China’s Fosun International Ltd (復星國際) yesterday signed an agreement to acquire Brazil-based investment management firm Rio Bravo Investimentos SA, according to a statement, just a day after the Chinese conglomerate announced another overseas deal.
Fosun, which has interests ranging from property to mining, said it will buy the controlling share of privately-owned Rio Bravo, but did not give a value for the deal. Fosun did not immediately respond to request for comment.
Fosun chairman Guo Guangchang (郭廣昌) said the deal was an “important milestone for the laying out of Fosun’s globalization strategy of being present in the important emerging economies.”
Fosun intends to use the acquisition as a gateway to Brazil and the Latin American region in business areas such as property and investment, the statement said.
The Chinese conglomerate on Friday announced that its pharmaceutical unit would buy just more than an 86 percent stake in India’s Gland Pharma Ltd for up to US$1.26 billion.
Gland Pharma is the first Indian maker of injectable drugs with approval from the US Food and Drug Administration, according to a filing to the Hong Kong stock exchange.
Gland Pharma, based in the Indian city of Hyderabad, counts US private equity firm KKR and its chief executive’s family as its biggest shareholders.
Hong Kong-listed Fosun also owns Club Med SA and has a stake in Cirque du Soleil. Earlier this month, it completed a takeover of the English Championship soccer club Wolves.
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