AUTOMAKERS
Chinese deliveries shrink
China’s vehicle deliveries last month continued to shrink, extending the market’s historic decline. Sales of sedans, sport utility vehicles, minivans and multipurpose vehicles fell 3.9 percent from a year earlier to 1.53 million units, the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers (CAAM) said Monday. That is the 13th consecutive monthly decline. Retail sales of cars in China fell last month for the 13th time in the past 14 months, falling 5.3 percent, the China Passenger Car Association (CPCA) said last week. Unlike CPCA figures, CAAM’s numbers detail deliveries made to dealerships, not end consumers.
TRAVEL
Thomas Cook seeks liquidity
Thomas Cook Group PLC is seeking an additional ￡150 million (US$180.93 million) to help tide the debt-laden travel giant through the coming winter, when fewer Europeans go on vacation. The additional capital “will provide further liquidity headroom through the coming 2019-2020 winter cash low period and ensure the business can continue to invest in its strategy,” London-based Cook said in a statement yesterday. The 178-year-old holiday firm saw its market value last month fall as low as ￡69 million, compared with ￡2.2 billion at its most recent peak in May last year.
INDUSTRIAL SERVICES
ABB selects next head
ABB Ltd said that Bjorn Rosengren would take over as chief executive officer of the Swiss engineering giant early next year after he leaves the top job at Swedish mining equipment company Sandvik AB. Rosengren, 60, is a seasoned Swedish industrial executive who has been at Sandvik’s helm since November 2015. He is to join ABB in February and take on the CEO role a month later. He was identified last month as the preferred candidate to take over from Peter Voser, the chairman who has been ABB’s interim CEO since Ulrich Spiesshofer abruptly stepped down in April. Voser would revert to his position as chairman, the company said in a statement.
INTERNET
Meesho gains investors
Meesho, an Indian e-commerce site, said that it raised US$125 million from investors, including Naspers Ltd, Facebook Inc and the former chief executive officer of Vodafone Group PLC. The Bangalore-based company allows people to build connections online and then sell through social networks such as Facebook and WhatsApp. Other investors in the company include Sequoia, Shunwei Capital and Venture Highway. The social commerce start-up said that it has a network of more than 2 million “social sellers” in 700 towns across India, focusing on categories such as apparel, wellness and electronics.
AUTOMAKERS
Tesla car crashes in Moscow
A Tesla Model 3 electric car on Saturday caught fire after crashing into a parked tow truck on a Moscow motorway, with the Tesla driver saying that he failed to see the truck. Asked in a video published on the REN TV Web site if he was using an Autopilot self-driving system, driver Alexei Tretyakov said that he was in a mode with drive assistance in which he was still holding the steering wheel. Tesla Inc has stood by safety claims for its Model 3 in the face of regulatory scrutiny, while the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has issued at least five subpoenas since last year seeking information about crashes involving the company’s vehicles.
CHIP HANG-UP: Surging memorychip prices would deal a blow to smartphone sales this year, potentially hindering one of MediaTek’s biggest sources of revenue MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s biggest smartphone chip designer, yesterday said its new artificial intelligence (AI) chips used in data centers are to account for 20 percent of its total revenue next year, as cloud service providers race to deploy AI infrastructure to meet voracious demand. MediaTek is believed to be developing tensor processing units for Google, which are used in AI applications. While it did not confirm such reports, MediaTek said its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business would be a new growth engine for the company. It again hiked its forecast for the addressable ASIC market to US$70 billion by 2028, compared
Motorists ride past a mural along a street in Varanasi, India, yesterday.
MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s biggest smartphone chip supplier, yesterday said it plans to double investment in data center-related technologies, including advanced packaging and high-speed interconnect technologies, to broaden the new business’ customer and service portfolios. The chip designer is redirecting its resources to data centers, mainly designing application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities for cloud service providers. The data center business is forecast to lead growth in the next three years and become the company’s second-biggest revenue source, replacing chips used in smart devices, MediaTek president Joe Chen (陳冠州) told a media event in Taipei. “Three or four years
AT HIGH CAPACITY: Three-month order visibility on stable customer demand would push factory utilization to between 80 and 85 percent, Vanguard’s president said Foundry service provider Vanguard International Semiconductor Corp (世界先進) yesterday said it is unable to fully satisfy surging demand for chips used in artificial intelligence (AI) servers and data centers, amid an AI infrastructure investment boom that is crowding out production of less advanced chips. Vanguard is facing an “undersupply of chips” made using mature process technologies, due to strong demand for AI products and improving demand from customers in the commercial, industrial and auto sectors, which are digesting excess inventory to a healthier level, company chairman Fang Leuh (方略) told a virtual investors’ conference. However, Vanguard gave a more conservative view on
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