BYD Co (比亞迪), the Chinese automaker backed by Warren Buffett, has come under fire for pollution at one of its factories that residents say has caused nosebleeds in hundreds of children.
Officials in Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province, sent a team to BYD’s factory to investigate gas emissions after receiving complaints from neighbors, the local government said in a statement on its Sina Weibo account on Sunday.
The team includes third-party testing institutions and experts who are to try to get to the bottom of the issue that has seen scores of parents in Changsha protest.
Photo: Reuters
One report said that more than 600 children living near the production plant in the city’s Yuhua District have experienced repeated nosebleeds since last month.
Shenzhen-based BYD said over the weekend that its emissions comply with regulations, adding that it has taken steps to reduce the odor caused by the plant, which has been in operation since 2012.
BYD also said that it has filed police reports alleging the complaints about nosebleeds are groundless and malicious.
The company’s China-traded shares yesterday dropped, falling as much as 4.6 percent, their biggest intraday decline in almost two weeks. Markets in Hong Kong, where BYD is also listed, are closed for a public holiday.
The stock, along with battery maker Contemporary Amperex Technology Co (新能源科技), was among the biggest drags on the CSI 300 index.
BYD is one of China’s most successful vehicle companies in terms of sales, producing both conventional gas automobiles as well as electric vehicles, for which it also makes batteries.
UNCONVINCING: The US Congress questioned whether the company’s Chinese owners pose a national security risk and how the app might influence young users TikTok chief executive officer Shou Chew (周受資), confronted with an unforgiving, distrustful US Congress, tried to give answers in his testimony on Thursday that avoided offending either the US government or China. However, his evasiveness left Congress unsatisfied, with representatives hungrier than ever to punish TikTok for ties to its parent company ByteDance Ltd (字節跳動), based in Beijing. He did not bring his company any closer to a resolution. Politically, TikTok is in a tougher spot. Its executives had been discussing divesting from ByteDance to resolve US national security concerns, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. However, China this week said
The Investment Commission yesterday approved a Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) application to invest an additional US$3.5 billion in its Arizona subsidiary to manufactured advanced chips. The world’s largest contract chipmaker’s board of directors last month approved the funding project after TSMC started moving manufacturing equipment into the fab in December last year in preparation for the production of 4-nanometer chips next year. TSMC said it has also commenced the second phase of facility construction in Arizona. The second fab is to produce semiconductors using 3-nanometer technology in 2026. Altogether, TSMC plans to spend US$40 billion on the Arizona fabs, doubling its
Microsoft Corp has threatened to cut off access to its Internet search data, which it licenses to rival search engines, if they do not stop using it as the basis for their own artificial intelligence (AI) chat products, people familiar with the dispute have said. The software maker licenses the data in its Bing search index — a map of the Internet that can be quickly scanned in real time — to other companies that offer Web search, such as Apollo Global Management Inc’s Yahoo and DuckDuckGo. Last month, Microsoft integrated a cousin of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s AI-powered chat technology, into Bing. Rivals
Sanofi SA’s drug Dupixent succeeded in a late-stage trial for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), raising the odds that the blockbuster would be the first biologic medicine cleared to treat the lung disorder. Dupixent, which is already prescribed for asthma and some skin conditions, showed a 30 percent reduction in the rate at which patients’ COPD worsened compared with those who received a placebo during the stage-three Boreas trial, the company said in a statement yesterday. The positive data could herald a new era of cutting-edge treatments for the life-threatening respiratory affliction and provide another major boost in demand for the French