Local semiconductor firm GCS Holdings Inc (環宇通訊) yesterday said its board has dropped a US$226 million deal to sell itself to China’s Sanan Optoelectronics Co (三安光電) after US regulatory authorities blocked the transaction.
Instead, GCS signed a memorandum of understanding with the Chinese LED chipmaker to form a new joint venture, with the aim of building a 6-inch wafer plant.
GCS said it has been seeking partners to build advanced chip capacities over the past year in order to explore new business opportunities and to diversify its product portfolios.
The joint venture is to help the firm reach this goal, it said.
“The new joint venture will make chips, such as radio frequency ICs [integrated circuits] and power management ICs used in consumer electronics and mobile devices,” GCS said in a statement filed with the Taiwan Stock Exchange yesterday.
Radio frequency ICs made up 34 percent of the firm’s total revenue of NT$464 million (US$14.66 million) in the first quarter of this year.
As discussions are still in the initial stages, GCS said it does not yet have financial details, such as the new firm’s share capital and how many shares each side will hold.
GCS said its board yesterday approved scrapping the acquisition, as the deal was rejected by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS) due to unspecified concerns.
Since the deal was announced in March, speculation had arisen that Sanan’s takeover bid would face close scrutiny by CFIUS, because some GCS products with military applications are shipped to clients in the US.
GCS did not comment on the issue.
The company said it has signed an agreement to terminate the deal with Sanan’s fully-owned investment arm, SAIC Acquisition Inc.
SAIC originally planned to buy all 58 million shares of GCS.
GCS, registered in the Cayman Islands, offers foundry services for gallium arsenide-based and gallium nitride-based radio frequency ICs, wireless devices, power electronics and optoelectronics, in addition to gallium arsenide-based optical wafers and chips.
Trading of GCS shares has been suspended due to the cancelation of the deal.
The company is scheduled to release quarterly earnings at an investors’ conference today.
TRADE WAR: Tariffs should also apply to any goods that pass through the new Beijing-funded port in Chancay, Peru, an adviser to US president-elect Donald Trump said A veteran adviser to US president-elect Donald Trump is proposing that the 60 percent tariffs that Trump vowed to impose on Chinese goods also apply to goods from any country that pass through a new port that Beijing has built in Peru. The duties should apply to goods from China or countries in South America that pass through the new deep-water port Chancay, a town 60km north of Lima, said Mauricio Claver-Carone, an adviser to the Trump transition team who served as senior director for the western hemisphere on the White House National Security Council in his first administration. “Any product going
STRUGGLING BUSINESS: South Korea’s biggest company and semiconductor manufacturer’s buyback fuels concerns that it could be missing out on the AI boom Samsung Electronics Co plans to buy back about 10 trillion won (US$7.2 billion) of its own stock over the next year, putting in motion one of the larger shareholder return programs in its history. South Korea’s biggest company would repurchase the stock in stages over the coming 12 months, it said in a regulatory filing on Friday. As a first step, it would buy back about 3 trillion won of paper starting today up until February next year, all of which it would cancel. The board would deliberate on how best to effect the remaining 7 trillion won of buybacks. The move
China’s Huawei Technologies Co (華為) plans to start mass-producing its most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip in the first quarter of next year, even as it struggles to make enough chips due to US restrictions, two people familiar with the matter said. The telecoms conglomerate has sent samples of the Ascend 910C — its newest chip, meant to rival those made by US chipmaker Nvidia Corp — to some technology firms and started taking orders, the sources told Reuters. The 910C is being made by top Chinese contract chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯) on its N+2 process, but a lack
NVIDIA PLATFORM: Hon Hai’s Mexican facility is to begin production early next year and a Taiwan site is to enter production next month, Nvidia wrote on its blog Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), the world’s biggest electronics manufacturer, yesterday said it is expanding production capacity of artificial intelligence (AI) servers based on Nvidia Corp’s Blackwell chips in Taiwan, the US and Mexico to cope with rising demand. Hon Hai’s new AI-enabled factories are to use Nvidia’s Omnivores platform to create 3D digital twins to plan and simulate automated production lines at a factory in Hsinchu, the company said in a statement. Nvidia’s Omnivores platform is for developing industrial AI simulation applications and helps bring facilities online faster. Hon Hai’s Mexican facility is to begin production early next year and the
RSS