Alstom SA, the maker of France’s iconic Train a Grande Vitesse high-speed trains, and German industrial leader Siemens AG on Friday signed an agreement on creating a global leader in the rail industry.
The business combination agreement (BCA) sets the terms of combining Alstom with Siemens’ mobility business, including its rail traction drive business, after the two firms unveiled their plans last year.
NEW LEADER
“With the signing of the BCA, we have reached an important milestone on the way to building a new leader capable of tackling the challenges of tomorrow’s mobility,” Alstom chief executive Henri Poupart-Lafarge, who is to be the CEO of the new company, said in a statement.
Siemens board member Roland Busch is to serve as chairman of the board of directors of the combined entity, which is to be based in France.
Siemens is to control 50 percent of Alstom immediately, but will be blocked from taking a bigger than 50.5-percent stake in the next four years.
Alstom’s trade unions objected to the merger, fearing job cuts and closures.
TRANSFORMATION
An Alstom-Siemens merger has been mooted for years and completes the transformation of the French group, which in 2015 sold its energy business to US rival General Electric Co for 9.5 billion euros (US$11.7 billion).
The merger would create the world’s top firm for rail signalization and the No. 2 for building train carriages, which should help the firms face rising Chinese competition. It is expected to be completed by the end of the year.
Alstom employs 32,800 people worldwide, while Siemens Mobility has 28,800 staff.
ISSUES: Gogoro has been struggling with ballooning losses and was recently embroiled in alleged subsidy fraud, using Chinese-made components instead of locally made parts Gogoro Inc (睿能創意), the nation’s biggest electric scooter maker, yesterday said that its chairman and CEO Horace Luke (陸學森) has resigned amid chronic losses and probes into the company’s alleged involvement in subsidy fraud. The board of directors nominated Reuntex Group (潤泰集團) general counsel Tamon Tseng (曾夢達) as the company’s new chairman, Gogoro said in a statement. Ruentex is Gogoro’s biggest stakeholder. Gogoro Taiwan general manager Henry Chiang (姜家煒) is to serve as acting CEO during the interim period, the statement said. Luke’s departure came as a bombshell yesterday. As a company founder, he has played a key role in pushing for the
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
CROSS-STRAIT TENSIONS: The US company could switch orders from TSMC to alternative suppliers, but that would lower chip quality, CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), whose products have become the hottest commodity in the technology world, on Wednesday said that the scramble for a limited amount of supply has frustrated some customers and raised tensions. “The demand on it is so great, and everyone wants to be first and everyone wants to be most,” he told the audience at a Goldman Sachs Group Inc technology conference in San Francisco. “We probably have more emotional customers today. Deservedly so. It’s tense. We’re trying to do the best we can.” Huang’s company is experiencing strong demand for its latest generation of chips, called
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
RSS