Foxconn buys Alibaba shares
Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), the nation's largest company by sales, announced yesterday that its subsidiary Foxconn (Far East) Ltd had acquired nearly 17.55 million common shares of Alibaba.com Ltd (阿里巴巴) at HK$13.5 per share, or a total of HK$239.3 million, on Saturday.
Hon Hai will hold 0.347 percent of shares in Alibaba, it said in a filing with the Taiwan Stock Exchange.
It has been reported that Alibaba.com, the largest trading Web site in China, raised a total of US$1.5 billion in the biggest initial public offering by a Chinese Internet company, after investors submitted more than 190 times the number of shares to be offered.
The stock will be listed in Hong Kong next Tuesday.
HTC, T-Mobile launch phone
High Tech Computer Corp (HTC, 宏達電), the biggest maker of phones running Microsoft Corp's system, yesterday launched a new phone with T-Mobile to sell its phones in the US during Christmas shopping season.
The new phone will be available tomorrow at T-Mobile's channel stores and on its official Web site, HTC said in a statement.
The handset, code-named" T-Mobile Shadow" connects to the Internet using EDGE, or 2.5G, and Wi-Fi, technologies and has a 2-megapixel camera with video recording on the back.
Inventec Besta debuts
Inventec Besta Co (無敵科技), a leading electronic dictionary maker, made its debut on the GRETAI Securities Market yesterday and saw its shares jump by 14 percent to NT$77.3 from the listing price of NT$68.
Inventec Besta is a subsidiary of Inventec Corp (英業達集團), which offers a wide range of electronic dictionaries, including English-Chinese, Chinese-Japanese, English-Korean, English-Malay, English-Thai and English-Arabic.
Inventec Besta acquired Hong Kong's Golden Atom Holdings Ltd (好易通集團) in 2000, and later established its Hong Kong and Chinese units to expand its business in the Greater China region. Its market share in Taiwan is about 55 percent.
Riding on the wave of English learning in the region, the company has seen steady business. For the first nine months of the year, Inventec Besta posted sales increased by 19.63 percent to NT$2.65 billion.
In addition to keep cultivating in its electronic dictionary products that generated more than 91 percent of sales, Inventec Besta plans to introduce mobile TV for digital learning next year, chairman Bill Tseng (曾炳榮) said earlier.
Vietnamese town planned
E-United Group (義聯集團), one of the nation's leading conglomerates, is planning to build a town in Vietnam for US$1 billion that will include hospitals, schools, golf courses and business, the Economic Daily News reported yesterday.
The group is targeting about 500 hectares of land near Hanoi for the investment which will use the company's experience deployed at a similar project in Kaohsiung, the report said.
The Kaohsiung-based group, whose core business is steel making, also runs a university, a high school and an elementary school and manages property development businesses.
Vietnamese authorities have a positive attitude toward the planned investment, the report said.
NT dollar gains
The New Taiwan dollar gained ground against the US dollar on the Taipei Foreign Exchange yesterday, rising NT$0.05 to close at NT$32.415. Turnover was US$1.704 billion.
HORMUZ ISSUE: The US president said he expected crude prices to drop at the end of the war, which he called a ‘minor excursion’ that could continue ‘for a little while’ The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait started reducing oil production, as the near-closure of the crucial Strait of Hormuz ripples through energy markets and affects global supply. Abu Dhabi National Oil Co (ADNOC) is “managing offshore production levels to address storage requirements,” the company said in a statement, without giving details. Kuwait Petroleum Corp said it was lowering production at its oil fields and refineries after “Iranian threats against safe passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz.” The war in the Middle East has all but closed Hormuz, the narrow waterway linking the Persian Gulf to the open seas,
Apple Inc increased iPhone production in India by about 53 percent last year and now makes a quarter of its marquee devices there, reflecting the US company’s efforts to avoid tariffs on China. The company assembled about 55 million iPhones in India last year, up from 36 million a year earlier, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be named because the numbers aren’t public. Apple makes about 220 million to 230 million iPhones a year globally, with India’s share of the total increasing rapidly. Apple has accelerated its expansion in the world’s most populous country in recent years, bolstered
HEADWINDS: The company said it expects its computer business, as well as consumer electronics and communications segments to see revenue declines due to seasonality Pegatron Corp (和碩) yesterday said it aims to grow its artificial intelligence (AI) server revenue more than 10-fold this year from last year, driven by orders from neocloud solutions clients and large cloud service providers. The electronics manufacturing service provider said AI server revenue growth would be driven primarily by the Nvidia Corp GB300 server platform. Server shipments are expected to increase each quarter this year, with the second half likely to outperform the first half, it said. The AI server market is expected to broaden this year as more inference applications emerge, which would drive demand for system-on-chip, application-specific integrated circuits
PROJECTION: TSMC said it expects strong growth this year, with revenue in US dollars projected to grow by about 30 percent, outperforming the industry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday reported consolidated sales last month reached NT$317.66 billion (US$9.98 billion), the highest ever for the month of February, driven by robust demand for chips built using the company’s advanced 3-nanometer (3nm) process. Last month’s figure was up 22.2 percent from a year earlier, but fell 20.8 percent from January, the world’s largest contract chipmaker said in a statement. For the first two months of the year, TSMC posted cumulative sales of NT$718.91 billion, up 29.9 percent from a year earlier. Analysts attributed the growth to sustained global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) products
RSS