The surprise arrest of Huawei Technologies Co (華為) chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou (孟晚舟) is about to affect one of the Chinese company’s suppliers in Japan.
Yaskawa Electric Corp, which supplies industrial robots for Huawei’s smartphone and telecom gear factories, saw all orders for its machines put on hold after the arrest, Yaskawa president Hiroshi Ogasawara said in an interview on Wednesday.
Of Yaskawa’s ¥448.5 billion (US$4 billion) in revenue for the fiscal year that ended in February, 23 percent came from China.
Photo: AP
“My people on the ground in China say that Huawei is turned upside down internally,” Ogasawara said. “All kinds of capex deals are temporarily on hold as they figure things out.”
Huawei declined to comment.
Meng was arrested in Vancouver at the request of US authorities for allegedly breaching sanctions related to selling technology to Iran. While her detention has become an international incident, this is the first indication that it is beginning to affect Huawei’s operations.
The arrest has further undermined the international standing of the company, which was already under suspicion in the West because of its ties to the Chinese government.
Separately, the Japanese media earlier this week reported that the country’s top three carriers — NTT Docomo Inc, SoftBank Group Corp and KDDI Corp — would ban telecommunications equipment by Huawei and ZTE Corp (中興), and France’s Orange SA said it does not plan to work with Huawei to build its 5G mobile network.
The order freeze is making Yaskawa reconsider its outlook on the timing of demand for 5G phones and communications equipment, because Huawei was at the forefront of the technology’s rollout, Ogasawara said.
Yaskawa in October said that it expected memorychip manufacturers to start making capital investments related to 5G in the spring and see a boost in its own machinery orders by early next year.
That outlook is now uncertain, because of the events at Huawei, Ogasawara said.
The Huawei incident and trade tensions with the US are not likely to derail 5G’s rollout in China, he said.
The deployment is driven by China’s national policy and orders for internal demand would make up for any losses due to trade barriers, Ogasawara said.
Yaskawa has three factories in China, all of which make machines for domestic customers.
Global smartphone output is not likely to decline, but capital investment is likely to remain flat until 5G demand kicks in during the second half of next year, Ogasawara said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained