IPAWEEK
www.globalfdi.net
it & BPM i FOOD I HEALTHCARE i TOURISM i INFRASTRUCTURE i ENGINEERING i TEXTILES
THE DEFINITIVE SOURCE FOR INVESTMENT PROMOTION EXECUTIVES
Toyota to invest US$1 bn in Grab
Workday will acquire Adaptive Insights for US$1.5 bn
11-16 June 2018
Alibaba invest US$ 1.5 bn to build logistics centre at HK Int. Airport
Renault invest US$1 bn for EV production in France
Salesforce to invest US$ 2.5 bn in UK
AT&T completes acquisition of Time Warner
Read article on globalfdi.net
Alibaba invest US$ 1.5 bn to build logistics center at HK Int. Airport
Cainiao Network, the logistics arm of Alibaba Group, announced that it will lead a joint venture to invest approximately US$1.5 billion (approximately HK$12 billion) to build a world-class digital logistics center at Hong Kong International Airport, the world's busiest cargo airport. Cainiao will lead the project through its controlling joint venture with China National Aviation Corporation (Group) Limited and YTO Express. The companies hold a 51%, 35% and 14% stake in the joint venture respectively. With advanced environmental protection standards and state-of-the-art technologies, such as automated warehousing and temperature-control solutions, the center will be put into operation in 2023 with an estimated gross floor area of 380,000 square meters. It will include air cargo processing center, sorting center and order fulfilment center, among other functions. The center will handle tens of millions of parcels every year to meet the surging cross-border e-commerce needs of global SMEs, bringing an incremental cargo volume of approximately 1.7 million tonnes per annum to the Hong Kong International Airport when the center operates in full capacity, and reinforcing the city's position as a key gateway in the global logistics chain.
AT&T Inc. has completed its acquisition of Time Warner Inc., bringing together global media and entertainment leaders Warner Bros., HBO and Turner with AT&T’s leadership in technology and its video, mobile and broadband customer relationships. “The content and creative talent at Warner Bros., HBO and Turner are first-rate. Combine all that with AT&T’s strengths in direct-to-consumer distribution, and we offer customers a differentiated, high-quality, mobile-first entertainment experience,” said Randall Stephenson, chairman and CEO of AT&T Inc. “We’re going to bring a fresh approach to how the media and entertainment industry works for consumers, content creators, distributors and advertisers.” Stephenson said the future of media entertainment is rapidly converging around three elements required to transform how video is distributed, paid for, consumed and created. Today, AT&T brings together: Premium Content: Broadly distributed, robust premium content portfolio that combines leading movies and shows from Warner Bros., HBO and Turner, along with more targeted digital content from Bleacher Report, FilmStruck and AT&T’s investment in Otter Media, among others. Direct to Consumer Distribution (D2C): AT&T has more than 170 million D2C relationships across its TV, video streaming, mobile and broadband services in the U.S., mobile in Mexico, TV in Latin America, in addition to D2C digital properties such as HBO NOW, Boomerang, FilmStruck and CNN.com. High-Speed Networks: AT&T‘s leading wireless and fiber network, including investments in new technology such as 5G, will provide the network bandwidth required as customers increase engagement with premium video and emerging 4K and virtual reality content.
AT&T completes acquisition of Time Warner Inc.
Renault invest $1 billion for EV production in France
Groupe Renault is accelerating the deployment of its Drive The Future strategic plan with an investment of more than one billion euros for the development and production of electric vehicles in France. With the aim of strengthening the leadership of its French industrial base in the growing electric vehicle market, Groupe Renault plans to: Introduce a new Alliance electric platform in Douai to create a second Renault electric vehicle production site; Double ZOE production capacity and the launch of a new ZOE at Flins, the only ZOE production site in the world; Triple electric motor production capacities at Cleon and introduce a new generation electric motor from 2021. Invest in Maubeuge for the production of the next generation of the Kangoo family, including the electric utility vehicle Kangoo Z.E.
