Hillhouse Capital Management (高瓴資本管理) is in talks to buy Uber Technologies Inc bonds that can be converted into shares of the car-booking company, a person with knowledge of the matter said.
Uber, based in San Francisco, is finalizing a deal to sell hundreds of millions of dollars of convertible bonds to investors, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the terms are confidential.
Hong Kong-based Hillhouse chief executive Zhang Lei (張磊) did not immediately reply to text messages seeking comment.
Huang Xue (黃雪), a Beijing-based spokeswoman for Uber, declined to comment on the sale, which was reported by the Wall Street Journal earlier yesterday.
Hillhouse, founded in 2005 with US$30 million from the Yale University endowment, can invest in public and privately held companies globally. Last year, it raised US$2.2 billion for private-equity investments. The fundamental equity manager now oversees about US$20 billion.
It has made a name for itself backing companies using Internet and mobile technology to deliver traditional products and services.
It was an early shareholder in Tencent Holdings Ltd (騰訊), Asia’s second-biggest Internet company, and a pre-initial public offering investor in JD.com Inc (京東), China’s second-largest e-commerce company.
More recently, it invested in Didi Kuaidi (滴滴快的), a Chinese rival to Uber, and CarDekho, the Indian car portal, according to Hillhouse’s Web site.
Uber is negotiating a US$2 billion credit line from a group of Wall Street banks. It raised US$1.6 billion in convertible debt at the beginning of the year from Goldman Sachs Group Inc’s wealth-management clients, valuing the company at US$40 billion, one of the highest for a closely held technology startup.
Uber was in talks to raise US$600 million from hedge funds and international strategic investors to add to that amount, people told Bloomberg News in January.
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