Huawei Technologies Co (華為) plans to sell its undersea telecom cable business, a buyer’s filing showed yesterday, in its first major asset sale since the US ratcheted up accusations of the Chinese firm being a vehicle for espionage.
Hengtong Optic-Electric Co (亨通光電), an optical telecommunication network products company based in Jiangsu Province, said in the filing to the Shanghai Stock Exchange that it on Friday signed a letter of intent with Huawei Technologies subsidiary Huawei Tech Investment Co (華為技術投資) to buy its 51 percent stake in Huawei Marine Systems Co (華為海洋網絡) via cash and share issuance.
The filing did not disclose a price.
Huawei Technologies declined to provide comment when contacted by reporters.
The potential sale comes as Huawei’s main business of making and selling telecom network equipment and smartphones is under intense global scrutiny as the US works to persuade its allies that Huawei’s products pose a security risk.
Huawei has said it would not cooperate with any Chinese state request to access its systems for intelligence purposes.
Even so, the US Department of Commerce last month imposed a trade ban that threatens to significantly disrupt its supply chain.
In March, the Wall Street Journal cited US security officials as saying that the suspected security risk extended to undersea cables built by Huawei Marine.
Undersea cables are the backbone of global Internet traffic. Huawei has been gaining share in the market dominated by US firm SubCom LLC, Japan’s NEC Corp and Europe’s Alcatel-Lucent SA, since Huawei Marine was established in 2008 as a joint venture with the UK’s Global Marine Group.
Huawei Marine has participated in 90 projects worldwide and built 50,361km of cables, its Web site showed, including a 6,000km cable connecting Africa and South America for the first time, completed in September last year.
It booked net profit of 115 million yuan (US$16.66 million) for last year on revenue of 394 million yuan, according to Huawei Technologies’ annual report.
The annual report also showed that Huawei Technologies gained majority voting rights on Huawei Marine’s board in August last year, with Global Marine retaining a 49 percent non-controlling interest.
According to exchange filings, Hengtong Optic-Electric’s largest shareholder is privately owned Hengtong Group (亨通集團) with a 15.66 percent stake.
Hengtong Group’s founder and owner Cui Genliang (崔根良) is the second-largest shareholder with 14.95 percent.
Hengtong Group on its Web site said it is China’s biggest solutions provider in fiber-optic networks and smart electricity grids, with more than 70 subsidiaries at home and abroad, including Indonesia-listed cable maker PT Voksel Electric Tbk.
Hengtong Optic-Electric booked net profit of 2.5 billion yuan for last year on revenue of 33.9 billion yuan, according to its annual report.
It has delivered more than 10,000km of undersea cables, including for projects in Papua New Guinea, Chile, Bolivia and Mexico, the annual report showed.
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],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
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