Yageo Corp (國巨), the world’s No. 3 multilayer ceramic capacitor supplier, on Tuesday night said that it had secured support from Shibaura Electronics Co’s management team for a takeover bid, clearing a major hurdle to clinching the NT$22.83 billion (US$759.4 million) deal later this year.
It came after Yageo early this month obtained foreign direct investment clearance for the tender offer from authorities including the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry under the Foreign Exchange and Foreign Trade Act. That is the sole regulatory obstacle for closing the deal.
Yageo has again extended its tender offer by 10 business days to Oct. 3 in accordance with Japanese regulations, allowing shareholders enough time to respond to its bid, the company said.
Photo: Lee Wen-yee, Reuters
Yageo shares yesterday surged 4.35 percent to close at NT$156 in Taipei.
“Yageo would like to express the most sincere and genuine appreciation to Shibaura’s leadership team, board of directors and special committee, who have now given support to Yageo’s tender offer and recommended its shareholders tender to Yageo,” the company said in a statement.
Shibaura in its statement said it agreed with Yageo’s proposal and believed that the combination with Yageo would help enhance Shibaura’s sales in Europe, the US and China, as well as broaden the company’s product portfolios under the financial support of Yageo.
The deal would also help uphold the company’s corporate values, it said.
Shibaura’s support for the deal followed high-ranking executives’ meeting in Taipei in July and their visits to Yageo’s manufacturing facilities in Kaohsiung and Thailand, it said.
Yageo launched the bid in May with an aim of fully acquiring Shibaura, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of negative temperature coefficient thermistors to expand its sensor business.
Since then, the company has extended the deadline of the tender offer several times and raised the bidding price to ￥7,130 per share, 15 percent higher than ￥6,200 from rival MinebeaMitsumi Inc.
Yageo aims to buy all 15.25 million Shibaura shares in cash.
The tender offer would succeed if it meets the minimum acquisition of 7.62 million shares, or about 50 percent, the company said.
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
Singapore-based ride-hailing and delivery giant Grab Holdings’ planned acquisition of Foodpanda’s Taiwan operations has yet to enter the formal review stage, as regulators await supplementary documents, the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) said yesterday. Acting FTC Chairman Chen Chih-min (陳志民) told the legislature’s Economics Committee that although Grab submitted its application on March 27, the case has not been officially accepted because required materials remain incomplete. Once the filing is finalized, the FTC would launch a formal probe into the deal, focusing on issues such as cross-shareholding and potential restrictions on market competition, Chen told lawmakers. Grab last month announced that it would acquire
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has triggered a seismic reshuffling of global equity markets, with Taiwan and South Korea muscling past European nations one by one. With its stock market now valued at nearly US$4.3 trillion, Taiwan surpassed the UK, Europe’s biggest market, earlier this month, data compiled by Bloomberg showed. South Korea is about US$140 billion away from doing the same. The tech-heavy Asian markets have shot past Germany and France in the past seven months. The shift is largely down to massive gains in shares of three companies that provide essential hardware for AI: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電),
Shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) have repeatedly hit new highs, but an equity analyst said the stock’s valuation remains within a reasonable range and any pullback would likely be technical. The contract chipmaker’s historical price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio has ranged between 20 and 30, Cathay Futures Consultant Co (國泰證期) analyst Tsai Ming-han (蔡明翰) told Central News Agency. With market consensus projecting that TSMC would post earnings per share of about NT$100 (US$3.17) this year, supported by strong global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, and the stock currently trading at a P/E ratio of below 25, Tsai said the valuation
RSS