LUXURY GOODS
Chinese firm buys Baccarat
French crystal maker Baccarat is changing hands 253 years after it was founded by royal decree of King Louis XV. Chinese investment firm Fortune Fountain Capital Ltd (灃沅弘集團) is buying a controlling stake from Baccarat’s private equity owners for about 164 million euros (US$184 million), it said in a statement yesterday. The deal ends more than a decade of ownership by Starwood Capital, which took over the brand from the Taittinger family in 2005. Baccarat is known for sets of champagne glasses that cost as much as US$990 and chandeliers that can cost thousands. Fortune Fountain agreed to buy an 88.8 percent stake from Starwood and L Catterton for 222.70 euros a share. The price is 14 percent less than Thursday’s closing share price for Baccarat, which has risen about 19 percent in the past two weeks on speculation of a possible takeover.
AUTOMAKERS
US car sales down in May
Automakers offered big discounts over the US Memorial Day holiday, but the response from car buyers last month was not enough to reverse months of sales declines. Monthly sales data showed the industry sold 6 percent fewer vehicles than in April and 1 percent fewer than in May last year, with a total of 1.5 million vehicles, according to Autodata. Total sales last month fell to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 16.58 million units, compared with 17.17 million a year ago, Autodata reported. General Motors Co saw its sales fall 1.3 percent last month compared with a year earlier, while the North American arm of Fiat Chrysler saw a 1 percent decline and Toyota Motor Corp sales fell 0.5 percent.
FINANCE
Metro buys UK mortgages
British lender Metro Bank PLC said it had bought a portfolio of UK mortgages from a company owned by Cerberus Capital Management LP for £596.7 million (US$768.2 million). Metro Bank, which offers retail, business and private banking, said all lending in the portfolio is secured on property and has a similar credit risk profile to its current mortgage book. The portfolio bought from Cerberus European Residential Holdings BV is made up primarily of buy-to-let mortgages, with the rest being owner-occupied. The acquisition of the mortgages is to be financed using cash from existing resources, Metro said.
BRAZIL
First-quarter GDP up 1%
The government on Thursday said that GDP expanded 1 percent in the first quarter compared with the previous quarter. The result published by the statistics bureau prompted President Michel Temer to tweet that the nation’s worst recession in decades is over. The bureau said it was the first time in eight consecutive quarters that GDP has grown. It said record grain harvests boosted the economy in the first three months of the year, with GDP reaching about US$500 billion.
SERVICES
Blue Apron files for IPO
Meal-kit delivery company Blue Apron Holdings Inc filed for an initial public offering (IPO) in the US, after reportedly delaying listing plans while it worked on improving financials. The New York-based firm filed with an initial offering size of US$100 million, which is a placeholder used to calculate fees that will typically change, according to a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday. The company plans to offer its Class A common stock and will have three classes of shares — two of them with voting rights — after the IPO.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by