PETROCHEMICALS
Fire at Formosa Texas plant
Formosa Plastics Corp (台塑) on Saturday said that its Texas operation early on Friday reported a fire incident in the Olefins I production unit in Point Comfort. The company said the unit was immediately shut down and the fire was brought under control by the plant’s emergency response team, with no injuries reported. Formosa said the company and local authorities were still investigating the cause of the fire.
INSURANCE
Fubon recapitalizes Hyundai
The board of Fubon Financial Holding Co (富邦金控) on Friday approved an investment by its subsidiary Fubon Life Insurance Co (富邦人壽), which is to spend 144 billion won (US$105.8 million) to recapitalize South Korea’s Hyundai Life Insurance Co. The capital increase program is to be completed in the first half of next year, Fubon Financial said in a filing with the Taiwan Stock Exchange. Fubon Life in December 2015 invested approximately NT$6.1 billion (US$203.6 million) to acquire a 48 percent stake in Hyundai Life, becoming its second-largest shareholder and securing five seats on its board.
INSURANCE
Cathay eyes frontier markets
Cathay Life Insurance Co’s (國泰人壽) wholly-owned investment management unit Conning Holdings Ltd has signed a definitive agreement to acquire a 45 percent stake in Global Evolution, which specializes in emerging and frontier market debt strategies, for up to US$87 million, the company said on Friday. The transaction is expected to close early next year and Conning said it plans to increase its shareholding in Global Evolution through a series of staged investments. Cathay Life said it would inject US$40 million in capital into Conning to meet the related financing needs.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to