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.
This week’s undoing of the TerraUSD algorithmic stablecoin and its sister token, Luna, has ramifications for all of crypto. First, there is the immediate impact: The rapid collapse of a once-popular pair of cryptocurrencies sent a ripple effect across the industry, contributing to plummeting coin prices that wiped hundreds of billions of market value from the digital-asset market and stoked worries over the potential fragility of digital-asset ventures. Then there are the knock-on effects. In addition to delivering punishing losses to individual users and investment firms, the spectacular failure of a market darling like Terra threatens to have a cooling effect
China’s biggest chipmaker has cut its outlook for the second quarter, joining a growing list of manufacturers warning about the fallout from lockdowns aimed at containing the country’s worst COVID-19 outbreak in two years. Semiconductor Manufacturing International Co (SMIC, 中芯) estimates a month-long lockdown in Shanghai could spur component shortages and logistics tangles, and erase about 5 percent of its output in the second quarter. “We are trying our best to mitigate the impact on product delivery,” SMIC Chairman Gao Yonggang (高永崗) told analysts on a call yesterday morning. “We are still assessing the actual impact as many suppliers restart their
DISRUPTIONS: The war in Ukraine, China’s lockdown measures, rising interest rates and inflation have thrown a wrench into business plans made years in advance Samsung Electronics Co is talking with foundry clients about charging as much as 20 percent more for making semiconductors this year, joining an industry-wide push to hike prices to cover rising costs of materials and logistics. Contract-based chip prices are likely to rise around 15 percent to 20 percent, depending upon the level of sophistication, people familiar with the matter said. Chips produced on legacy nodes would face bigger price hikes, while new pricing would be applied from the second half of this year, they said, adding that Samsung has finished negotiating with some clients and is in discussions with others. Samsung’s decision
material SHORTAGE: Even as workers are about to return, Quanta lacks operating supplies, while Pegatron reported its lowest revenues in 11 quarters, the companies said Taiwan’s major Apple Inc supplier cut its outlook for the second quarter, joining a growing list of manufacturers warning about the fallout from lockdowns aimed at containing China’s worst COVID-19 outbreak in two years. Quanta Computer Inc (廣達電腦), which assembles MacBooks, expects a 20 percent quarterly fall in notebook shipments and a squeeze on margins this quarter due to the lockdown, a company representative said on Friday during an earnings call. The impact from supply chain disruptions could last until the end of the year, she said. The company’s Shanghai factory has been operating under tight restrictions since the middle of last month,
RSS