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.
‘SWASTICAR’: Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s close association with Donald Trump has prompted opponents to brand him a ‘Nazi’ and resulted in a dramatic drop in sales Demonstrators descended on Tesla Inc dealerships across the US, and in Europe and Canada on Saturday to protest company chief Elon Musk, who has amassed extraordinary power as a top adviser to US President Donald Trump. Waving signs with messages such as “Musk is stealing our money” and “Reclaim our country,” the protests largely took place peacefully following fiery episodes of vandalism on Tesla vehicles, dealerships and other facilities in recent weeks that US officials have denounced as terrorism. Hundreds rallied on Saturday outside the Tesla dealership in Manhattan. Some blasted Musk, the world’s richest man, while others demanded the shuttering of his
TIGHT-LIPPED: UMC said it had no merger plans at the moment, after Nikkei Asia reported that the firm and GlobalFoundries were considering restarting merger talks United Microelectronics Corp (UMC, 聯電), the world’s No. 4 contract chipmaker, yesterday launched a new US$5 billion 12-inch chip factory in Singapore as part of its latest effort to diversify its manufacturing footprint amid growing geopolitical risks. The new factory, adjacent to UMC’s existing Singapore fab in the Pasir Res Wafer Fab Park, is scheduled to enter volume production next year, utilizing mature 22-nanometer and 28-nanometer process technologies, UMC said in a statement. The company plans to invest US$5 billion during the first phase of the new fab, which would have an installed capacity of 30,000 12-inch wafers per month, it said. The
Taiwan’s official purchasing managers’ index (PMI) last month rose 0.2 percentage points to 54.2, in a second consecutive month of expansion, thanks to front-loading demand intended to avoid potential US tariff hikes, the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) said yesterday. While short-term demand appeared robust, uncertainties rose due to US President Donald Trump’s unpredictable trade policy, CIER president Lien Hsien-ming (連賢明) told a news conference in Taipei. Taiwan’s economy this year would be characterized by high-level fluctuations and the volatility would be wilder than most expect, Lien said Demand for electronics, particularly semiconductors, continues to benefit from US technology giants’ effort
MULTIFACETED: A task force has analyzed possible scenarios and created responses to assist domestic industries in dealing with US tariffs, the economics minister said The Executive Yuan is tomorrow to announce countermeasures to US President Donald Trump’s planned reciprocal tariffs, although the details of the plan would not be made public until Monday next week, Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) said yesterday. The Cabinet established an economic and trade task force in November last year to deal with US trade and tariff related issues, Kuo told reporters outside the legislature in Taipei. The task force has been analyzing and evaluating all kinds of scenarios to identify suitable responses and determine how best to assist domestic industries in managing the effects of Trump’s tariffs, he
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