BANKING
Management to buy SVB unit
Healthcare investment firm SVB Securities on Sunday announced that its management team would buy out the company from parent Silicon Valley Bank, the California-based lender whose brisk collapse in March shook financial markets. SVB Securities had not been included in Silicon Valley Bank’s bankruptcy filing. “The SVB Securities management team bidder group led by CEO Jeff Leerink, and backed by The Baupost Group, today announced they have entered into a definitive agreement with SVB Financial Group to purchase SVB Securities following a competitive bidding process,” the company said in a statement. The amount of the buyout agreement was not specified. The deal is subject to final confirmation by the US Bankruptcy Court and regulators “as well as other customary closing conditions,” the statement said.
AIRLINES
Cathay to train staff on China
Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd (國泰航空) yesterday said it would launch initiatives next month to improve Mandarin language and cultural understanding, including hiring cabin staff from mainland China. The announcement said that all cabin crew would be given “culture training” and that Cathay would increase the scope of Mandarin-speaking services amongst the cabin team. The move came weeks after Cathay Pacific fired three flight attendants following passenger accusations of bias against non-English speakers, prompting criticism on Chinese state media. “Widening our crew’s Putonghua (普通話) coverage is a key objective under this initiative, given the increasing proportion of our customers who speak Putonghua,” Cathay CEO Ronald Lam (林紹波) said in the memo. Mandarin is also known as Putonghua in China.
TELECOMMUNICATIONS
Indonesia satellite launched
Indonesia and Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX yesterday launched the country’s largest telecommunication satellite from the US, in a US$540 million project intended to link up remote corners of the archipelago to the Internet. “Satellite technology will accelerate Internet access to villages in areas that cannot be reached by fiber optics in the next 10 years,” Indonesian Acting Minister of Communication and Information Technology Mahfud MD said in a statement ahead of the launch. The 4.5-tonne Satellite of the Republic of Indonesia was built by Thales Alenia Space and deployed into orbit from Florida by SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, which then returned to an offshore site in a precision landing. The satellite is to occupy the orbital slot above Indonesia’s eastern Papua region. It has a throughput capacity of 150 gigabytes per second and would provide Internet access to 50,000 public service points, the Indonesian government said.
BANKING
Nora Yeung joins DB
Deutsche Bank AG (DB) has named Credit Suisse’s Nora Yeung (楊淑婷) as its cohead of equity capital markets for Asia-Pacific. Yeung is to join the German lender in September and would be based in Hong Kong, an internal memo seen by Bloomberg News showed. She would lead the business alongside Melody Ngan, and report to Haitham Ghattas, the region’s head of capital markets. The banker worked at Credit Suisse for 12 years, most recently as cohead of equity capital markets for Asia-Pacific, the memo shows. She previously worked at Goldman Sachs Group Inc in Hong Kong and London. A spokesperson for Deutsche Bank confirmed the contents of the memo.
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
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
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
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