BANKING
HDFC plans to raise funds
HDFC Bank Ltd plans to raise as much as 240 billion rupees (US$3.75 billion) through a share sale, as India’s most richly valued lender seeks to boost its risk buffers and maintain its rapid pace of loan growth. The board of the Mumbai-based bank approved the fundraising yesterday, an exchange filing showed. About 85 billion rupees of the capital is to come from the bank’s parent company, Housing Development Finance Corp, the filing showed. Under CEO Aditya Puri, HDFC Bank has maintained high loan growth by focusing on consumer lending to the country’s growing middle class. HDFC Bank also has a below-average bad loan ratio due to limiting its exposure to heavily-indebted Indian corporations.
PAPERMAKERS
‘Panda poo’ paper to launch
When life gave one Chinese company giant panda poop, it decided to make paper — and profits. Qianwei Fengsheng Paper Co (犍為鳳生紙業) in China’s southwest Sichuan Province has teamed up with the China Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda to recycle the animal’s feces and food debris into toilet paper, napkins and other household products, state media reported yesterday. The goods, soon to be released on the Chinese market, are to be marketed as part of a “panda poo” product line decorated with a picture of the bamboo-eating, black-and-white bear.
ENERGY
Enea inaugurates generator
Polish state-controlled energy company Enea SA on Tuesday inaugurated Europe’s largest coal-fired power unit, at a time when other nations want to shift away from greenhouse gas-emitting fossil fuels. Enea opened a 1,075 megawatt (MW) unit built by Japan’s Mitsubishi Hitachi Power Systems at its Kozienice plant to join a dozen other units in the 250MW to 300MW range at the site. “The B11 section is the largest and most modern in Europe,” Enea head of production Krzysztof Figat said during a ceremony carried live over the Internet to mark the completion of the 1.5 billion euro (US$1.8 billion) project. Total capacity at the plant, which uses about 3 million tonnes of coal annually is now nearly 4,000MW.
TRANSPORTATION
UPS to buy 125 Tesla Semis
United Parcel Service Inc (UPS) on Tuesday announced that it would buy 125 of Tesla Inc’s all-electric Semi trucks, the largest such order since the vehicle was unveiled last month. The order by UPS, one of the biggest operators of commercial trucking fleets, comes on the heels of a PepsiCo Inc announcement two weeks ago that it would buy 100 of the Tesla trucks. The vehicles are designed to run up to 805km on a single charge, helping UPS meet its targets for reducing carbon emissions and gasoline use, the company said.
BANKING
Prosecutors charge banker
Brazilian federal prosecutors on Tuesday charged a Spanish-Swiss banker with laundering US$21.7 million in graft money for Brazilian clients involved in the country’s largest corruption scandal. David Muino Suarez, a relationship manager of Zurich, Switzerland-based BSI Ltd, was arrested at Sao Paulo-Guarulhos International Airport as he got off a flight from Switzerland on Nov. 27 and is being held in Curitiba. The federal prosecutors’ office in Curitiba said in a statement that Suarez knew the money came from bribes paid to Cunha and Pedro Bastos, a former executive at state-run oil company Petroleo Brasileiro SA, from an oil field acquisition in Benin in 2011.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) would not produce its most advanced technologies in the US next year, Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) said yesterday. Kuo made the comment during an appearance at the legislature, hours after the chipmaker announced that it would invest an additional US$100 billion to expand its manufacturing operations in the US. Asked by Taiwan People’s Party Legislator-at-large Chang Chi-kai (張啟楷) if TSMC would allow its most advanced technologies, the yet-to-be-released 2-nanometer and 1.6-nanometer processes, to go to the US in the near term, Kuo denied it. TSMC recently opened its first US factory, which produces 4-nanometer
PROTECTION: The investigation, which takes aim at exporters such as Canada, Germany and Brazil, came days after Trump unveiled tariff hikes on steel and aluminum products US President Donald Trump on Saturday ordered a probe into potential tariffs on lumber imports — a move threatening to stoke trade tensions — while also pushing for a domestic supply boost. Trump signed an executive order instructing US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick to begin an investigation “to determine the effects on the national security of imports of timber, lumber and their derivative products.” The study might result in new tariffs being imposed, which would pile on top of existing levies. The investigation takes aim at exporters like Canada, Germany and Brazil, with White House officials earlier accusing these economies of
Teleperformance SE, the largest call-center operator in the world, is rolling out an artificial intelligence (AI) system that softens English-speaking Indian workers’ accents in real time in a move the company claims would make them more understandable. The technology, called accent translation, coupled with background noise cancelation, is being deployed in call centers in India, where workers provide customer support to some of Teleperformance’s international clients. The company provides outsourced customer support and content moderation to global companies including Apple Inc, ByteDance Ltd’s (字節跳動) TikTok and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd. “When you have an Indian agent on the line, sometimes it’s hard
PROBE CONTINUES: Those accused falsely represented that the chips would not be transferred to a person other than the authorized end users, court papers said Singapore charged three men with fraud in a case local media have linked to the movement of Nvidia’s advanced chips from the city-state to Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) firm DeepSeek (深度求索). The US is investigating if DeepSeek, the Chinese company whose AI model’s performance rocked the tech world in January, has been using US chips that are not allowed to be shipped to China, Reuters reported earlier. The Singapore case is part of a broader police investigation of 22 individuals and companies suspected of false representation, amid concerns that organized AI chip smuggling to China has been tracked out of nations such
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