French Minister of Finance Bruno Le Maire yesterday said that a takeover raid by French energy and water giant Veolia Environment SA against its rival Suez SA risked destabilizing both firms unless an amicable accord could be reached.
Veolia closed in on its target on Monday after securing a deal to buy 30 percent of Suez from Engie SA, an energy player in which the French state owns a 22 percent stake.
Despite voting against the sale, the French government was overruled by Engie’s board, which agreed to pocket Veolia’s offer of 3.4 billion euros (US$4 billion).
Photo: AFP
Veolia is now poised to launch a full takeover, potentially creating a global giant supplying power generation, waste management and water services to municipalities worldwide.
French officials are eyeing the deal warily, despite pledges by Veolia to maintain jobs in the strategic sectors.
Suez’s board on Tuesday denounced a “hostile” deal made under “unprecedented and irregular conditions.”
“I don’t believe in forced marriages. I don’t think they work,” Le Maire told France Info radio, urging talks to resume between the two sides quickly.
“The deal won’t work” without an accord, he added.
“We were just a few centimeters from a deal, but we ran up against intransigence on one side and hastiness on the other,” he said.
Veolia has said it would give itself six months to find common ground with Suez and allay its fears of a breakup that it says could cost up to 10,000 jobs.
Suez has already taken a series of “poison pill” moves to try to scupper any takeover, including by placing its key French water services business in an independent Dutch holding.
That could put it out of reach for Veolia, which has said it wants to sell the French operations to meet antitrust concerns.
Suez said that “it will use all the means at its disposal ... to avoid a creeping takeover or de facto control.”
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
TARIFF TRADE-OFF: Machinery exports to China dropped after Beijing ended its tariff reductions in June, while potential new tariffs fueled ‘front-loaded’ orders to the US The nation’s machinery exports to the US amounted to US$7.19 billion last year, surpassing the US$6.86 billion to China to become the largest export destination for the local machinery industry, the Taiwan Association of Machinery Industry (TAMI, 台灣機械公會) said in a report on Jan. 10. It came as some manufacturers brought forward or “front-loaded” US-bound shipments as required by customers ahead of potential tariffs imposed by the new US administration, the association said. During his campaign, US president-elect Donald Trump threatened tariffs of as high as 60 percent on Chinese goods and 10 percent to 20 percent on imports from other countries.
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
RSS