A week after it admitted to cheating on US emissions tests for years, Volkswagen AG’s pain is beginning to spread throughout Europe’s credit markets.
The Bank of France on Friday stopped trading two securities backed by Volkswagen auto loans, while executives of parts supplier Schaeffler AG found themselves fielding questions about their biggest customer as they drum up support for an initial public offering (IPO), according to people familiar with the matters.
Since Volkswagen admitted on Sept. 18 that it had cheated on US air pollution tests since 2009, its chief executive officer resigned, the company became the target of a joint investigation by 27 US states and the stock price fell 28 percent.
Photo: Reuters
Matthias Mueller, the former Porsche chief who was appointed Volkswagen’s CEO on Friday, said his most urgent task is to win back trust for the company.
Suzuki Motor Corp on Saturday said it sold all the shares it held in Volkswagen to Porsche Automobil Holding SE, following the end of a four-year dispute over a failed partnership with VW.
The two Volkswagen-related securities were not in an updated list the Bank of France distributed on Friday after being included in the original version sent to investors earlier this week, said the people, who asked not to be identified.
The Bank of France is buying asset-backed securities under a European Central Bank purchase program designed to help boost lending in the euro area.
Volkswagen Financial Services has 22.8 billion euros (US$25 billion) of outstanding asset-backed debt, according to a presentation on its Web site this month.
Germany-based Schaeffler on Monday announced its IPO plans. Concerns about the impact of the Volkswagen issue, as well as Chinese and global market volatility, could affect investor views on the IPO valuation, according to the two people.
The company is planning to set a price range for the offering soon as it crisscrosses Europe to market the shares to investors from London to Zurich, the people said.
Schaeffler is telling investors that its products are not involved in the scandal and any decline in Volkswagen car production would have an insignificant impact on sales, according to two of the people.
An IPO could raise as much as 3 billion euros, sources have 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
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts