ENERGY
Hyundai wins plant deal
South Korea’s Hyundai Heavy Industries said yesterday that its consortium with French firm Sidem had won a US$1.4 billion deal to build a power plant and a desalination facility in Kuwait. Under the deal with Kuwait’s energy authorities, Hyundai will build a gas-fired power plant worth US$970 million, while Sidem will build a water desalination plant in a combined complex about 100km south of Kuwait City. Construction will start this month and be completed toward the end of 2016, Hyundai said in a statement. The power plant will have a production capacity of 1,500 megawatts while the desalination plant will produce up to 486,000m3 of water a day, it said.
MARKETING
Red Bull plans China launch
Red Bull is planning to launch its best-selling energy drink in China after gaining the necessary permissions, and is building an office in Shanghai, Austria’s Kronen Zeitung reported. The newspaper cited the Austrian company — whose activities span extreme sports sponsorship, Formula One motor racing and media — as confirming the move. “The aim is a selective distribution of Red Bull, limited to urban areas and a target group that knows the brand from abroad. We want to develop a feel for the market and the consumers,” Kronen Zeitung quoted the company as saying. The company sold 5.2 billion cans of its Red Bull energy drink last year and made sales of 4.9 billion euros (US$6.7 billion).
ENERGY
S Korea increases gas use
South Korea, the world’s second-largest buyer of liquefied natural gas (LNG), boosted imports of the fuel by 9.7 percent last month amid increased demand for power generation. Shipments climbed to 3.28 million tonnes from 2.99 million tonnes a year earlier, according to data on the Korea Customs Service’s Web site today. Imports advanced 2.8 percent from October. Domestic sales by state-run Korea Gas Corp were up 3.3 percent last month from a year earlier, according to a regulatory filing on Wednesday. Demand from electricity producers rose by 9.4 percent, while local city-gas providers used 1.9 percent less of the fuel. South Korea imports most of its LNG under long-term contracts with suppliers including Qatar, Indonesia, Malaysia and Oman. It was the largest buyer after Japan last year with purchases of 36.77 million tonnes, according to the industry-funded International Group of Liquefied Natural Gas Importers in Paris.
CHIPMAKERS
Google eyes ARM chips
British chip designer ARM Holdings PLC’s shares rose as much as 5.7 percent after Bloomberg reported on Thursday that Google Inc may use ARM’s technology to design its own server processors. A deal would speed up ARM’s push into the server market, where it has been a late entrant. ARM licenses its designs to chipmakers such as Qualcomm Inc and Texas Instruments Inc, whose chips are used in Apple Inc’s iPhone and Samsung Electronic Co’s Galaxy devices. Jefferies analyst Lee Simpson said he expected companies such as Amazon.com and Facebook Inc to adopt ARM’s designs over the next couple of years. ARM’s strength in designing low-power processors has enabled it to dominate the mobile devices sector, while Intel Corp is the leader in chips used in servers and personal computers. A deal between ARM and Google could dent Intel’s dominance in the server market as Google is one of the biggest buyers of server chips.
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],”