Panasonic Corp agreed to pay ￥186.6 billion (US$1.5 billion) for US-based maker of refrigeration systems Hussmann to bolster its housing operations and move further away from consumer electronics.
The company plans purchase the parent of Hussmann Corp from private equity fund Clayton, Dubilier and Rice and make it a wholly owned subsidiary, Panasonic yesterday said in a statement in Tokyo. The deal is expected to close in April.
Panasonic president Kazuhiro Tsuga has steered a recovery in the past three years after record losses by moving away from TVs and smartphones to focus on housing, information systems for cars and making batteries with Tesla Motors Inc.
Tsuga has said the Osaka-based company plans ￥200 billion in strategic investments this fiscal year, part of a push to spend ￥1 trillion to reach a goal of ￥10 trillion in revenue by fiscal 2018.
Hussmann makes refrigerators used by supermarkets, including display cases, doors and lighting systems.
After Panasonic posting combined net losses of ￥1.5 trillion in fiscal 2012 and 2013, the company is expecting its third straight annual profit.
Operating income is likely to be ￥430 billion in the year to March next year, the highest profit since 2008, the company said in October.
Panasonic has said it expects sales of ￥2.5 trillion in its business that includes avionics and security systems, about ￥2.1 trillion for automotive components, ￥2 trillion yen for housing and ￥2.3 trillion for household appliances in the year ending March 2018.
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.
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