The Chinese owner of Volvo Car Corp said full-year profit at its local automaking unit probably doubled, topping analysts’ estimates and allowing billionaire founder Li Shufu (李書福) to turn his focus to another major acquisition in Sweden.
Net income last year at Geely Automobile Holdings Ltd (吉利汽車) increased “around 100 percent” from 5.11 billion yuan (US$783.5 million at the current exchange rate) in 2016, the Hong Kong-listed unit of Li’s Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Co (浙江吉利) said on Tuesday in an exchange filing.
That would exceed the 9.46 billion yuan average estimate in a Bloomberg survey of 36 analysts.
The maker of Emgrand sedans is among automakers getting a boost in the world’s biggest auto market, where sales rose to a record for a 27th consecutive year.
Geely forecast deliveries will rise 27 percent to 1.58 million units this year after a surge in demand last year, which might place the company as the biggest-selling domestic brand in China, analysts said.
Shares of the company yesterday fell as much as 2.2 percent in Hong Kong after more than tripling last year.
Last month, parent company Zhejiang Geely Holding announced that it would purchase a stake in Swedish truckmaker AB Volvo. The parent already owns the Volvo Car nameplate after buying it from Ford Motor Co.
In 2013, Zhejiang Geely agreed to purchase Manganese Bronze Holdings PLC, rescuing the maker of London’s iconic black taxis after the UK automaker entered administration.
Li is turning his attention to the Swedish company’s heavy vehicles in a bid to bulk up outside China. The stake would mark Hangzhou, China-based Geely’s first foray into the heavy truck segment.
In a New Year message, Li told employees: “2017 has been an extraordinary and memorable year, in which we have taken significant steps forward on several fronts.”
“The brands under Geely Holding Group have made exceptional progress,” he added.
Li started out making refrigerator parts and later turned a bankrupt state-owned manufacturer into China’s biggest privately owned automaker. He cemented his reputation as a savvy dealmaker after reviving Volvo Car in the face of widespread industry skepticism following the purchase from Ford in 2010.
The premium Volvo brand is going to help Geely outperform peers in the future, Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Steve Man said.
PERSISTENT RUMORS: Nvidia’s CEO said the firm is not in talks to sell AI chips to China, but he would welcome a change in US policy barring the activity Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said his company is not in discussions to sell its Blackwell artificial intelligence (AI) chips to Chinese firms, waving off speculation it is trying to engineer a return to the world’s largest semiconductor market. Huang, who arrived in Taiwan yesterday ahead of meetings with longtime partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), took the opportunity to clarify recent comments about the US-China AI race. The Nvidia head caused a stir in an interview this week with the Financial Times, in which he was quoted as saying “China will win” the AI race. Huang yesterday said
Nissan Motor Co has agreed to sell its global headquarters in Yokohama for ￥97 billion (US$630 million) to a group sponsored by Taiwanese autoparts maker Minth Group (敏實集團), as the struggling automaker seeks to shore up its financial position. The acquisition is led by a special purchase company managed by KJR Management Ltd, a Japanese real-estate unit of private equity giant KKR & Co, people familiar with the matter said. KJR said it would act as asset manager together with Mizuho Real Estate Management Co. Nissan is undergoing a broad cost-cutting campaign by eliminating jobs and shuttering plants as it grapples
The Chinese government has issued guidance requiring new data center projects that have received any state funds to only use domestically made artificial intelligence (AI) chips, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. In recent weeks, Chinese regulatory authorities have ordered such data centers that are less than 30 percent complete to remove all installed foreign chips, or cancel plans to purchase them, while projects in a more advanced stage would be decided on a case-by-case basis, the sources said. The move could represent one of China’s most aggressive steps yet to eliminate foreign technology from its critical infrastructure amid a
MORE WEIGHT: The national weighting was raised in one index while holding steady in two others, while several companies rose or fell in prominence MSCI Inc, a global index provider, has raised Taiwan’s weighting in one of its major indices and left the country’s weighting unchanged in two other indices after a regular index review. In a statement released on Thursday, MSCI said it has upgraded Taiwan’s weighting in the MSCI All-Country World Index by 0.02 percentage points to 2.25 percent, while maintaining the weighting in the MSCI Emerging Markets Index, the most closely watched by foreign institutional investors, at 20.46 percent. Additionally, the index provider has left Taiwan’s weighting in the MSCI All-Country Asia ex-Japan Index unchanged at 23.15 percent. The latest index adjustments are to
RSS