MANUFACTURING
Blackstone eyes Gates Corp
Investment fund Blackstone said on Friday it will buy US auto parts maker Gates Corp for US$5.4 billion from its Canadian owners. The deal is the second-largest private equity takeover so far this year, after Cerberus Capital’s US$9.1 billion agreement to merge its Albertson’s supermarket chain with rival Safeway. Blackstone said it had clinched the cash deal to buy all of Pinafore Holdings, the parent company of Gates owned by Canadian private-equity company Onex and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.
PHILIPPINES
Cebu airport upgrades set
A consortium that includes India’s GMR Group has won a 17.52 billion peso (US$389.33 million) contract to upgrade the passenger terminal of the Philippines’ second airport, the government said yesterday. The GMR-Megawide consortium won a 25-year concession to the Mactan-Cebu International Airport that serves the central city of Cebu, the country’s second-largest after Manila, the transportation and communication department said. Over the next three to four years, GMR and its local partner are to renovate Mactan’s passenger terminal, build one for international flights, and operate the facility with an expected annual turnover of 8 million passengers.
AVIATION
Mexican carrier bankrupt
A Mexican judge has declared Mexicana de Aviacion, one of Latin America’s oldest airlines, bankrupt, and ordered the sale of its assets, a court said on Friday. The company, founded in 1921, suspended operations in August 2010 and was under bankruptcy protection, allowing it to negotiate with creditors and make restructuring plans. A district judge declared the company “in a state of bankruptcy” and ordered the sale of “rights and assets” to pay back lenders, the Federal Judicial Council said in a statement. Two subsidiaries, Click and Link, were also declared bankrupt.
HAITI
Heineken sets investment
The Dutch brewer Heineken announced on Friday that it is investing US$100 million in its Haiti production plant that makes the popular lager Prestige. Heineken purchased the Haitian brewery in 2011, and owns 95 percent of Prestige’s brewer. The remaining 5 percent is held by Diageo Ireland, which makes Guinness stout. About one-fifth of the investment has funded the construction of a second 2,257m2 production line that opened in December last year in the same Port-au-Prince facility. The addition will allow the brewery to double output to 40,000 more cases every day.
BANKING
Goldman boss nets raise
Goldman Sachs chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein’s total compensation rose by almost 50 percent to US$19.9 million last year, boosted by the value of his stock awards. The value of Blankfein’s stock awards more than doubled from US$5.3 million to US$11.3 million. Goldman’s stock rose 39 percent in 2013 as the bank’s profits climbed. The executive’s cash bonus also increased, climbing 11 percent to US$6.3 million. Blankfein has been chairman and CEO since 2006. The bank’s earnings rose about 9 percent last year as its investment banking revenues improved.
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
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],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained