Alstom SA’s chief executive says the French heavy engineering firm’s agreement to sell off most of its power generation business to US rival General Electric Co (GE) will save jobs and protect France’s national interests.
Patrick Kron says the US$17 billion deal agreed over the weekend “is a combination of Alstom’s qualities and GE’s economic strength.”
After the deal is completed Kron will be left running the company’s train, tram and railway signaling business, which accounts for around a quarter of the group’s total sales and operating profit.
Photo: Bloomberg
GE will take over Alstom’s money-spinning gas turbine business, while the two companies keep equal stakes in the small renewable energy and power grid businesses.
The French state will also buy a stake in the new rump Alstom.
French Economy Minister Arnaud Montebourg said on French television on Sunday that the government will buy a 20 percent stake in Alstom from construction giant Bouygues SA, a main shareholder of the French company.
The move fulfills his pledge to ensure that the French government would retain a say in jobs and decision-making at the company, which builds power plants and France’s famed high-speed TGV trains. He did not comment on the final price of the stake to be bought from Bouygues.
Under the agreement with Alstom, GE agreed to sell its railroad signal business to the French company for about US$825 million. The deal also calls for the companies to set up three 50-50 joint ventures: one for the power grid businesses, another for offshore wind and hydro-power operations and a third for nuclear steam turbines.
GE has said that if shareholders and workers’ representatives sign the deal, the acquisition of Alstom’s energy unit should close sometime next year.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to