General Motors Co’s (GM) main joint venture partner in China, Shanghai Automotive Industrial Corp (SAIC, 上海汽車), said it has bought an almost 1 percent stake in the US automaker through its initial public offering.
SAIC, which is owned by the Shanghai Municipal Government, said yesterday it paid US$33 a share for about 0.97 percent of GM at a total cost of almost US$500 million.
The two companies said the share purchase is meant to enhance their cooperation in the world’s biggest auto market.
“We are happy with SAIC’s decision to participate in GM’s public offering. GM has enjoyed a strong partnership with SAIC over the past 14 years,” Tim Lee, president of GM International Operations, said in a statement.
SAIC said it would raise the funds needed to finance the share purchase in the Hong Kong financial market. It did not give further details on that plan.
In related news, Ford is reducing its stake in Japanese automaker Mazda to 3.5 percent from 11 percent, giving up the position of top stakeholder it has held for 31 years.
However, Mazda Motor Corp said in a statement yesterday that its partnership with Ford Motor Co would continue in developing and marketing cars together.
Mazda did not specify which companies were buying the shares from Ford, based in Dearborn, Michigan. However, it said the buyers would be companies with which it does business.
Japanese media reports have said Mitsui Sumitomo Bank, already a major investor in Mazda, will be among the buyers as will Japanese trading conglomerate Itochu Corp.
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