South Korea’s POSCO, Asia’s third-biggest steelmaker by output, scrapped a plan to build a mill in the southern Indian state of Karnataka because of delays in getting mining rights and purchasing land.
The South Korean steelmaker agreed with the Indian state to pull out of the project, the Pohang-based company said in a regulatory filing yesterday.
Both parties signed an initial agreement for the 323 billion rupee (US$5.44 billion) integrated mill project in June 2010.
SLOWDOWN
The decision came at a time when steelmakers globally are suffering from falling profitability amid the economic slowdown. POSCO, South Korea’s biggest steelmaker, in April reported a worse-than-estimated profit for the first quarter as slow demand depressed prices. Second-quarter earnings are due on Thursday next week.
Separately, the South Korean company’s proposed US$12 billion project in the eastern state of Orissa has also been delayed by eight years because farmers had refused to vacate government-owned land they occupied for generations.
WAITING GAME
POSCO is waiting to hear from the state government, which has said it has completed land acquisition for the mill, POSCO’s India unit spokesman I.G. Lee said in a telephone interview from New Delhi yesterday.
In March, a bomb explosion in a village in Orissa state killed three people involved in protests against the project. The village has been the epicenter of protests since POSCO signed a pact with the state government in 2005 for the plant.
Local residents say the planned steel mill — touted as India’s biggest single foreign direct investment — would interfere with their traditional forest-based livelihoods and uproot them from their homes.
TEST CASE
The Posco deal in Orissa state has been watched as a test case by foreign investors eager to enter India’s fast-growing economy, but wary of the potential for environmental and other concerns to derail their plans.
The company’s shares fell 1 percent to 310,000 won in Seoul trading at 2:29pm local time, compared with a 0.6 percent drop in the local benchmark KOSPI index. The stock has lost 11 percent this year, underperforming a 6.7 percent decline in the KOSPI.
Shares of contract chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) came under pressure yesterday after a report that Apple Inc is looking to shift some orders from the Taiwanese company to Intel Corp. TSMC shares fell NT$55, or 2.4 percent, to close at NT$2,235 on the local main board, Taiwan Stock Exchange data showed. Despite the losses, TSMC is expected to continue to benefit from sound fundamentals, as it maintains a lead over its peers in high-end process development, analysts said. “The selling was a knee-jerk reaction to an Intel-Apple report over the weekend,” Mega International Investment Services Corp (兆豐國際投顧) analyst Alex Huang
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is expected to remain Apple Inc’s primary chip manufacturing partner despite reports that Apple could shift some orders to Intel Corp, industry experts said yesterday. The comments came after The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Apple and Intel had reached a preliminary agreement following more than a year of negotiations for Intel to manufacture some chips for Apple devices. Taiwan Institute of Economic Research (台灣經濟研究院) economist Arisa Liu (劉佩真) said TSMC’s advanced packaging technologies, including integrated fan-out and chip-on-wafer-on-substrate, remain critical to the performance of Apple’s A-series and M-series chips. She said Intel and Samsung
POWER BUILDUP: Powered by Nvidia’s B200 Blackwell chips, the data center would support MediaTek’s computing power demand and business growth, the company said Smartphone chip designer MediaTek Inc (聯發科) yesterday launched a new artificial intelligence (AI) data center with a maximum capacity of 45 megawatts to meet its rising demand for computing power required to develop new advanced chips for AI applications. The company has completed the first-phase computing power buildup at the data center in Miaoli County’s Tongluo Township (銅鑼), providing 15 megawatts of capacity to support its research and development (R&D) capabilities, despite an industrywide shortage of key components, MediaTek said. Supply constraints have plagued a wide range of key components, including memory chips, solid-state drives, power supply units and central
TRANSITION: With the closure, the company would reorganize its Taiwanese unit to a sales and service-focused model, Bridgestone said Bridgestone Corp yesterday announced it would cease manufacturing operations at its tire plant in Hsinchu County’s Hukou Township (湖口), affecting more than 500 workers. Bridgestone Taiwan Co (台灣普利司通) said in a statement that the decision was based on the Tokyo-based tire maker’s adjustments to its global operational strategy and long-term market development considerations. The Taiwanese unit would be reorganized as part of the closure, effective yesterday, and all related production activities would be concluded, the statement said. Under the plan, Bridgestone would continue to deepen its presence in the Taiwanese market, while transitioning to a sales and service-focused business model, it added. The Hsinchu
RSS