Apple Inc, expanding its environmental efforts, has announced a US$300 million fund to promote clean energy in China.
The iPhone maker said it is creating the fund to boost the use of renewable energy in its supply chain, which is primarily spread across China.
The company and 10 of its key suppliers and manufacturing partners, including Corning Inc, Pegatron Corp (和碩), Wistron Corp (緯創) and Luxshare Precision Industry Co (立訊), are to contribute to the fund over the next four years, the Cupertino, California-based company said in a statement on Thursday.
The fund is to be managed by DWS Group GmbH & Co, the asset-management arm of Deutsche Bank AG.
DWS is also to invest in the fund.
The money is to go toward developing projects totaling a gigawatt of renewable energy in China, Apple said.
China’s four-decade transition into an industrial behemoth has brought the side effects of severe air, soil and water pollution, and the government is pushing various initiatives to clean things up, including incentives for renewable energy and the electric-car industry.
Most of Apple’s products worldwide are assembled in vast production networks in China that employ hundreds of thousands of workers and the company has taken various steps to reduce the resulting carbon emissions.
In 2015, Apple committed to using clean energy in its supply chain and has said it hopes to create 4 gigawatts of renewable energy globally by 2020, an increase from a goal of 3 gigawatts announced earlier this year.
Currently, Apple uses renewable energy across 100 percent of its facilities worldwide.
Earlier this year, the company also helped aluminum suppliers Alcoa Corp and Rio Tinto Aluminum begin the development of a new technology that eliminates greenhouse-gas emissions during production, which is expected to be ready by 2024.
Additional reporting by AFP
The US dollar was trading at NT$29.7 at 10am today on the Taipei Foreign Exchange, as the New Taiwan dollar gained NT$1.364 from the previous close last week. The NT dollar continued to rise today, after surging 3.07 percent on Friday. After opening at NT$30.91, the NT dollar gained more than NT$1 in just 15 minutes, briefly passing the NT$30 mark. Before the US Department of the Treasury's semi-annual currency report came out, expectations that the NT dollar would keep rising were already building. The NT dollar on Friday closed at NT$31.064, up by NT$0.953 — a 3.07 percent single-day gain. Today,
‘SHORT TERM’: The local currency would likely remain strong in the near term, driven by anticipated US trade pressure, capital inflows and expectations of a US Fed rate cut The US dollar is expected to fall below NT$30 in the near term, as traders anticipate increased pressure from Washington for Taiwan to allow the New Taiwan dollar to appreciate, Cathay United Bank (國泰世華銀行) chief economist Lin Chi-chao (林啟超) said. Following a sharp drop in the greenback against the NT dollar on Friday, Lin told the Central News Agency that the local currency is likely to remain strong in the short term, driven in part by market psychology surrounding anticipated US policy pressure. On Friday, the US dollar fell NT$0.953, or 3.07 percent, closing at NT$31.064 — its lowest level since Jan.
Hong Kong authorities ramped up sales of the local dollar as the greenback’s slide threatened the foreign-exchange peg. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) sold a record HK$60.5 billion (US$7.8 billion) of the city’s currency, according to an alert sent on its Bloomberg page yesterday in Asia, after it tested the upper end of its trading band. That added to the HK$56.1 billion of sales versus the greenback since Friday. The rapid intervention signals efforts from the city’s authorities to limit the local currency’s moves within its HK$7.75 to HK$7.85 per US dollar trading band. Heavy sales of the local dollar by
The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday met with some of the nation’s largest insurance companies as a skyrocketing New Taiwan dollar piles pressure on their hundreds of billions of dollars in US bond investments. The commission has asked some life insurance firms, among the biggest Asian holders of US debt, to discuss how the rapidly strengthening NT dollar has impacted their operations, people familiar with the matter said. The meeting took place as the NT dollar jumped as much as 5 percent yesterday, its biggest intraday gain in more than three decades. The local currency surged as exporters rushed to
RSS