Toyota to invest $1 billion in Grab
Toyota Motor Corporation announced that it has concluded an agreement with Grab Holdings Inc. (Grab) to strengthen their existing partnership and expand the collaboration between Toyota and Grab in Southeast Asia to drive further advances in Mobility as a Service (MaaS) across the region. As part of this agreement, Toyota will invest $1 billion U.S. dollars (approximately 110 billion yen) in Grab. Furthermore, to accelerate decision-making, one Toyota executive will be appointed to Grab's board of directors and a dedicated Toyota team member will be seconded to Grab to as an executive officer, with Toyota considering more personnel exchanges in the future. Grab operates online-to-offline mobile platforms in transportation, food and package delivery, mobile payments and financial services in 217 cities in eight Southeast Asian countries. In March this year, it acquired Uber Technologies Inc.'s Southeast Asian assets, and is now the partner of choice for ride-hailing in the region.
Interface to acquire nora systems for $420 million
Interface, Inc., a leading global commercial flooring company and worldwide leader in sustainability, announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire nora systems in a stock purchase transaction valued at approximately $420 million. Nora, a global leader in performance flooring and worldwide share leader in the rubber flooring category, is a privately held company that is majority owned by investment firm Intermediate Capital Group (ICG). This acquisition will expand Interface's rapidly growing resilient flooring portfolio and increase its penetration into high growth segments including healthcare, life sciences, education and transportation. Nora is the leader in the nearly $1 billion rubber flooring category of the $34 billion global commercial flooring industry. Rubber flooring is ideal for applications that require hygienic, safe flooring with strong chemical resistance, and it is extremely durable compared to other flooring alternatives. Nora is considered the leading premium brand and has built a specified selling organization that provides reach into approximately 80 countries around the world.
QuEST Global signs agreement to acquire Engineering Community S.L.
QuEST Global, the pioneering engineering services provider, has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Barcelona-based Engineering Community S.L. (engicom), thus adding additional sought-after capability of Research & Development in the manufacturing cycle of new products. This acquisition is the latest in a series of similar milestones achieved by QuEST in sync with their rapid diversification strategy. With this, QuEST will boost their onshore presence in Europe, providing significant development efficiency and delivery time benefits to customers across industries, especially in Power, Automotive and Hi-Tech. A highly specialized engineering co-development partner for OEMs and product innovators, engicom has wide experience spanning close to two decades along the entire product development and manufacturing value chain. Crystallizing their expertise in various verticals, engicom has developed a series of advanced mechanical components that simplify supply chain and ensure continuous improvement for manufacturers.
Salesforce, the global leader in CRM, plans to invest more than $2.5 billion over the next five years to fuel the growth of its UK business. The company is making the announcement ahead of participating in Prime Minister May's Tech Investment Roundtable hosted at 10 Downing Street. Salesforce is experiencing rapid growth in the UK. Salesforce is the #1 Customer Experience and Customer Relationship Management market share leader worldwide and the #1 Customer Experience and Customer Relationship Management in the UK based on 2017 total software revenue, according to Gartner1. As part of this investment, Salesforce plans to increase headcount, data centre capacity and office space to support its rapidly growing customer base in the country.
Salesforce to invest US$ 2.5 billion in its UK business over five years
Microsemi collaborates with China Telecom for 5G
Microsemi Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Microchip Technology Inc. announced its collaboration with China Telecom Beijing Research Institute to define and develop next-generation optical transport solutions to meet the stringent requirements of 5G. China Telecom is leading the Next-Generation Optical Transport Network Forum (NGOF) consortium formed to drive industry collaboration and technological innovations to define converged optical transport network (OTN) which meet the needs of 5G deployments. As part of this collaboration, Microsemi is bringing to market the DIGI-G5, the newest member of its award-winning DIGI OTN processors, supporting new 5G optimized architecture that enables the stringent synchronization, latency and network slicing requirements being placed on optical networks to support 5G deployments. 5G's variety of use cases will impose new requirements like network slicing, stringent latency and timing synchronization on the underlying optical transport networks. With 25G, 50G and 100Gbps port rates planned for 5G remote radio heads, the traffic flow from the radio to the mobile edge will dramatically increase. With the promise of up to 50x lower end-to-end latency, the optical transport network will play a critical role in enabling ultrareliable low latency communication (uRLLC) applications such as autonomous vehicles. New architectures leveraging hard traffic isolation will further enhance the business opportunities network slicing is set to bring for mobile operators.
