TELECOMS
Ooredoo eyes Turkish bid
Qatari phone carrier Ooredoo QSC decided to bid for the insolvent owner of Turkey’s biggest telecommunications company to rival an offer from Saudi Telecom Co, three people with knowledge of the matter said. Ooredoo will seek to acquire Ojer Telekomunikasyon AS (Otas), which owns 55 percent of Turk Telekomunikasyon AS, said the people, who asked not to be identified. The Saudi proposal remains on the table, they said. A purchase by Ooredoo would extend its record of expanding to serve about 150 million customers from Algeria to Myanmar, largely through acquisitions. The plan by Saudi Telecom, which owns 35 percent of Otas’ parent, Oger Telecom, involves buying the company via a US$750 million cash injection and committing to restructure US$4 billion of debt.
LUXURY GOODS
Chow Tai Fook income up
Chow Tai Fook Jewellery Group Ltd (周大福珠寶)’s profit increased for a second consecutive six-month period as demand for gold products lifted sales at the world’s leading jewelry retailer. Shares jumped after the company on Tuesday reported net income rose 46 percent to HK$1.78 billion (US$228 million) in the six months through September. The stock rose 4.4 percent to HK$9.19 as of 11:03am yesterday in Hong Kong, heading for its biggest two-day gain in a year. The results mirror the continued recovery in demand for luxury goods in China after a two-year slump.
CAMBODIA
Bank sees 6.9% growth
The nation’s economy is forecast to grow 6.9 percent next year, compared with a projected 6.8 percent pace this year, despite risks including uncertainties over next year’s election, the World Bank said yesterday. The bank said textile exports had moderated and the construction sector showed signs of slowing, but other manufacturing exports had increased and the country was also drawing more tourists — particularly from China. “The outlook remains positive,” it said in a report. “A possible slowdown of the regional economy, especially China, and potential election related uncertainties, however, pose downside risks to the outlook.”
INVESTMENT
Strong forecast for Asia
Strong corporate earnings and favorable stock valuations will help one of the world’s top-performing regions extend its runaway success next year, Goldman Sachs Group Inc said yesterday. It said stocks in Asia excluding Japan should outperform next year after staging a 33 percent rally this year — twice the gain achieved by the S&P 500. A report by Goldman raised its 12-month target for the MSCI Asia Pacific ex-Japan Index by 9.7 percent to 620, and favors China, India and South Korea stocks. Corporate profits and the total return on the index are expected to surge 14 percent next year, with earnings growth especially strong in the technology, materials and insurance sectors, analysts wrote in the report. Markets could advance further if earnings growth is good and starting valuations are moderate, they added.
PAINTS
AkzoNobel ends talks
Dutch chemicals and paints maker AkzoNobel yesterday said it had ended talks on a possible merger of its paints and coatings business with Pennsylvania-based Axalta Coating Systems. It it would focus on increasing profitability independently instead. Axalta CEO Charles Shave said discussions ended when his firm realized it “could not negotiate a transaction on terms that meet our criteria.”
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