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.
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