China’s economic development plans will force consolidation, especially in primary industries, even as new business opportunities are created, said executives including the head of the nation’s second-largest steelmaker.
Chinese industries “must upgrade themselves and discard backward production capacity,” Chinese Ministry of Finance’s research institute director Jia Kang (賈康) told executives yesterday at a conference in Beijing.
Output by Chinese steelmakers this year will fall about 90 million tonnes short of their total capacity of 650 million tonnes, Baosteel Group Corp (寶鋼集團) chairman Xu Lejiang (徐樂江) said yesterday at the same venue.
Xu said Baosteel would concentrate on reducing carbon emissions and energy conservation as it develops new products, such as specialty steel for electric vehicles.
The Chinese government is drafting its next five-year plan for economic development goals from next year to 2015. The National People’s Congress, China’s top legislative body, will review the plan for approval at its annual meetings in March.
China’s top policy makers will meet on Friday and Saturday to set economic policies for the coming year after the Chinese Communist Party’s Politburo said on Friday that the nation will shift next year to a “prudent” monetary stance from its current “moderately loose” one.
China may order higher reserve requirements for banks to counter capital inflows and a possible jump in lending at the start of next year, said Li Daokui (李稻葵), an adviser to China’s central bank.
China has been winding back stimulus measures to rein in liquidity and combat inflation. Inflows of capital to Asia threaten to fuel price gains and asset bubbles.
The People’s Bank of China (中國人民銀行) on Oct. 17 raised benchmark lending rates for the first time since 2007 to curb inflation that hit a two-year high in October.
FALLING BEHIND: Samsung shares have declined more than 20 percent this year, as the world’s largest chipmaker struggles in key markets and plays catch-up to rival SK Hynix Samsung Electronics Co is laying off workers in Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand as part of a plan to reduce its global headcount by thousands of jobs, sources familiar with the situation said. The layoffs could affect about 10 percent of its workforces in those markets, although the numbers for each subsidiary might vary, said one of the sources, who asked not to be named because the matter is private. Job cuts are planned for other overseas subsidiaries and could reach 10 percent in certain markets, the source said. The South Korean company has about 147,000 in staff overseas, more than half
Taipei is today suspending its US$2.5 trillion stock market as Super Typhoon Krathon approaches Taiwan with strong winds and heavy rain. The nation is not conducting securities, currency or fixed-income trading, statements from its stock and currency exchanges said. Yesterday, schools and offices were closed in several cities and counties in southern and eastern Taiwan, including in the key industrial port city of Kaohsiung. Taiwan, which started canceling flights, ship sailings and some train services earlier this week, has wind and rain advisories in place for much of the island. It regularly experiences typhoons, and in July shut offices and schools as
An Indian factory producing iPhone components resumed work yesterday after a fire that halted production — the third blaze to disrupt Apple Inc’s local supply chain since the start of last year. Local industrial behemoth Tata Group’s plant in Tamil Nadu, which was shut down by the unexplained fire on Saturday, is a key linchpin of Apple’s nascent supply chain in the country. A spokesperson for subsidiary Tata Electronics Pvt yesterday said that the company would restart work in “many areas of the facility today.” “We’ve been working diligently since Saturday to support our team and to identify the cause of the fire,”
TECH PARTNERSHIP: The deal with Arizona-based Amkor would provide TSMC with advanced packing and test capacities, a requirement to serve US customers Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is collaborating with Amkor Technology Inc to provide local advanced packaging and test capacities in Arizona to address customer requirements for geographical flexibility in chip manufacturing. As part of the agreement, TSMC, the world’s biggest contract chipmaker, would contract turnkey advanced packaging and test services from Amkor at their planned facility in Peoria, Arizona, a joint statement released yesterday said. TSMC would leverage these services to support its customers, particularly those using TSMC’s advanced wafer fabrication facilities in Phoenix, Arizona, it said. The companies would jointly define the specific packaging technologies, such as TSMC’s Integrated
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