ENERGY
Oil highest since 2014
Oil jumped to the highest in more than six years after a bitter fight between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates plunged OPEC+ into crisis and blocked a supply increase. West Texas Intermediate crude advanced to US$76.98 a barrel, the highest since November 2014, as the breakdown in cartel talks left the market without the extra supplies for next month it had been counting on. Major consumers were paying attention to the cartel’s failure, and the administration of US President Joe Biden urged the group to get its act together. The White House is “closely monitoring the OPEC+ negotiations and their impact on the global economic recovery,” a spokesperson said.
BANKING
Sumitomo to buy stake
Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group Inc is to buy a 74.9 percent stake in Fullerton India Credit Co for about US$2 billion, marking the first entry into the South Asian country’s retail financial business by a Japanese bank. Japan’s second-largest lender would eventually acquire the rest of the Indian credit firm from Fullerton Financial Holdings Pte, it said in a statement Tuesday. With the acquisition, Fullerton India would become a consolidated subsidiary of Sumitomo Mitsui, it said in a separate statement. Fullerton Financial is a unit of Singapore’s state investment fund Temasek Holdings Pte.
SINGAPORE
Suspect’s bail increased
A court has tightened bail conditions for a businessman accused of involvement in a bogus, billion-dollar nickel trading scheme after the prosecution said plans were afoot to help him flee the city-state. Ng Yu Zhi (黃有志), a former managing director of trading companies Envy Global Trading Pte Ltd and an inactive firm, Envy Asset Management Pte Ltd, has been implicated by authorities in a fraudulent scheme that raised at least S$1.5 billion (US$1.12 billion) from investors. Ng’s bail was increased to S$4 million from the previous S$1.5 million, court proceedings showed on Monday.
UNITED KINGDOM
Firm to rent out apartments
John Lewis Partnership PLC, whose department stores have been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, is to rent out thousands of new homes to be built on its plots. The company announced over the weekend that about 10,000 new apartments and houses would be built mostly on sites housing John Lewis department stores, Waitrose supermarkets and distribution centers, beginning in southeast England. The plan would “provide a stable, long term income for the Partnership,” executive director of strategy and commercial development Nina Bhatia said. The group wants to address a national housing shortage in the country, she said.
GERMANY
Industrial orders plummet
Industrial orders fell sharply in May, hit by weak demand from abroad as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to pummel Europe’s top economy, official data showed yesterday. Orders were down by 3.7 percent, the federal statistics office Destatis said, dashing the hopes of analysts polled by Factset who had penciled in a rise of 0.8 percent from April. International orders in May sank particularly sharply, by 2.3 percent from eurozone countries and 9.3 percent from the rest of the world, data showed. The economy shrank in the first quarter of this year as restrictions were imposed to counter a winter surge in COVID-19 cases.
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
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
The US on Friday penalized two Chinese firms that acquired US chipmaking equipment for China’s top chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯國際), including them among 32 entities that were added to the US Department of Commerce’s restricted trade list, a US government posting showed. Twenty-three of the 32 are in China. GMC Semiconductor Technology (Wuxi) Co (吉姆西半導體科技) and Jicun Semiconductor Technology (Shanghai) Co (吉存半導體科技) were placed on the list, formally known as the Entity List, for acquiring equipment for SMIC Northern Integrated Circuit Manufacturing (Beijing) Corp (中芯北方積體電路) and Semiconductor Manufacturing International (Beijing) Corp (中芯北京), the US Federal Register posting said. The
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