AB Electrolux chief financial officer Tomas Eliasson is resigning to take another job, less than two weeks after the firm’s CEO announced his retirement following the collapse of a deal to buy General Electric Co’s (GE) appliance business.
Eliasson, 53, has been appointed chief financial officer of Sandvik AB, the world’s largest maker of cutting tools, and is to leave Electrolux to take up his new position no later than July, Stockholm-based Sandvik said in a statement yesterday.
Electrolux has begun looking for Eliasson’s replacement, the appliance maker said in a separate statement.
Eliasson’s departure comes after the collapse of what would have been Electrolux’s largest acquisition to date, a planned US$3.3 billion takeover of the GE business. GE pulled out of the deal because of opposition from US antitrust regulators, and later agreed to sell the unit to China’s Haier Group (海爾) for US$5.4 billion.
Electrolux on Jan. 11 said that Keith McLoughlin would retire as CEO and move back to the US after GE’s decision to walk away from the deal, which Electrolux had pursued to gain scale in the US market.
The company went to court to fight the US Department of Justice’s claims that the combined company and rival Whirlpool Corp would be dominant in US cooking appliances. The trial was under way in Washington when GE announced on Dec. 7 last year it was abandoning the plan because of regulatory opposition.
Sandvik has undergone an executive overhaul since Johan Molin took over as chairman in May last year. In November last year, Bjoern Rosengren, the former CEO of Finnish engine maker Wartsila Oyj Abp, took the same job at Sandvik, replacing Olof Faxander. Eliasson replaces Mats Backman, who is joining Autoliv Inc.
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