China is set to merge two of its biggest state-owned shipping companies, official media reported yesterday, as the government seeks to reform lumbering public companies to try to bolster growth.
The State Council approved the restructuring of China Ocean Shipping Group Co (COSCO, 中遠集團) and China Shipping Group Co (中國海運集團), the state-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) said on its Web site.
It did not detail how the restructuring would be carried out, but the official Xinhua news agency said the two would merge.
COSCO is the largest shipping company in the country by fleet size, and China Shipping has total assets of 200 billion yuan (US$30.96 billion), according to their official Web sites.
Under a merger, the new entity would have a 7.7 percent share of the global container market and become the fourth-biggest company in the industry, Bloomberg News reported earlier, following AP Moeller-Maersk A/S, Mediterranean Shipping Co SA and CMA CGM Group, according to Alphaliner’s ranking.
The global shipping industry is in the grip of a long-term downtrend and a merger would give the Chinese firms an opportunity to benefit from economies of scale.
It was not clear whether the move might be subject to regulatory approval in the EU or US, even though Western multinationals have had to secure the green light from Chinese authorities for some of their deals.
The approval followed news of the merger of two of China’s largest metals firms, China Minmetals Corp (中國五礦集團) and China Metallurgical Group Corp (中冶集團), announced earlier this week.
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