The Chinese investment firm buying Royal Philips NV’s lighting components arm is targeting more European acquisitions as large as US$10 billion.
GSR Capital (金沙江資本) is to pursue overseas deals in technology, clean energy and pharmaceuticals, as well as online finance, chairman Sonny Wu (伍伸俊) said.
The firm, which yesterday said it plans to raise a US$5 billion global acquisition fund, is to target Europe, where valuations are more reasonable than in the US, Wu said.
“We’re looking at the top one or two companies in the world in their sectors,” Wu said in an interview yesterday in Hong Kong. “They may not be growing fast, but they will with the China angle.”
Wu, a former Nortel Networks Corp executive with backing from a Hong Kong solar-power magnate, is raising a buyout fund to source larger acquisitions of technology-heavy companies with the potential to grow in China.
He is seeking to add to the US$28.1 billion of cross-border deals by Chinese private-equity firms this year.
The firm would be branching out into biotechnology and healthcare, Wu said.
“Pharmaceuticals is huge in China. Other guys are setting up hospitals or helping restructure state-owned enterprises. We don’t do that,” he said. “We want to acquire pharmaceuticals companies — we’re scanning the world — and bring them to China.”
A GSR-backed fund is leading a group of investors that agreed in March to acquire control of the Philips Lumileds business for US$2.8 billion.
The buyers have received US antitrust approval for the deal and aim to complete the purchase by October, Wu 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],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
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