Formosa Petrochemical Corp (台塑石化), the nation’s only publicly traded oil refiner, said it may need one to two weeks to have two-thirds of its Mailiao oil refinery fully operational after a fire damaged a unit three days ago.
Formosa is preparing to restart one of the crude processing units at the plant and may begin feeding oil to it tomorrow, spokesman Lin Keh-yen (林克彥) said.
The Chinese-language Commercial Times reported yesterday the refiner could take a year to restart the residual desulfurization unit damaged by Sunday’s fire.
“I am not that pessimistic,” Lin said by telephone.
The company shut the 540,000-barrel-a-day refinery for safety reasons after on oil leak triggered a fire at the No. 2 residual desulfurization unit, Lin said on Monday.
The blaze was the second accident at the refiner’s Mailiao complex this month. Formosa halted its No. 1 ethylene plant, which has an annual capacity of 700,000 tonnes, on July 7 after a fire.
Yuanta Securities Co (元大證券) analyst Danny Ho (何耀仁) said Formosa may need as little as two months to resume production at the residual processing unit and supporting plants.
The refinery has three crude distillation units, each able to process 180,000 barrels a day. The plants heat crude and separate it into oil products. Residual desulfurization units remove sulfur from residual fuel.
Direct losses” from the fire are estimated at NT$500 million (US$15.6 million), the company said in a statement on Monday.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s biggest contract chipmaker, booked its first-ever profit from its Arizona subsidiary in the first half of this year, four years after operations began, a company financial statement showed. Wholly owned by TSMC, the Arizona unit contributed NT$4.52 billion (US$150.1 million) in net profit, compared with a loss of NT$4.34 billion a year earlier, the statement showed. The company attributed the turnaround to strong market demand and high factory utilization. The Arizona unit counts Apple Inc, Nvidia Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc among its major customers. The firm’s first fab in Arizona began high-volume production
VOTE OF CONFIDENCE: The Japanese company is adding Intel to an investment portfolio that includes artificial intelligence linchpins Nvidia Corp and TSMC Softbank Group Corp agreed to buy US$2 billion of Intel Corp stock, a surprise deal to shore up a struggling US name while boosting its own chip ambitions. The Japanese company, which is adding Intel to an investment portfolio that includes artificial intelligence (AI) linchpins Nvidia Corp and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), is to pay US$23 a share — a small discount to Intel’s last close. Shares of the US chipmaker, which would issue new stock to Softbank, surged more than 5 percent in after-hours trading. Softbank’s stock fell as much as 5.4 percent on Tuesday in Tokyo, its
The prices of gasoline and diesel at domestic fuel stations are to rise NT$0.1 and NT$0.4 per liter this week respectively, after international crude oil prices rose last week, CPC Corp, Taiwan (台灣中油) and Formosa Petrochemical Corp (台塑石化) announced yesterday. Effective today, gasoline prices at CPC and Formosa stations are to rise to NT$27.3, NT$28.8 and NT$30.8 per liter for 92, 95 and 98-octane unleaded gasoline respectively, the companies said in separate statements. The price of premium diesel is to rise to NT$26.2 per liter at CPC stations and NT$26 at Formosa pumps, they said. The announcements came after international crude oil prices
SETBACK: Apple’s India iPhone push has been disrupted after Foxconn recalled hundreds of Chinese engineers, amid Beijing’s attempts to curb tech transfers Apple Inc assembly partner Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), also known internationally as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), has recalled about 300 Chinese engineers from a factory in India, the latest setback for the iPhone maker’s push to rapidly expand in the country. The extraction of Chinese workers from the factory of Yuzhan Technology (India) Private Ltd, a Hon Hai component unit, in southern Tamil Nadu state, is the second such move in a few months. The company has started flying in Taiwanese engineers to replace staff leaving, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be named, as the
RSS