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.
Intel Corp chief executive officer Lip-Bu Tan (陳立武) is expected to meet with Taiwanese suppliers next month in conjunction with the opening of the Computex Taipei trade show, supply chain sources said on Monday. The visit, the first for Tan to Taiwan since assuming his new post last month, would be aimed at enhancing Intel’s ties with suppliers in Taiwan as he attempts to help turn around the struggling US chipmaker, the sources said. Tan is to hold a banquet to celebrate Intel’s 40-year presence in Taiwan before Computex opens on May 20 and invite dozens of Taiwanese suppliers to exchange views
Application-specific integrated circuit designer Faraday Technology Corp (智原) yesterday said that although revenue this quarter would decline 30 percent from last quarter, it retained its full-year forecast of revenue growth of 100 percent. The company attributed the quarterly drop to a slowdown in customers’ production of chips using Faraday’s advanced packaging technology. The company is still confident about its revenue growth this year, given its strong “design-win” — or the projects it won to help customers design their chips, Faraday president Steve Wang (王國雍) told an online earnings conference. “The design-win this year is better than we expected. We believe we will win
Chizuko Kimura has become the first female sushi chef in the world to win a Michelin star, fulfilling a promise she made to her dying husband to continue his legacy. The 54-year-old Japanese chef regained the Michelin star her late husband, Shunei Kimura, won three years ago for their Sushi Shunei restaurant in Paris. For Shunei Kimura, the star was a dream come true. However, the joy was short-lived. He died from cancer just three months later in June 2022. He was 65. The following year, the restaurant in the heart of Montmartre lost its star rating. Chizuko Kimura insisted that the new star is still down
While China’s leaders use their economic and political might to fight US President Donald Trump’s trade war “to the end,” its army of social media soldiers are embarking on a more humorous campaign online. Trump’s tariff blitz has seen Washington and Beijing impose eye-watering duties on imports from the other, fanning a standoff between the economic superpowers that has sparked global recession fears and sent markets into a tailspin. Trump says his policy is a response to years of being “ripped off” by other countries and aims to bring manufacturing to the US, forcing companies to employ US workers. However, China’s online warriors
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