BHP Billiton Ltd yesterday said it would double the number of onshore US shale rigs, despite a major shareholder pushing for the commodities giant to divest its US oil and gas assets.
The Anglo-Australian firm said in an annual operational review ending June 30 that it increased the rig count to five during the quarter ended last month, with plans to boost that to 10 in the 2018 financial year.
The ramp up came even as BHP said it would sell off noncore shale assets in Hawkville, Texas, in the September quarter.
New York-based Elliott Advisors Ltd, a significant shareholder in the company, is pushing for BHP to restructure the business, including spinning off its US oil and gas operations and dissolving its costly dual stock market listing.
The world’s biggest miner rejected Elliott’s proposal in April, while Canberra has warned that removing BHP from the Australian Stock Exchange was not in the national interest.
Apart from iron ore and energy coal, annual production for BHP’s other assets — petroleum, copper and metallurgical coal — all fell, pushing its shares down 1.67 percent to A$24.68 in Sydney yesterday.
Total iron ore production for the 2017 financial year rose 4 percent to 231 million tonnes after record output from its Western Australia operations.
The lift also came during a period where prices for the metal surged following a slump from a supply glut and softening Chinese demand.
Copper output eased 16 percent for the year to 1,326 kilotonnes, hurt by a strike in Chile at the world’s largest copper mine, Escondida, with the industrial action also costing BHP US$546 million in costs.
However, copper production was “expected to rebound strongly in the 2018 financial year,” BHP CEO Andrew Mackenzie said, on the back of a new water project and an extension program at Escondida.
Rio Tinto PLC, the world’s second-largest miner, on Tuesday said in its second-quarter production report that shipments and production for iron ore, its main commodity, slipped slightly for the period owing to “adverse weather conditions.”
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