INVESTMENT
Alinta Energy deal approved
Chow Tai Fook Enterprises Ltd (周大福), the Hong Kong conglomerate best known for its jewelry stores, has won Australian regulatory approval to acquire gas and electricity provider Alinta Energy Holdings Ltd. The deal has been approved by Australia’s Foreign Investment Review Board and is subject to strict conditions, a spokeswoman for Australian Treasurer Scott Morrison said by telephone yesterday, without elaborating on the details. Chow Tai Fook last month agreed to pay investors, including buyout firm TPG Capital, more than A$4 billion (US$3 billion) for Alinta, people with knowledge of the matter said at the time. The transaction follows in the path of Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing’s (李嘉誠) Cheung Kong Infrastructure Holdings Ltd (長江基建), which on Friday won approval for a A$7.4 billion takeover of Australian power provider Duet Group. Li-controlled companies already own stakes in Australian assets, including SA Power Networks, Powercor Australia and Australian Gas Networks.
DEVELOPMENT
German plan to boost Africa
Narrowing the gap between rich and poor is key to avoiding a destructive rise in populism, German Minister of Finance Wolfgang Schaeuble said on Saturday as he laid out a plan to boost private investment in Africa. “If we do nothing to change this, we can expect a rise in populist parties and demagogues, and a rise in instability around the world, with all its negative effects for sustainable growth,” he said at the Global Infrastructure Forum at the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington. He said Germany, which holds the presidency of the G20 group of nations, is pushing a plan to have African nations partner with certain G20 countries and international lenders, such as the World Bank, to attract outside investors to the continent. The first stage of the proposal, dubbed “Compact with Africa,” would focus on Rwanda, Senegal, Tunisia, Morocco and Ivory Coast.
INSURANCE
Elsztain taking bids for Clal
Eduardo Elsztain, the Argentine real-estate developer who controls Israeli conglomerate IDB Development Corp, said he has at least two bidders for the company’s insurance unit, Clal Insurance Enterprises Holdings Ltd. Elsztain is fighting a sale of the company in the public market after facing a court order to divest. Selling equity on the stock exchange would inflict a 40 percent loss on shareholders because the company is trading below book value, he said on Friday. IDB has more than two interested parties willing to pay a much higher price than Clal’s market value, he said. Elsztain said that under the anti-concentration law the deadline for a sale will be 2019. He did not elaborate on how he plans to respond to the recent court ruling.
CHINA
Trade surplus slips slightly
The General Administration of Customs yesterday published the revised trade data for last month. The latest data showed March’s trade balance with a surplus of US$23.92 billion, down slightly from a surplus of US$23.93 billion in preliminary data that Customs released on April 13. Customs yesterday said that US dollar-denominated import and export growth were up 20.3 percent and 16.4 percent respectively, unchanged from preliminary data. In the first quarter of the year, exports rose 8.2 percent from the same period last year, while imports surged 24 percent. China’s first-quarter trade surplus was US$65.61 billion, Customs reported on April 13.
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
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
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],”
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