■AVIATION
Lufthansa to buy BMI stake
German airline Lufthansa said yesterday that it will buy a remaining 20 percent stake in British carrier BMI from the Scandinavian SAS group. Lufthansa will pay SAS a total of £38 million (US$60.8 million) for the BMI shares that it does not yet already own, a brief statement said. The deal is to take effect on Nov. 1.
■TELECOMS
Bharti Airtel ends MTN talks
India’s top mobile company Bharti Airtel on Wednesday called off merger talks with South Africa’s MTN Group, blaming South Africa’s political leaders. The South African government “has expressed its inability to accept it [the proposed deal] in the current form” and “in view of this, both companies have taken the decision to disengage from discussion,” Bharti said in a statement. The collapse of the politically sensitive talks marked the second time the two companies had failed to forge an alliance. They called off similar talks in May last year.
■ELECTRONICS
Cisco to buy Tandberg
Cisco Systems Inc, the world’s largest maker of networking equipment, agreed to buy Tandberg ASA for 17.2 billion kroner (US$2.96 billion), to expand its lineup of video-conferencing products. Cisco will pay 153.50 kroner a share in cash, Lysaker, Norway-based Tandberg said yesterday in a statement. The acquisition is expected to close in the first half of next year, Cisco said. The company expects the purchase to add to earnings, excluding some items, in fiscal 2011. Tandberg, which has 1,500 employees, reported US$808.8 million in sales last year.
■ENERGY
S Korea drills for Iraq oil
South Korea’s state-owned oil company was to begin drilling for oil yesterday in northern Iraq amid a dispute between the Kurdish regional government and Baghdad over the legality of such resource deals. Korea National Oil Corp (KNOC) and other South Korean companies in a consortium it leads will drill for about three months in the Bazian field in the northern Kurdish region, a senior KNOC executive said. South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported yesterday that the Bazian field could hold up to 1.2 billion barrels, or enough to cover about 18 months of South Korea’s crude imports.
■AUTOMOBILES
Sales rise in Japan
Vehicle sales in Japan rose year-on-year for a second straight month last month, driven by government incentives for low emission cars aimed at boosting the flagging industry, data showed yesterday. The Japan Automobile Dealers Association said 321,737 new cars, trucks and buses were sold in the country last month, compared to 198,265 units in August when sales showed the first year-on-year increase in 13 months. The figure marked a modest 3.5 percent increase compared to the same month last year.
■COMPUTING
Vtion makes IPO in Germany
Vtion Wireless Technology yesterday made the first initial public offer (IPO) this year of shares in a Chinese company on the Frankfurt stock market, market operator Deutsche Boerse said in a statement. Vtion, which says it is the second-biggest player in the Chinese market for wireless data cards for mobile computing uses, aimed to obtain a listing in the market’s Prime Standard, the highest standard of transparency, a statement to the markets said late last month.
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has