MINING
BHP profit rises 77%
Mining giant BHP Group yesterday released record half-year earnings, with profit up 77 percent. The company also outpaced dividend estimates, delivering a record interim dividend to shareholders of US$1.50 for the third year running. BHP’s Western Australia iron ore business drove the miner’s US$9.4 billion attributable profit, helped along by strong prices for coking coal and copper. “We mitigated the impacts of COVID-19 and significant adverse weather events to turn in a solid operational performance, particularly from our flagship Western Australian iron ore business,” company chief executive officer Mike Henry said yesterday.
ENERGY
Engie SA returns to profit
French utility group Engie SA returned to profit last year, buoyed by soaring energy prices, company results showed yesterday. The firm posted net profit of 3.7 billion euros (US$4.2 billion) after losses of 1.5 billion euros in 2020. The company expects to deliver growth in the 2023-2024 period. This would be “mainly driven” by its investment in sources of renewable energy, as well as higher results from its Energy Solutions unit, which provides support to cities and industries transitioning to carbon neutrality.
TRANSPORTATION
Volocopter eyes Singapore
Volocopter GmbH plans to start flying electric air taxis in Singapore within two years, and is in talks to offer flights to nearby destinations in Indonesia and Malaysia. The German firm plans to operate a fleet of 10 to 20 air taxis in the popular tourist destinations of Marina Bay and Sentosa, Volocopter chief commercial officer Christian Bauer said in an interview yesterday. As part of its Asian expansion, Volocopter plans to set up maintenance operations in Singapore.
HOUSING
Singapore sales rise
Singapore home sales rose slightly last month, signaling that demand is holding up after property cooling measures were introduced in December last year. Purchases of new private apartments climbed to 673 units last month, Urban Redevelopment Authority figures showed yesterday. That is 3.5 percent higher than the 650 units sold in the previous month.
FINLAND
Economy expands 0.6%
The economy posted a sixth consecutive quarter of growth at the end of last year, putting the Nordic nation on a firmer path to a post-COVID-19 pandemic recovery, a flash estimate showed. Output expanded a seasonally adjusted 0.6 percent last quarter from the previous three-month period, Statistics Finland said yesterday, citing indicator data. The expansion was 3.7 percent from a year earlier, adjusted for the number of working days. In the near term, higher energy prices and supply-chain bottlenecks are weighing on growth, still forecast at about 3 percent this year, Ministry of Finance data showed.
SEMICONDUCTORS
Intel deal expected
Intel Corp is close to a deal to acquire Tower Semiconductor Ltd for about US$5 billion as part of its push into the outsourced chip-manufacturing business, a person familiar with negotiations said. Tower competes in a market dominated by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電), but is much smaller. Its sales are about US$1.3 billion annually. Tower makes power management chips, image sensors and other semiconductors.
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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