AUTOMAKERS
VW to rehaul truck activities
Volkswagen (VW) wants to rehaul its trucking activities by boosting its interest in Sweden’s Scania while transferring its share in German truck firm MAN to its Nordic rival, the weekly Der Spiegel reported. In its edition to appear today, Der Spiegel said Volkswagen’s plans would see the German auto giant boosting its share in Scania to between 75 to 80 percent — compared with the current 46 percent — and transferring its 30 percent stake in MAN to Scania. Scania would then make an offer to MAN shareholders to be the main owner and ultimately merge with MAN, Spiegel reported. MAN currently holds a 13.4 percent stake in Scania.
COMMUNICATIONS
Dentsu to offer Internet radio
Dentsu Inc will set up a company with 13 Japanese radio broadcasters to offer radio programs through the Internet to users of smartphones and personal computers, the Nikkei Shimbun said yesterday, without citing anybody. On Wednesday, Dentsu said in a statement to the Tokyo Stock Exchange that it and Apple Inc would cooperate to offer the iAd mobile advertising service in Japan early next year.
CHEMICALS
LG Chem to raise output
LG Chem Ltd, South Korea’s largest chemicals maker, plans to raise production capacity for car batteries almost 10-fold in the next three years to meet increasing demand for hybrid and electric vehicles. Annual capacity at domestic and overseas plants will jump by 2013 to 80 million batteries, sufficient for more than 350,000 electric cars, from the current 8.5 million, Seoul-based LG Chem said in an e-mailed statement yesterday. LG will invest 1 trillion won (US$887 million) to expand to 60 million batteries annual capacity at an 8.5 million-cell plant in Ochang, south of Seoul, which began operating in June. It will also spend US$300 million to build a plant in Holland, Michigan, that can turn out an additional 20 million a year. LG Chem targets 20 percent of the market for car batteries, a business it expects to generate more than 3 trillion won of revenue by 2015.
TELECOMS
KDDI to release tablet
KDDI Corp, Japan’s -second-largest mobile phone operator, will on Friday start sales of a tablet computer developed by Onkyo Corp, competing with Softbank Corp and NTT DoCoMo Inc in the domestic market for the device, the Nikkei Shimbun said. A number of handset makers are betting on growth in the tablet market. Sales of the devices will almost triple worldwide to 54.8 million units next year as they invade the markets for netbooks, e-readers, gaming devices and media players, researcher Gartner Inc said in a report last month. Apple Inc had captured 95 percent of the global tablet market in the third quarter, according to researcher Strategy Analytics.
AIRLINES
Qantas’ A380s stay grounded
Qantas will keep all its flagship A380 superjumbos on the ground until further notice in response to a midair engine disintegration that revealed a problem of potentially disastrous oil leaks in some motors on the world’s largest jetliner, the company’s chief executive said on Saturday. “We’re not going to rush anybody, we’re not going to be putting a deadline on it. We’re going to make sure it’s absolutely right before we have this aircraft start flying again,” Alan Joyce said at a celebration of the 90th anniversary of his airline, which began as a small-scale flier transporting farmers and miners across the Outback.
CHIP WAR: Tariffs on Taiwanese chips would prompt companies to move their factories, but not necessarily to the US, unleashing a ‘global cross-sector tariff war’ US President Donald Trump would “shoot himself in the foot” if he follows through on his recent pledge to impose higher tariffs on Taiwanese and other foreign semiconductors entering the US, analysts said. Trump’s plans to raise tariffs on chips manufactured in Taiwan to as high as 100 percent would backfire, macroeconomist Henry Wu (吳嘉隆) said. He would “shoot himself in the foot,” Wu said on Saturday, as such economic measures would lead Taiwanese chip suppliers to pass on additional costs to their US clients and consumers, and ultimately cause another wave of inflation. Trump has claimed that Taiwan took up to
A start-up in Mexico is trying to help get a handle on one coastal city’s plastic waste problem by converting it into gasoline, diesel and other fuels. With less than 10 percent of the world’s plastics being recycled, Petgas’ idea is that rather than letting discarded plastic become waste, it can become productive again as fuel. Petgas developed a machine in the port city of Boca del Rio that uses pyrolysis, a thermodynamic process that heats plastics in the absence of oxygen, breaking it down to produce gasoline, diesel, kerosene, paraffin and coke. Petgas chief technology officer Carlos Parraguirre Diaz said that in
SUPPORT: The government said it would help firms deal with supply disruptions, after Trump signed orders imposing tariffs of 25 percent on imports from Canada and Mexico The government pledged to help companies with operations in Mexico, such as iPhone assembler Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), shift production lines and investment if needed to deal with higher US tariffs. The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday announced measures to help local firms cope with the US tariff increases on Canada, Mexico, China and other potential areas. The ministry said that it would establish an investment and trade service center in the US to help Taiwanese firms assess the investment environment in different US states, plan supply chain relocation strategies and
Japan intends to closely monitor the impact on its currency of US President Donald Trump’s new tariffs and is worried about the international fallout from the trade imposts, Japanese Minister of Finance Katsunobu Kato said. “We need to carefully see how the exchange rate and other factors will be affected and what form US monetary policy will take in the future,” Kato said yesterday in an interview with Fuji Television. Japan is very concerned about how the tariffs might impact the global economy, he added. Kato spoke as nations and firms brace for potential repercussions after Trump unleashed the first salvo of