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.
China has claimed a breakthrough in developing homegrown chipmaking equipment, an important step in overcoming US sanctions designed to thwart Beijing’s semiconductor goals. State-linked organizations are advised to use a new laser-based immersion lithography machine with a resolution of 65 nanometers or better, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said in an announcement this month. Although the note does not specify the supplier, the spec marks a significant step up from the previous most advanced indigenous equipment — developed by Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment Group Co (SMEE, 上海微電子) — which stood at about 90 nanometers. MIIT’s claimed advances last
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has appointed Rose Castanares, executive vice president of TSMC Arizona, as president of the subsidiary, which is responsible for carrying out massive investments by the Taiwanese tech giant in the US state, the company said in a statement yesterday. Castanares will succeed Brian Harrison as president of the Arizona subsidiary on Oct. 1 after the incumbent president steps down from the position with a transfer to the Arizona CEO office to serve as an advisor to TSMC Arizona’s chairman, the statement said. According to TSMC, Harrison is scheduled to retire on Dec. 31. Castanares joined TSMC in
EUROPE ON HOLD: Among a flurry of announcements, Intel said it would postpone new factories in Germany and Poland, but remains committed to its US expansion Intel Corp chief executive officer Pat Gelsinger has landed Amazon.com Inc’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a customer for the company’s manufacturing business, potentially bringing work to new plants under construction in the US and boosting his efforts to turn around the embattled chipmaker. Intel and AWS are to coinvest in a custom semiconductor for artificial intelligence computing — what is known as a fabric chip — in a “multiyear, multibillion-dollar framework,” Intel said in a statement on Monday. The work would rely on Intel’s 18A process, an advanced chipmaking technology. Intel shares rose more than 8 percent in late trading after the
FACTORY SHIFT: While Taiwan produces most of the world’s AI servers, firms are under pressure to move manufacturing amid geopolitical tensions Lenovo Group Ltd (聯想) started building artificial intelligence (AI) servers in India’s south, the latest boon for the rapidly growing country’s push to become a high-tech powerhouse. The company yesterday said it has started making the large, powerful computers in Pondicherry, southeastern India, moving beyond products such as laptops and smartphones. The Chinese company would also build out its facilities in the Bangalore region, including a research lab with a focus on AI. Lenovo’s plans mark another win for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who tries to attract more technology investment into the country. While India’s tense relationship with China has suffered setbacks
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