AVIATION
GE nears US$30bn deal
General Electric Co (GE) is nearing a US$30 billion-plus deal to combine its aircraft-leasing business with Ireland’s AerCap Holdings NV, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday, citing people familiar with the matter. Details of how the deal would be structured were not immediately known, but an announcement was expected yesterday, assuming the talks do not fall apart, the Journal said. The unit, known as GE Capital Aviation Services, is one of the world’s biggest jet-leasing companies and leases passenger aircraft made by companies including Boeing Co and Airbus SE. It owns, services or has on order about 1,650 aircraft, according to its Web site.
BANKING
DBS docks CEO’s pay
DBS Holdings Group Ltd cut chief executive officer Piyush Gupta’s total compensation for last year by 24 percent after Southeast Asia’s largest lender posted its first annual drop in profit for four years. The bank slashed Gupta’s bonus by 27 percent, resulting in a 24 percent decline in his overall compensation to S$9.2 million (US$6.8 million) for the performance year, down from S$12.1 million a year earlier, DBS said in its annual report yesterday. The reduction reflects the “extremely challenging operating environment,” it said. Excluding his pay, the median decline in total remuneration and variable pay of the bank’s management committee members for 2019 and last year was 12 percent and 17 percent respectively.
BANKING
ECB watching crisis-hit firm
European Central Bank (ECB) supervisors have asked banks for details about outstanding loans to Greensill Capital and its client GFG Alliance, the Financial Times reported, citing four people familiar with the matter. Regulators are asking for the details as they try to determine whether a crisis is contained, the report said. Three more directors of Greensill Capital have resigned as the trade-finance company faces a fight for survival following the flight of its top backers. One person told the newspaper that the move was standard and did not reflect heightened concern. Apollo Global Management’s talks to acquire part of Greensill were at “full speed” over the weekend, and “a lot of technical details still need to be ironed out,” one person told the paper.
BANKING
Central banks lack diversity
Just one of the 31 central bank governors appointed last year was a woman, with Vietnam’s Nguyen Thi Hong joining a global group that now consists of 15 female central bank chiefs, according to the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum’s latest gender balance report. That means not even one in 10 central banks is headed by a woman. “While attention is on new accommodative monetary policy measures and lending operations, central banks should not fall behind on measures to correct the lack of diversity,” the forum said.
CRYPTOCURRENCY
Meitu invests in crypto
China’s Meitu Inc (美圖), taking a page from Tesla Inc, has become the latest corporation to invest in cryptocurrency as digital coin prices head into the stratosphere. Meitu, which makes an app that helps touch up user-profile pictures, on Sunday said it bought 15,000 units of ether for US$22.1 million and 379.1 bitcoins for US$17.9 million on the open market on Friday.
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass
People walk past advertising for a Syensqo chip at the Semicon Taiwan exhibition in Taipei yesterday.
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
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