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.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday obtained the government’s approval to inject an additional US$7.5 billion into its US subsidiary, the Department of Investment Review said in a statement. The department approved TSMC’s application of investing in TSMC Arizona Corp, which is engaged in the manufacturing, sales, testing and design of IC and other semiconductor devices, it said. The latest capital injection follows a US$5 billion investment for TSMC Arizona approved in June. The chipmaker has broken ground on two advanced fabs in Arizona with aggregated investments approved by the department totaling US$24 billion thus far. According to TSMC, the first Arizona
The lethal hack of Hezbollah’s Asian-branded pagers and walkie-talkies has sparked an intense search for the devices’ path, revealing a murky market for older technologies where buyers might have few assurances about what they are getting. While supply chains and distribution channels for higher-margin and newer products are tightly managed, that is not the case for older electronics from Asia where counterfeiting, surplus inventories and complex contract manufacturing deals can sometimes make it impossible to identify the source of a product, analysts and consultants say. The response from the companies at the center of the booby-trapped gadgets that killed 37
FRIENDLY TAKEOVER: While Qualcomm Inc’s proposal to buy some or all of Intel raises the prospect of other competitors, Broadcom Inc is staying on the sidelines Qualcomm Inc has approached Intel Corp to discuss a potential acquisition of the struggling chipmaker, people with knowledge of the matter said, raising the prospect of one of the biggest-ever merger and acquisition deals. California-based Qualcomm proposed a friendly takeover for Intel in recent days, said the sources, who asked not to be identified discussing confidential information. The proposal is for all of the chipmaker, although Qualcomm has not ruled out buying some parts of Intel and selling off others. It is uncertain whether the initial approach would lead to an agreement and any deal is likely to come under close antitrust scrutiny
SECURITY CONCERNS: The proposed ban on Chinese autonomous vehicle software and hardware would go into effect with the 2027 and 2030 model years respectively The US Department of Commerce today is expected to propose prohibiting Chinese software and hardware in connected and autonomous vehicles on US roads due to national security concerns, two sources said. US President Joe Biden’s administration has raised concerns about the collection of data by Chinese companies on US drivers and infrastructure as well as the potential foreign manipulation of vehicles connected to the Internet and navigation systems. The proposed regulation would ban the import and sale of vehicles from China with key communications or automated driving system software or hardware, said the two sources, who declined to be identified because the