CHINA
Coal prices hit new highs
The nation’s thermal coal prices yesterday surged to fresh record highs as floods in a key coal-producing province worsened a supply crunch, just as new efforts by Beijing to liberalize power prices boosted demand from power generators. Incessant rain flooded 60 mines in Shanxi Province and four mines with a combined annual output capacity of 4.8 million tonnes remained shut, an official told a news conference on Tuesday. January Zhengzhou thermal coal futures touched a record high of 1,640 yuan (US$254.56) per tonne yesterday, having surged almost threefold so far this year.
FOOD
Sauce prices to rise
Foshan Haitian Flavouring & Food Co (佛山市海天調味食品), China’s largest soy sauce maker by sales, is to raise the retail prices of its products due to higher costs. The company plans to increase the prices of soy sauce, oyster sauce and other products by 3 to 7 percent from Oct. 25, as the costs of raw materials, transport and energy continue to increase, the Shanghai-listed firm said in a stock exchange filing yesterday, adding that the hike is aimed at making its business more “sustainable.”
CRYPTOCURRENY
Binance ending yuan trading
Binance Holdings Ltd (幣安控股) is shutting down peer-to-peer trading of the yuan, closing one of the last workarounds for Chinese users after Beijing’s blanket ban on cryptocurrency transactions. The world’s biggest cryptoexchange is to terminate yuan-dominated trades on its over-the-counter platform on Dec. 31, it said in a statement yesterday. The start-up is also to conduct checks and any users found in mainland China would only be allowed to withdraw funds from the platform.
SHIPPING
Maersk diverting UK ships
Denmark’s A.P. Moller-Maersk A/S on Tuesday said that it had started to divert vessels away from the UK’s biggest container port because of congestion. The UK is suffering runaway energy prices, shortages of goods, fuel delivery issues and a worsening long-term shortage of truck drivers, with post-Brexit immigration controls and the COVID-19 pandemic among the causes cited by experts. Felixstowe, England, has been particularly hard hit, prompting Maersk to divert one ship each week out of the usual two or three that call there.
GREEN BONDS
EU raises 12 billion euros
The EU drew massive demand on Tuesday for its first green bonds, raising 12 billion euros (US$13.9 billion) in the world’s biggest issuance of sustainable debt, the European Commission said. The money raised is to be handed out to member states to be spent on cleaner energy, energy efficiency and other ways to achieve the EU goal of carbon neutrality by 2050.
AUTOMAKERS
Volkswagen mulls job cuts
Volkswagen AG is considering cutting up to 30,000 jobs to cut costs and improve its competitiveness with players such as Tesla Inc, German daily Handelsblatt reported yesterday. It cited a presentation by Volkswagen chief executive Herbert Diess to the supervisory board. “There is no question that we have to address the competitiveness of our plant in Wolfsburg in view of new market entrants,” Volkswagen spokesman Michael Manske said when asked for comment. “The debate is now under way and there are already many good ideas. There are no concrete scenarios.”
Napoleon Osorio is proud of being the first taxi driver to have accepted payment in bitcoin in the first country in the world to make the cryptocurrency legal tender: El Salvador. He credits Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s decision to bank on bitcoin three years ago with changing his life. “Before I was unemployed... And now I have my own business,” said the 39-year-old businessman, who uses an app to charge for rides in bitcoin and now runs his own car rental company. Three years ago the leader of the Central American nation took a huge gamble when he put bitcoin
Demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips should spur growth for the semiconductor industry over the next few years, the CEO of a major supplier to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said, dismissing concerns that investors had misjudged the pace and extent of spending on AI. While the global chip market has grown about 8 percent annually over the past 20 years, AI semiconductors should grow at a much higher rate going forward, Scientech Corp (辛耘) chief executive officer Hsu Ming-chi (許明琪) told Bloomberg Television. “This booming of the AI industry has just begun,” Hsu said. “For the most prominent
PARTNERSHIPS: TSMC said it has been working with multiple memorychip makers for more than two years to provide a full spectrum of solutions to address AI demand Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it has been collaborating with multiple memorychip makers in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) used in artificial intelligence (AI) applications for more than two years, refuting South Korean media report's about an unprecedented partnership with Samsung Electronics Co. As Samsung is competing with TSMC for a bigger foundry business, any cooperation between the two technology heavyweights would catch the eyes of investors and experts in the semiconductor industry. “We have been working with memory partners, including Micron, Samsung Memory and SK Hynix, on HBM solutions for more than two years, aiming to advance 3D integrated circuit
NATURAL PARTNERS: Taiwan and Japan have complementary dominant supply chain positions, are geographically and culturally close, and have similar work ethics Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) and other related companies would add ￥11.2 trillion (US$78.31 billion) to Japan’s chipmaking hot spot Kumamoto Prefecture over the next decade, a local bank’s analysis said. Kyushu Financial Group, a lender based in Kumamoto’s capital, almost doubled its projection for the economic impact that the chip sector would bring to the region compared to its estimate a year earlier, a presentation on Thursday said. The bank said that 171 firms had made new investments since November 2021, up from 90 in an earlier analysis. TSMC’s Kumamoto location was once a sleepy farming area, but has undergone
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