MACHINERY
Komatsu to buy Joy Global
Komatsu Ltd, the world’s second-biggest construction equipment maker, agreed to buy Joy Global Inc for US$2.89 billion, bolstering the Japanese firm’s underground mining business amid a fight for market share with industry leader Caterpillar Inc. Tokyo-based Komatsu will pay US$28.30 per share in cash for the Milwaukee-based company, using funds on hand and loans, the company said yesterday. The deal is expected to close in the middle of next year after approvals by regulators and shareholders, it said.
BEVERAGES
AB InBev secures approval
Anheuser-Busch InBev NV (AB InBev), the world’s largest beer maker, on Wednesday announced that it had reached an agreement with the US Department of Justice that clears the way for US approval of its acquisition of SABMiller PLC. AB InBev, the maker of Budweiser and Bud Light, is to sell SABMiller’s entire US business to Molson Coors as previously announced as part of the agreement. The merger with the maker of Miller Genuine Draft, valued at about US$107 billion, would have about 31 percent of the global beer market, according to Beer Business Daily.
RETAIL
UK sales fall after Brexit
UK retail sales last month had their biggest drop in six months, adding to signs that the vote to leave the EU is starting to bite. The volume of goods sold in stores and online dropped 0.9 percent, figures from the Office for National Statistics showed yesterday. Sales excluding car fuel also fell a larger-than-expected 0.9 percent. The statistics office carried out its monthly survey between May 29 and July 2, meaning some responses were received in the week following the June 23 Brexit referendum.
CONSUMER GOODS
Unilever sales up 2 percent
Anglo-Dutch consumer products giant Unilever Co said its net profit in the first half of the year rose 2 percent to 2.7 billion euros (US$3 billion), despite sales declining 2.6 percent to 26.3 billion euros due to exchange rate fluctuations. Unilever yesterday said that its underlying sales growth, which strips out the effect of factors such as currency changes, was a healthy 4.7 percent, despite tough economic conditions around the world.
AIRLINES
Lufthansa cuts profit target
Terror attacks in Europe and “political and economic uncertainty” have prompted Deutsche Lufthansa AG to cut its full-year profit target, the company said on Wednesday. In the first half of the year Lufthansa reported earnings of 529 million euros, a jump of 13 percent compared with the previous year. Despite those improved figures, Lufthansa “regards a complete recovery as not likely anymore,” it said. The airline predicted unit revenues would fall by 8 to 9 percent in the second half of the year, from 15 billion euros in the first half.
TIMEPIECES
Swatch profit declines
Swatch Group AG, the maker of Omega and Tissot timepieces, reported its lowest first-half profit in seven years, as demand cratered in Hong Kong, France and Switzerland. First-half operating profit declined 54 percent to 353 million Swiss francs (US$359 million), the Biel, Switzerland-based company said in a statement yesterday. The company last week said that earnings at that level probably fell by 50 to 60 percent, sending its shares plummeting.
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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