Two major units of Formosa Plastics Group (台塑集團), the nation’s largest industrial conglomerate, yesterday said they plan to spend a total of US$88 million on the group’s new ethylene plant in Louisiana.
The investment from Formosa Chemicals & Fibre Corp (台灣化學纖維) and Nan Ya Plastics Corp (南亞塑膠) is to fund an ongoing expansion plan for the group’s US unit, FG Inc, company filings with the Taiwan Stock Exchange said.
Delaware-based FG Inc, a fully owned subsidiary of Formosa Petrochemical Corp (台塑石化), operates FG LA LLC in Louisiana, which is building an ethylene cracker.
FG LA, which has paid-in capital of US$120 million, plans to raise US$100 million to cover the construction and design costs of the Louisiana project, which is undergoing an environmental assessment.
Through a capital injection of US$66 million and US$22 million respectively, Formosa Chemicals is to take a 30 percent stake and Nan Ya is to take a 10 percent stake in FG LA, while Formosa Petrochemical would hold 57 percent.
Formosa Taffeta Co (福懋興業), the conglomerate’s arm that operates its textile business, would own the remaining 3 percent stake in FG LA with an investment of US$6.6 million, the group said.
The group would not consider raising more money in the near term, an official told a news conference yesterday, adding that the Louisiana plan is expected to pass the environmental assessment next year at the earliest.
FG LA has acquired 321.15 hectares for US$34.65 million to build the new facility, a company statement said last month.
Formosa Petrochemical chairman Chen Bao-lang (陳寶郎) said that the Louisiana plant is scheduled to begin construction in 2020 and start production in 2022, the Chinese-language Economic Daily News reported earlier this year.
The cracker is to be capable of producing 2.4 million tonnes of ethylene per year after the first phase of construction is completed in 2024, newspapers said.
The group is planning to build more plants in the state to produce other petrochemicals, such as propane dehydrogenation and ethylene glycol, eyeing abundant shale oil there.
Total investment in Louisiana is expected to be about US$9.4 billion, Formosa Petrochemicals said.
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass
People walk past advertising for a Syensqo chip at the Semicon Taiwan exhibition in Taipei yesterday.
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
RSS