MANUFACTURING
Shoemaker resumes work
Yue Yuen Industrial Holdings Ltd (裕元), a Taiwanese-owned maker of shoes for clients including Adidas AG and Nike Inc, said production at its Dongguan factory in China has resumed fully after being disrupted by a strike that began on April 14. “All operations have returned to normal,” George Liu (劉鴻志), a Hong Kong-based spokesman for the manufacturer, said yesterday by telephone. All of the workers at the factory, which has about 45,000 employees, have returned to work, he said. Employees in Dongguan struck over benefits and pay for about 10 days. The stoppage cost Yue Yuen about US$27 million, including lost profit and additional air-freight costs, the Hong Kong-based company said on Friday last week. The settlement for the dispute will raise employee costs by about US$31 million this year, it said.
ENERGY
Alstom halts trading
French engineering group Alstom SA said on Sunday that it has suspended trading in its shares as expectations grew for a possible bidding war between industrial giants General Electric Co and Siemens AG. The announcement came after French President Francois Hollande held a special meeting with senior ministers to discuss the future of the beleaguered firm, once considered a jewel of French industry that has fallen on hard times. Germany’s Siemens earlier in the day said it wanted to discuss strategic opportunities with Alstom, which it pursued without success a decade ago, after reports that US giant GE was seeking to buy the company’s power generation arm.
ELECTRONICS
Philips, Gibson ink deal
Dutch technology company Royal Philips Electronics NV says it has struck a deal with music company Gibson Brands of the US to sell its audiovisual equipment business for US$135 million.
The companies said the deal makes sense as Gibson is big in Japan and the US, while Philips is strong in Europe, China and Latin America. The audiovisual equipment business employs about 1,900 people and makes home audio systems, headphones, speakers, portable audio and video players, media players, telephones and more. It turned a marginal US$4.1 million profit last year, on sales of US$1.3 billion.
REAL ESTATE
UK market uptick widens
Britain’s housing market recovery spread further beyond London this month as prices rose in more parts of England and Wales outside the capital than at any time over the last decade, a survey showed yesterday. Asking prices for houses in England and Wales rose 0.6 percent this month, the same pace as last month, according to the survey of estate agents and surveyors from Hometrack. The report showed 48 percent of postcode districts outside London reported rising house prices, the highest level since June 2004 and three times as high as a year ago.
ENERGY
BG Group CEO resigns
BG Group’s chief executive Chris Finlayson resigned yesterday as the British oil and gas major said production would be at the lower end of its target range this year due to problems in Egypt. The board said it accepted Finlayson’s resignation for personal reasons after just 16 months on the job. Non-executive chairman Andrew Gould would take over at the FTSE 100 firm with immediate effect until a new chief executive was appointed, BG Group said.
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