Kirin Holdings Co has agreed to buy Australian vitamins maker Blackmores Ltd for A$1.88 billion (US$1.24 billion) in cash, as part of a push by the Japanese brewer into health products to reduce its reliance on beer.
Kirin won unanimous approval from the Australian company’s board with an offer of A$95 per share and Blackmores is to pay shareholders an A$3.34 special dividend.
Altogether, the bid adds up to a 24 percent premium to Blackmores’ last closing price, the companies said in a statement yesterday.
The shares surged 22 percent in early Sydney trading.
Kirin is expanding into healthcare as it sees increasing regulation of the alcoholic beverage industry. Kirin’s diversification away from beer stands in contrast to bigger rivals, such as Anheuser-Busch InBev SA and Asahi Group Holdings Ltd, which are doubling down on alcohol and investing in higher-end businesses like craft beers.
“The acquisition of Blackmores will transform the scale” of Kirin’s health business, the brewer said in a statement.
It “will expand access to Kirin’s ingredients to hundreds of millions of consumers in the Asia-Pacific region through Blackmores’ distribution network,” it said.
Taiwan’s foreign exchange reserves fell below the US$600 billion mark at the end of last month, with the central bank reporting a total of US$596.89 billion — a decline of US$8.6 billion from February — ending a three-month streak of increases. The central bank attributed the drop to a combination of factors such as outflows by foreign institutional investors, currency fluctuations and its own market interventions. “The large-scale outflows disrupted the balance of supply and demand in the foreign exchange market, prompting the central bank to intervene repeatedly by selling US dollars to stabilize the local currency,” Department of Foreign
ENERGY ISSUES: The TSIA urged the government to increase natural gas and helium reserves to reduce the impact of the Middle East war on semiconductor supply stability Chip testing and packaging service provider ASE Technology Holding Co (日月光投控) yesterday said it planned to invest more than NT$100 billion (US$3.15 billion) in building a new advanced chip testing facility in Kaohsiung to keep up with customer demand driven by the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. That would be included in the company’s capital expenditure budget next year, ASE said. There is also room to raise this year’s capital spending budget from a record-high US$7 billion estimated three months ago, it added. ASE would have six factories under construction this year, another record-breaking number, ASE chief operating officer Tien Wu
Intel Corp is joining Elon Musk’s long-shot effort to develop semiconductors for Tesla Inc, Space Exploration Technologies Corp and xAI, marking a surprising twist in the chipmaker’s comeback bid. Intel would help the Terafab project “refactor” the technology in a chip factory, the company said on Tuesday in a post on X, Musk’s social media platform. That is a stage in the development process that typically helps make chips more powerful or reliable. The chipmaker’s shares jumped 4.2 percent to US$52.91 in New York trading on Tuesday. The Terafab project is a grand plan by Musk to eventually manufacture his own chips for
For weeks now, the global tech industry has been waiting for a major artificial intelligence (AI) launch from DeepSeek (深度求索), seen as a benchmark for China’s progress in the fast-moving field. More than a year has passed since the start-up put Chinese AI on the map in early last year with a low-cost chatbot that performed at a similar level to US rivals. However, despite reports and rumors about its imminent release, DeepSeek’s next-generation “V4” model is nowhere in sight. Speculation is also swirling over the geopolitical implications of which computer chips were chosen to train and power the new
RSS