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.
‘SWASTICAR’: Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s close association with Donald Trump has prompted opponents to brand him a ‘Nazi’ and resulted in a dramatic drop in sales Demonstrators descended on Tesla Inc dealerships across the US, and in Europe and Canada on Saturday to protest company chief Elon Musk, who has amassed extraordinary power as a top adviser to US President Donald Trump. Waving signs with messages such as “Musk is stealing our money” and “Reclaim our country,” the protests largely took place peacefully following fiery episodes of vandalism on Tesla vehicles, dealerships and other facilities in recent weeks that US officials have denounced as terrorism. Hundreds rallied on Saturday outside the Tesla dealership in Manhattan. Some blasted Musk, the world’s richest man, while others demanded the shuttering of his
ADVERSARIES: The new list includes 11 entities in China and one in Taiwan, which is a local branch of Chinese cloud computing firm Inspur Group The US added dozens of entities to a trade blacklist on Tuesday, the US Department of Commerce said, in part to disrupt Beijing’s artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced computing capabilities. The action affects 80 entities from countries including China, the United Arab Emirates and Iran, with the commerce department citing their “activities contrary to US national security and foreign policy.” Those added to the “entity list” are restricted from obtaining US items and technologies without government authorization. “We will not allow adversaries to exploit American technology to bolster their own militaries and threaten American lives,” US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said. The entities
Minister of Finance Chuang Tsui-yun (莊翠雲) yesterday told lawmakers that she “would not speculate,” but a “response plan” has been prepared in case Taiwan is targeted by US President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, which are to be announced on Wednesday next week. The Trump administration, including US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, has said that much of the proposed reciprocal tariffs would focus on the 15 countries that have the highest trade surpluses with the US. Bessent has referred to those countries as the “dirty 15,” but has not named them. Last year, Taiwan’s US$73.9 billion trade surplus with the US
Prices of gasoline and diesel products at domestic gas stations are to fall NT$0.2 and NT$0.1 per liter respectively this week, even though international crude oil prices rose last week, CPC Corp, Taiwan (台灣中油) and Formosa Petrochemical Corp (台塑石化) said yesterday. International crude oil prices continued rising last week, as the US Energy Information Administration reported a larger-than-expected drop in US commercial crude oil inventories, CPC said in a statement. Based on the company’s floating oil price formula, the cost of crude oil rose 2.38 percent last week from a week earlier, it said. News that US President Donald Trump plans a “secondary
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