INTERNET
Dropbox ups the ante for IPO
Cloud data service Dropbox Inc set a share price of US$21 for its NASDAQ market debut (IPO), a higher bar than expected, which values the start-up at about US$8 billion. Shares in the San Francisco-based technology firm were to begin trading yesterday, with a goal of raising about US$750 million. The company’s shares use the symbol “DBX.” Dropbox also plans a US$100 million stock sale to the venture capital arm of Salesforce.com Inc, according to an earlier filing.
OIL AND GAS
PetroChina triples profit
China’s biggest oil producer, PetroChina Co (中國石油天然氣), tripled its profit last year, rebounding on firmer crude prices, the company said. Net profit last year rose to 22.8 billion yuan (US$3.61 billion), compared with just 7.86 billion yuan (US$1.1 billion) in 2016, the company said on Thursday. PetroChina also said it is to pay a fresh dividend to shareholders of more than 11 billion yuan. Added to a more than 12 billion yuan dividend for the first half announced in August last year, total dividends for last year were about equal to PetroChina’s full-year annual profit.
TECHNOLOGY
Tencent slumps after sell-off
Tencent Holdings Ltd (騰訊) shares slumped in Hong Kong after Naspers Ltd, its biggest investor, raised HK$76.9 billion (US$9.8 billion) selling stock at a discount. Shares fell as much as 7.8 percent to HK$405 in trading early yesterday. Naspers, a South African media and investment company, sold 190 million shares, it said in a filing with the exchange yesterday. That suggests a price of HK$405 per share, Bloomberg calculations showed. At the end of the session, Tencent shares fell more than 4 percent.
APPAREL
Nike’s quarerly sales jump
Nike Inc shares on Thursday surged in after-hours trading after it reported a jump in quarterly sales and signaled improving market conditions in North America. The US sports apparel and sneaker giant reported a loss of US$921 million in the quarter ending on Feb. 28, due to US$2 billion in one-off expenses connected to US tax reform. Nike reported US$1.4 billion in profits in the same period one year earlier. In contrast, revenues rose seven percent to US$9.0 billion, thanks to big gains in sales in China, Europe, the Middle East and Africa that offset a decline in North America.
FINANCE
CommBank to settle case
Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CommBank) plans to enter mediation with the country’s financial intelligence agency over a major money laundering civil case that could be hugely costly for the lender. The nation’s biggest bank late on Thursday said that at the request of both parties, orders were made in the Federal Court “for the matter to be referred to mediation,” which has to take place before May 25.
JAPAN
Core inflation up to 1%
Japan’s consumer prices edged up 1.0 percent last month, but inflation was still far below a longstanding target, government data showed yesterday. The data showed that the core inflation rate, which excludes volatile fresh food prices, stood at 1.0 percent, up from 0.9 percent over the previous three months. With fresh food and energy stripped out, prices rose by even less — just 0.5 percent last month, the data showed.
Intel Corp chief executive officer Lip-Bu Tan (陳立武) is expected to meet with Taiwanese suppliers next month in conjunction with the opening of the Computex Taipei trade show, supply chain sources said on Monday. The visit, the first for Tan to Taiwan since assuming his new post last month, would be aimed at enhancing Intel’s ties with suppliers in Taiwan as he attempts to help turn around the struggling US chipmaker, the sources said. Tan is to hold a banquet to celebrate Intel’s 40-year presence in Taiwan before Computex opens on May 20 and invite dozens of Taiwanese suppliers to exchange views
Application-specific integrated circuit designer Faraday Technology Corp (智原) yesterday said that although revenue this quarter would decline 30 percent from last quarter, it retained its full-year forecast of revenue growth of 100 percent. The company attributed the quarterly drop to a slowdown in customers’ production of chips using Faraday’s advanced packaging technology. The company is still confident about its revenue growth this year, given its strong “design-win” — or the projects it won to help customers design their chips, Faraday president Steve Wang (王國雍) told an online earnings conference. “The design-win this year is better than we expected. We believe we will win
Power supply and electronic components maker Delta Electronics Inc (台達電) yesterday said it plans to ship its new 1 megawatt charging systems for electric trucks and buses in the first half of next year at the earliest. The new charging piles, which deliver up to 1 megawatt of charging power, are designed for heavy-duty electric vehicles, and support a maximum current of 1,500 amperes and output of 1,250 volts, Delta said in a news release. “If everything goes smoothly, we could begin shipping those new charging systems as early as in the first half of next year,” a company official said. The new
SK Hynix Inc warned of increased volatility in the second half of this year despite resilient demand for artificial intelligence (AI) memory chips from big tech providers, reflecting the uncertainty surrounding US tariffs. The company reported a better-than-projected 158 percent jump in March-quarter operating income, propelled in part by stockpiling ahead of US President Donald Trump’s tariffs. SK Hynix stuck with a forecast for a doubling in demand for the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) essential to Nvidia Corp’s AI accelerators, which in turn drive giant data centers built by the likes of Microsoft Corp and Amazon.com Inc. That SK Hynix is maintaining its
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