France and a major automaker said on Saturday that they are moving to get citizens out of a locked-down Chinese city where a deadly outbreak of a new virus originated and has spread worldwide.
French automaker PSA Group says it will evacuate its employees and their families from Wuhan in central China, quarantine them in another major Chinese city and then bring them back to France.
The Foreign Ministry said French officials were studying “eventual options” for all its nationals to leave if they wish.
Photo: EPA-EFE
It comes a day after France announced that three cases of the new virus are being treated in two French hospitals — the first confirmed in Europe. All the patients are Chinese who had recently returned from China and are doing well, officials said.
PSA Group did not say how many employees would be part of an evacuation.
In a series of tweets, the automaker said transportation, housing and other organizational considerations are being worked out. PSA, which sells its Peugeot and Citroen cars in China, has a joint venture with Dongfeng Motor Corp (DFM, 東風汽車) in Wuhan.
PSA said it was working closely with Chinese authorities and the French Consulate.
The French Foreign Ministry’s statement made no mention of PSA’s plans.
The automaker did not say how long the quarantine period would last.
However, French medical experts have said the incubation period for the virus appears to be 14 days.
PSA also said it is working with Chinese partner DFM and authorities to take care of Chinese employees. It did not elaborate.
French authorities have cautioned against panic at home, but were concerned about the country’s citizens in Wuhan and those arriving in France, which has direct flights to China. Starting yesterday, medical teams were deployed at France’s airports, notably Paris’ Charles de Gaulle, to help passengers arriving from Chinese cities with questions or medical needs, French health chief Jerome Salomon said.
The new virus accelerated its spread in China with 56 deaths so far, and the US consulate in the epicenter of the outbreak, the central city of Wuhan, announced yesterday it would evacuate its personnel and some private citizens aboard a charter flight.
A notice from the US embassy in Beijing said there would be limited capacity to transport US citizens on tomorrow’s flight from Wuhan that will proceed directly to San Francisco. It said that in the event there are not enough seats, priority will be given to individuals “at greater risk from coronavirus.”
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s biggest contract chipmaker, has decided to slow down its 3-nanometer chip production as Intel Corp, one of its major customers, plans to push back the launch of its new Meteor Lake tGPU chipsets to the end of next year, market researcher TrendForce Corp (集邦科技) said yesterday. That means Intel has canceled almost all of the 3-nanometer capacity booked for next year, with only a small amount of wafer input remaining for engineering verification, the Taipei-based researcher said in a report. Based on Intel’s original schedule, TSMC was to start producing the new chipsets in
DATA SHOW DOWNTURN: Manufacturing in Taiwan contracted as production and demand slumped, while growth in chip exports last month eased in South Korea World chip sales growth has decelerated for six straight months in another sign that the global economy is straining under the weight of rising interest rates and mounting geopolitical risks. Semiconductor sales rose 13.3 percent in June from a year earlier, down from 18 percent in May, data from the global peak industry body showed. The slowdown is the longest since the US-China trade dispute in 2018. The three-month moving average in chip sales has correlated with the global economy’s performance in the past few decades. The latest weakness comes as concern about a worldwide recession has prompted chipmakers such as Samsung
Italy is close to clinching a deal initially worth US$5 billion with Intel Corp to build an advanced semiconductor packaging and assembly plant in the country, two sources briefed on discussions said yesterday. Intel’s investment in Italy is part of a wider plan announced by the US chipmaker earlier this year to invest US$88 billion in building capacity across Europe, which is striving to cut its reliance on Asian chip imports and ease a supply crunch that has curbed output in the region’s strategic auto sector. Asking not to be named due to the sensitivity of the matter, the sources said the
Malaysia is scrambling to protect its assets as the descendants of the last sultan of the remote Philippine region of Sulu look to enforce a US$15 billion arbitration award in a dispute over a colonial-era land deal. In 1878, two European colonists signed a deal with the sultan for the use of his territory in present-day Malaysia — an agreement that independent Malaysia honored until 2013, paying the monarch’s descendants about US$1,000 per year. Now, 144 years later after the original deal, Malaysia is on the hook for the second-largest arbitration award on record for stopping the payments after a bloody incursion
RSS