AUTOMAKERS
Chinese deliveries shrink
China’s vehicle deliveries last month continued to shrink, extending the market’s historic decline. Sales of sedans, sport utility vehicles, minivans and multipurpose vehicles fell 3.9 percent from a year earlier to 1.53 million units, the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers (CAAM) said Monday. That is the 13th consecutive monthly decline. Retail sales of cars in China fell last month for the 13th time in the past 14 months, falling 5.3 percent, the China Passenger Car Association (CPCA) said last week. Unlike CPCA figures, CAAM’s numbers detail deliveries made to dealerships, not end consumers.
TRAVEL
Thomas Cook seeks liquidity
Thomas Cook Group PLC is seeking an additional £150 million (US$180.93 million) to help tide the debt-laden travel giant through the coming winter, when fewer Europeans go on vacation. The additional capital “will provide further liquidity headroom through the coming 2019-2020 winter cash low period and ensure the business can continue to invest in its strategy,” London-based Cook said in a statement yesterday. The 178-year-old holiday firm saw its market value last month fall as low as £69 million, compared with £2.2 billion at its most recent peak in May last year.
INDUSTRIAL SERVICES
ABB selects next head
ABB Ltd said that Bjorn Rosengren would take over as chief executive officer of the Swiss engineering giant early next year after he leaves the top job at Swedish mining equipment company Sandvik AB. Rosengren, 60, is a seasoned Swedish industrial executive who has been at Sandvik’s helm since November 2015. He is to join ABB in February and take on the CEO role a month later. He was identified last month as the preferred candidate to take over from Peter Voser, the chairman who has been ABB’s interim CEO since Ulrich Spiesshofer abruptly stepped down in April. Voser would revert to his position as chairman, the company said in a statement.
INTERNET
Meesho gains investors
Meesho, an Indian e-commerce site, said that it raised US$125 million from investors, including Naspers Ltd, Facebook Inc and the former chief executive officer of Vodafone Group PLC. The Bangalore-based company allows people to build connections online and then sell through social networks such as Facebook and WhatsApp. Other investors in the company include Sequoia, Shunwei Capital and Venture Highway. The social commerce start-up said that it has a network of more than 2 million “social sellers” in 700 towns across India, focusing on categories such as apparel, wellness and electronics.
AUTOMAKERS
Tesla car crashes in Moscow
A Tesla Model 3 electric car on Saturday caught fire after crashing into a parked tow truck on a Moscow motorway, with the Tesla driver saying that he failed to see the truck. Asked in a video published on the REN TV Web site if he was using an Autopilot self-driving system, driver Alexei Tretyakov said that he was in a mode with drive assistance in which he was still holding the steering wheel. Tesla Inc has stood by safety claims for its Model 3 in the face of regulatory scrutiny, while the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has issued at least five subpoenas since last year seeking information about crashes involving the company’s vehicles.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
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
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
FUTURE PLANS: Although the electric vehicle market is getting more competitive, Hon Hai would stick to its goal of seizing a 5 percent share globally, Young Liu said Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), a major iPhone assembler and supplier of artificial intelligence (AI) servers powered by Nvidia Corp’s chips, yesterday said it has introduced a rotating chief executive structure as part of the company’s efforts to cultivate future leaders and to enhance corporate governance. The 50-year-old contract electronics maker reported sizable revenue of NT$6.16 trillion (US$189.67 billion) last year. Hon Hai, also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), has been under the control of one man almost since its inception. A rotating CEO system is a rarity among Taiwanese businesses. Hon Hai has given leaders of the company’s six