■ Hon Hai may sell shares in HK
Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) will consider a plan to combine holdings in 15 mobile-phone related companies for a Hong Kong listing, a Chinese-language newspaper said, citing company spokesman Edmund Ding (丁祈安).
The plan would allow Hon Hai employees to take a stake in one of the company's most profitable businesses, where sales last year reached about NT$30 billion (US$890 million), the report said, without giving comparative figures.
Hon Hai expects to make about 30 million handsets this year and become the nation's largest mobile-phone manufacturer, the paper said.
Hon Hai's total sales last year rose by 34 percent to NT$327.8 billion from NT$245 billion in 2002. Hon Hai had a 51 percent increase in third-quarter profit as demand rose at its personal-computer and consumer-electronics factories in China.
■ Chunghwa's profit soars
Chunghwa Telecom Co's (中華電信) fourth-quarter profit nearly doubled compared with the year-earlier period as more customers used the nation's largest phone company's fixed-line services.
Chunghwa Telecom group net profit rose to NT$12 billion (US$357 million) in the last three months from NT$6.2 billion in the same period in 2002. The figures were derived by subtracting nine-month profit from the company's 12-month preliminary earnings.
Last year's net income rose 12 percent from 2002 to NT$48.4 billion (US$1.4 billion), the company said in an e-mailed statement. Sales, which were reported earlier, were NT$179.1 billion. That increased 1.7 percent from NT$176.1 billion in 2002.
■ CPC seeks oil tenders
Chinese Petroleum Corp (中油) plans to buy high-sulfur, or so-called sour crude oil for loading from mid-March through April, a company official said.
The company wants cargoes of crude oil with a sulfur content of more than 0.5 percent by weight, which would include most crude oil grades from the Middle East, said the official, who asked not to be named.
Sour crude oil is usually cheaper than grades with less sulfur because refiners need to remove the pollutant.
Suppliers must submit offers by 11am today and offers must be valid until 6pm tomorrow, the official said.
Chinese Petroleum usually buys grades such as Bahrain's Arab Medium, Yemen's Masila, Oman, Ratawi from the neutral zone between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, Iraq's Basrah Light, Russia's Urals and CPC Blend crude oils. CPC Blend mainly comprises Kazakhstan's Tengiz crude oil and is sold through the Caspian Pipeline Consortium.
Last month, the company bought 500,000 barrels of Bahrain's Arab Medium crude oil for loading next month, less than its usual monthly requirement of between 1 million and 2 million barrels.
■ Dragonair sets record
Dragon Airlines, Hong Kong's second-largest carrier, said it flew a record number of passengers during the Lunar New Year holiday.
The airline carried 15,762 passengers on Jan. 26, beating the previous record of 14,711 on Feb. 6 last year, it said in a statement.
Dragonair is operating 65 extra flights between Jan. 15 and Feb. 2 to meet the increased demand.
Shares of China National Aviation Co, which controls Dragonair, fell 0.7 percent to HK$1.52 in Hong Kong.
■ NT dollar soars
The New Taiwan dollar rose to its highest in one-and-a-half years after shares climbed, raising expectations that overseas money managers will buy more of the currency to pay for further investments in the nation's stocks.
CHIP HANG-UP: Surging memorychip prices would deal a blow to smartphone sales this year, potentially hindering one of MediaTek’s biggest sources of revenue MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s biggest smartphone chip designer, yesterday said its new artificial intelligence (AI) chips used in data centers are to account for 20 percent of its total revenue next year, as cloud service providers race to deploy AI infrastructure to meet voracious demand. MediaTek is believed to be developing tensor processing units for Google, which are used in AI applications. While it did not confirm such reports, MediaTek said its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business would be a new growth engine for the company. It again hiked its forecast for the addressable ASIC market to US$70 billion by 2028, compared
MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s biggest smartphone chip supplier, yesterday said it plans to double investment in data center-related technologies, including advanced packaging and high-speed interconnect technologies, to broaden the new business’ customer and service portfolios. The chip designer is redirecting its resources to data centers, mainly designing application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities for cloud service providers. The data center business is forecast to lead growth in the next three years and become the company’s second-biggest revenue source, replacing chips used in smart devices, MediaTek president Joe Chen (陳冠州) told a media event in Taipei. “Three or four years
Until US President Donald Trump’s return a year ago, when the EU talked about cutting economic dependency on foreign powers — it was understood to mean China, but now Brussels has US tech in its sights. As Trump ramps up his threats — from strong-arming Europe on trade to pushing to seize Greenland — concern has grown that the unpredictable leader could, should he so wish, plunge the bloc into digital darkness. Since Trump’s Greenland climbdown, top officials have stepped up warnings that the EU is dangerously exposed to geopolitical shocks and must work toward strategic independence — in defense, energy and
Motorists ride past a mural along a street in Varanasi, India, yesterday.
RSS