division will have a capacity of 1.5 million units by 2015 and 3 million units in 2017, it said.
The company did not provide information about when the projects would start.
“The new product can enhance the safety of cars while reducing their weight,” China Steel vice president Steve Lee (李慶超) said by telephone. “China Steel will provide its hot-rolled and cold-rolled sheets and coils as materials for these plants.”
Greater Kaohsiung-based China Steel established a research team in December 2011 to study hot stamping in the making of car skeletons after the method was used in the US and Europe.
To fund future investments, China Steel’s board yesterday decided to issue NT$30 billion in corporate bonds by the end of next year, Lee said. This year the company issued NT$20 billion in bonds, he said
The company has also decided to extend the operation of one of its steel rod production lines for another year as demand for the products is high. It said renovation of the production line, which can make 300,000 tonnes of steel rods and bars a year, will start next month and be completed by January 2016.
China Steel reported revenue of NT$290.11 billion in the first 10 months, down 3.98 percent from NT$302.14 billion a year ago.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by