More than 5,000 Chinese workers at a China-US tire manufacturer have gone on strike against the US parent company’s US$2.5 billion takeover by an Indian firm, Chinese state media reported.
Cooper Tire & Rubber Co announced last month that it would be taken over by Apollo Tyres Ltd of India, which would make the combined group the seventh-largest such firm in the world.
However, thousands of staff at Cooper Chengshan Tire Co (固鉑成山輪胎), a joint venture in China’s Shandong Province, have walked out in protest, Xinhua news agency said late on Tuesday.
It quoted union leaders as saying they wanted to block the huge transaction, which saw Cooper shares leap on the New York Stock Exchange.
Workers are concerned tha the Indian company will be unable to repay the debt it would take on in the highly leveraged acquisition and their interests could be damaged, Xinhua said.
Employees have become increasingly vocal in China recently, with numerous labor disputes occurring in the past years, but the cause of the Cooper Chengshan strike is unusual as protests are normally focused on pay and working conditions.
It is the latest incident to hit a foreign joint venture after Chinese workers held a US factory executive hostage for nearly a week in late June over a plan by his US-based medical supply company to lay off 30 workers.
Cooper holds 65 percent of the joint venture and China’s Chengshan Group has 35 percent.
“I cannot imagine what the company will become after it is taken over by the Indian company,” Cooper Chengshan worker Ma Rufu (馬汝福) said, according to Xinhua.
Ma added that Apollo’s annual profits were not enough to repay the interest on the debt.
“How can our welfare be sustained [after the acquisition]?” he said.
Zhang Huaqian, another Cooper employee, said: “We shall fight to the end with anyone who allows us to lose our jobs.”
Xinhua quoted Yue Chunxue (岳春學), the director of the Cooper Chengshan labor union, as saying it had been given no information about the deal.
“This is in contempt of Chinese law and disrespect[s] Chinese workers,” Yue said, adding that the union wants the deal scrapped.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) last week recorded an increase in the number of shareholders to the highest in almost eight months, despite its share price falling 3.38 percent from the previous week, Taiwan Stock Exchange data released on Saturday showed. As of Friday, TSMC had 1.88 million shareholders, the most since the week of April 25 and an increase of 31,870 from the previous week, the data showed. The number of shareholders jumped despite a drop of NT$50 (US$1.59), or 3.38 percent, in TSMC’s share price from a week earlier to NT$1,430, as investors took profits from their earlier gains
In a high-security Shenzhen laboratory, Chinese scientists have built what Washington has spent years trying to prevent: a prototype of a machine capable of producing the cutting-edge semiconductor chips that power artificial intelligence (AI), smartphones and weapons central to Western military dominance, Reuters has learned. Completed early this year and undergoing testing, the prototype fills nearly an entire factory floor. It was built by a team of former engineers from Dutch semiconductor giant ASML who reverse-engineered the company’s extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machines, according to two people with knowledge of the project. EUV machines sit at the heart of a technological Cold
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
CHINA RIVAL: The chips are positioned to compete with Nvidia’s Hopper and Blackwell products and would enable clusters connecting more than 100,000 chips Moore Threads Technology Co (摩爾線程) introduced a new generation of chips aimed at reducing artificial intelligence (AI) developers’ dependence on Nvidia Corp’s hardware, just weeks after pulling off one of the most successful Chinese initial public offerings (IPOs) in years. “These products will significantly enhance world-class computing speed and capabilities that all developers aspire to,” Moore Threads CEO Zhang Jianzhong (張建中), a former Nvidia executive, said on Saturday at a company event in Beijing. “We hope they can meet the needs of more developers in China so that you no longer need to wait for advanced foreign products.” Chinese chipmakers are in
RSS