Thomas Cook Group PLC shares surged as much as 24 percent after confirming that it received an offer for its tour-operator business from Chinese investor Fosun International Ltd (復星國際).
Hong Kong-listed Fosun, already Thomas Cook’s biggest shareholder, owning about 18 percent, has submitted a preliminary approach and talks are underway, the UK company said in a statement yesterday.
Sky News on Saturday reported that takeover talks were being held.
Thomas Cook, the world’s oldest travel agency, has lately been grappling with dwindling bookings and uncertainty related to the UK’s departure from the EU.
Selling at least part of the operation is crucial to the company’s survival because a new £300 million (US$380.97 million) loan announced last month is conditional on making progress with a disposal.
Fosun’s tourism arm is a division of billionaire Guo Guangchang’s (郭廣昌) drugs-to-insurance conglomerate, which owns the luxury resort brand Club Med.
Buying the travel agency would give the conglomerate control of a business that serves 11 million customers and reported £7.4 billion in revenue last year.
Thomas Cook said there is no certainty of a Fosun offer, but that the board would consider any proposal alongside the company’s “other strategic options.”
A deal would benefit from booming travel demand out of China. Thomas Cook and Fosun in 2016 partnered to cater to the wealthiest 20 percent of Chinese tourists.
The tour operator has also received offers for its Scandinavian arm from private equity company Triton Partners and for its airline unit from Portuguese airline Hi Fly, the Mail on Sunday reported.
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
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts