Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing (李嘉誠) has invested US$60 million in the popular US-based social networking Web site Facebook with a right to acquire another US$60 million stake, a report said yesterday.
Citing unnamed sources, the Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital blog said Asia's richest man is not making the investment through his Hong Kong conglomerates -- Cheung Kong (Holding) Ltd (
In October, Microsoft bought a US$240 million stake in Facebook in a deal valuing the Web site at US$15 billion.
The report said the deal came through a Facebook investor, who introduced the company to Solina Chau (周凱旋), director of the Li Ka-shing Foundation and a major stockholder in Tom.com, a Chinese media company in which Li has an interest.
His investment could give Tom.com a leg up in possible partnerships with Facebook in China, the report added.
A spokeswoman for Hutchison Whampoa would not comment on the report.
The 79-year-old, whose fortune was valued at US$23 billion by Forbes, has investments across the world, including telecommunications, real estate, the Internet, shipping and retail.
Facebook is a social networking Web site that allows people to interact. Facebook has some 5 million members around the world and sees an average of 250,000 new users each day.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's decision to turn down offers to buy the Web site outright look to be paying dividends.
Zuckerberg claims to have rejected an offer from Yahoo Inc to purchase the Web site after the search giant reduced a verbal offer of US$1 billion to a firm offer of US$900,000.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) would not produce its most advanced technologies in the US next year, Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) said yesterday. Kuo made the comment during an appearance at the legislature, hours after the chipmaker announced that it would invest an additional US$100 billion to expand its manufacturing operations in the US. Asked by Taiwan People’s Party Legislator-at-large Chang Chi-kai (張啟楷) if TSMC would allow its most advanced technologies, the yet-to-be-released 2-nanometer and 1.6-nanometer processes, to go to the US in the near term, Kuo denied it. TSMC recently opened its first US factory, which produces 4-nanometer
GREAT SUCCESS: Republican Senator Todd Young expressed surprise at Trump’s comments and said he expects the administration to keep the program running US lawmakers who helped secure billions of dollars in subsidies for domestic semiconductor manufacturing rejected US President Donald Trump’s call to revoke the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, signaling that any repeal effort in the US Congress would fall short. US Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who negotiated the law, on Wednesday said that Trump’s demand would fail, while a top Republican proponent, US Senator Todd Young, expressed surprise at the president’s comments and said he expects the administration to keep the program running. The CHIPS Act is “essential for America leading the world in tech, leading the world in AI [artificial
REACTIONS: While most analysts were positive about TSMC’s investment, one said the US expansion could disrupt the company’s supply-demand balance Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) new US$100 billion investment in the US would exert a positive effect on the chipmaker’s revenue in the medium term on the back of booming artificial intelligence (AI) chip demand from US chip designers, an International Data Corp (IDC) analyst said yesterday. “This is good for TSMC in terms of business expansion, as its major clients for advanced chips are US chip designers,” IDC senior semiconductor research manager Galen Zeng (曾冠瑋) said by telephone yesterday. “Besides, those US companies all consider supply chain resilience a business imperative,” Zeng said. That meant local supply would
Servers that might contain artificial intelligence (AI)-powering Nvidia Corp chips shipped from the US to Singapore ended up in Malaysia, but their actual final destination remains a mystery, Singaporean Minister for Home Affairs and Law K Shanmugam said yesterday. The US is cracking down on exports of advanced semiconductors to China, seeking to retain a competitive edge over the technology. However, Bloomberg News reported in late January that US officials were probing whether Chinese AI firm DeepSeek (深度求索) bought advanced Nvidia semiconductors through third parties in Singapore, skirting Washington’s restrictions. Shanmugam said the route of the chips emerged in the course of an
RSS