CONGLOMERATES
HNA selling Swissport
HNA Group Co (海航集團) is in advanced talks to sell its Swiss airport-cargo handler to a Canadian asset manager, people familiar with the matter said, in what could be the debt-laden Chinese conglomerate’s biggest disposal since it unloaded its Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc stake in April. Toronto-based Brookfield Asset Management Inc has emerged as the preferred bidder for Swissport International, the people said. Swissport — which also offers ticketing, cabin cleaning and aircraft maintenance — could fetch more than US$3 billion, the people said.
CRYPTOCURRENCIES
BK Global ups BTC stake
A group led by plastic surgeon and start-up investor Kim Byung-gun is boosting its bet on Bithumb, one of South Korea’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges. Kim’s BK Global Consortium signed a deal to buy 50 percent plus one share of BTC Holding Co, the largest investor in Bithumb’s operator, for about 400 billion won (US$352 million), according to a spokesperson for the trading platform. BK Global Consortium was already the fifth-largest shareholder of BTC Holding.
ENERGY
Shell to sell Venezuela JV
Royal Dutch Shell PLC is negotiating the sale of its stake in a Venezuelan oil joint venture (JV) to Paris-based Maurel & Prom, three sources said this week, a move to scale down its crude business in the ailing OPEC member country to focus on gas. The Anglo-Dutch company is seeking to sell its 40 percent stake in Petroregional del Lago, a joint venture with Venezuela’s state-run oil company PDVSA in the western state of Zulia near Colombia.
FINANCE
UOB mulls insurance ops
Singapore’s United Overseas Bank Ltd (UOB) is reviewing its insurance business, including an existing partnership with Prudential PLC, people familiar with the matter said. UOB has been soliciting ideas from potential advisers regarding its life insurance tie-up with Prudential, including ways to get more value out of the operations, the people said. Possibilities include renewing its agreement with the London-based insurer, which started in 2010, or looking for another partner, the people said.
SOUTH KOREA
Jobless rate declines
South Korea’s unemployment rate fell last month, recovering from an eight-year high in August, as increased fiscal spending in the healthcare sector boosted jobs even as manufacturers and retailers shed workers. The unemployment rate fell to 4 percent last month from 4.2 percent in seasonally adjusted terms, as the number of employed rose by 45,000 people from a year earlier, marking the biggest increase since June, a Statistics Korea report showed yesterday. The number of people with jobs increased by 137,000 last month from a year earlier, the report showed.
METALS
Pampa challenges SQM sale
The controlling shareholder in Chile’s lithium producer SQM has mounted a legal challenge to halt the sale of nearly a quarter of the company to Chinese group Tianqi Lithium Corp (天齊鋰業). Pampa Calichera, Potasios de Chile and Global Mining — collectively known as the Pampa Group, which holds 29.12 percent of SQM — said the decision by Chilean regulators to allow the deal breaks competition rules. Tianqi already has interests in Albermarle, the world’s largest lithium producer and a direct competitor of SQM.
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