OIL
CPC greenlights boss pick
State-run oil refiner CPC Corp, Taiwan’s (CPC, 中油) board of directors yesterday approved a proposal to tap China American Petrochemical Co Ltd (CAPCO, 中美和石油) president Paul Chen (陳綠蔚) to replace CPC president Arthur Kung (孔祥雲). Chen worked in CPC management for 30 years before joining CAPCO in January last year. He said he plans to maintain current policies to improve CPC’s business. Chen said he planned to increase CPC’s oil and natural gas exploration projects as the company needs to grow its oil and natural gas outputs by up to 10 percent a year to reduce reliance on imports and trim losses. As of Aug. 31, CPC’s accumulated losses were NT$71.3 billion (US$2.41 billion), company data showed.
Photo: Fang Pin-chao, Taipei Times
ENERGY
Formosa refinery still limited
Formosa Petrochemical Corp (台塑石化) yesterday said it plans to maintain the operating rate of its Mailiao refinery in Yunlin County at about three-quarters of capacity after it restarted a unit that reduces sulfur from fuels. The nation’s only publicly traded oil refiner restarted a residual desulfurizer at the 540,000 barrel-a-day plant on Sunday and a crude distillation unit on Sept. 10, company spokesman Lin Keh-yen (林克彥) said. The refinery’s crude processing has risen to 400,000 barrels a day this week, from 300,000 barrels last week, Lin said by telephone. Formosa is in “no hurry” to boost throughput as it has sufficient stockpiles of middle distillates, he added.
HORMUZ ISSUE: The US president said he expected crude prices to drop at the end of the war, which he called a ‘minor excursion’ that could continue ‘for a little while’ The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait started reducing oil production, as the near-closure of the crucial Strait of Hormuz ripples through energy markets and affects global supply. Abu Dhabi National Oil Co (ADNOC) is “managing offshore production levels to address storage requirements,” the company said in a statement, without giving details. Kuwait Petroleum Corp said it was lowering production at its oil fields and refineries after “Iranian threats against safe passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz.” The war in the Middle East has all but closed Hormuz, the narrow waterway linking the Persian Gulf to the open seas,
Apple Inc increased iPhone production in India by about 53 percent last year and now makes a quarter of its marquee devices there, reflecting the US company’s efforts to avoid tariffs on China. The company assembled about 55 million iPhones in India last year, up from 36 million a year earlier, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be named because the numbers aren’t public. Apple makes about 220 million to 230 million iPhones a year globally, with India’s share of the total increasing rapidly. Apple has accelerated its expansion in the world’s most populous country in recent years, bolstered
HEADWINDS: The company said it expects its computer business, as well as consumer electronics and communications segments to see revenue declines due to seasonality Pegatron Corp (和碩) yesterday said it aims to grow its artificial intelligence (AI) server revenue more than 10-fold this year from last year, driven by orders from neocloud solutions clients and large cloud service providers. The electronics manufacturing service provider said AI server revenue growth would be driven primarily by the Nvidia Corp GB300 server platform. Server shipments are expected to increase each quarter this year, with the second half likely to outperform the first half, it said. The AI server market is expected to broaden this year as more inference applications emerge, which would drive demand for system-on-chip, application-specific integrated circuits
PROJECTION: TSMC said it expects strong growth this year, with revenue in US dollars projected to grow by about 30 percent, outperforming the industry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday reported consolidated sales last month reached NT$317.66 billion (US$9.98 billion), the highest ever for the month of February, driven by robust demand for chips built using the company’s advanced 3-nanometer (3nm) process. Last month’s figure was up 22.2 percent from a year earlier, but fell 20.8 percent from January, the world’s largest contract chipmaker said in a statement. For the first two months of the year, TSMC posted cumulative sales of NT$718.91 billion, up 29.9 percent from a year earlier. Analysts attributed the growth to sustained global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) products
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