Veea Inc., a global leader in smart applications, announced the acquisition of the UK-based Virtuosys Ltd.(“Virtuosys”), a company delivering Smart network solutions at the network edge. Following the closing, Virtuosys will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Veea and will change its name to Veea Systems Ltd. (“Veea Systems”). Both companies have been collaborating for some time on Internet of Things (IoT) devices, gateways and smart applications that are seeing widespread adoption in consumer and business environments, which is estimated to be on the order of 31 billion connected things worldwide by 2020.
Veea acquires Virtuosys
Workday, Inc., a leader in enterprise cloud applications for finance and human resources, and Adaptive Insights, a leading cloud-based platform for modernizing business planning, have signed a definitive agreement under which Workday will acquire all of the outstanding shares of Adaptive Insights for approximately $1.55 billion including the assumption of approximately $150 million in unvested equity issued to Adaptive Insights employees. Comments on the News “Adaptive Insights is an industry leader with its Business Planning Cloud platform, and together with Workday, we will help customers accelerate their finance transformation in the cloud," said Aneel Bhusri, Co-Founder and CEO, Workday. “I am excited to welcome the Adaptive Insights team to Workday and look forward to coming together to continue delivering industry-leading products that equip finance organizations to make even faster, better business decisions to adapt to change and to drive growth.” “Joining forces with Workday accelerates our vision to drive holistic business planning and digital transformation for our customers,” said Tom Bogan, CEO, Adaptive Insights. “Most importantly, both Adaptive Insights and Workday have an employee-first and customer-centric approach to developing enterprise software that will only increase the power of the combined companies.”
Workday will acquire Adaptive Insights for $1.5 bn
InvestCloud Inc. acquires rplan Limited
InvestCloud Inc. has announced a strategic acquisition of London-based rplan Limited. The value of the deal is $20 million. rplan is the UK's leading provider of client engagement technology to support bespoke investment propositions for web and mobile. Its client base includes some of the largest institutional asset managers in the world, including four of the top eight in the UK. rplan has had significant success enabling asset managers to digitize their existing retail clients and catapult the development of their digital strategy to support multi-channel distribution.
Envision Healthcare acquired by KKR for US$ 9.9 billion
Envision Healthcare Corporation announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by global investment firm KKR in an all-cash transaction for approximately $9.9 billion, including the assumption or repayment of debt. The agreement represents the culmination of the Board's comprehensive review of strategic alternatives to enhance shareholder value. During the last seven months, the Board, with the assistance of three independent financial advisors and legal counsel, examined a full range of options to generate shareholder value, including capital structure alternatives, potential acquisitions, portfolio optimization, a potential sale of the whole company, and continued operation as a standalone business. The Board oversaw an extensive process that involved outreach to 25 potential buyers, including financial sponsors and strategic entities, and invited proposals for all or parts of the business. After consideration of the opportunities, risks and uncertainties facing the Company and the broader sector, as well as the alternatives available to the Company, the Board determined that the KKR proposal presented the best opportunity to maximize value for shareholders. "Envision is a leading provider of physician-led services in a health care system in which physician-patient interactions have a pronounced impact on nearly all health care decisions. Envision has a very strong reputation for delivering high-quality, patient-focused care through its network of 25,000 clinical professionals at thousands of hospitals, surgery centers and alternate sites of care across the country," said Jim Momtazee, Head of KKR's Health Care investment team. "We are excited to partner with the outstanding team led by Chris Holden to help build upon the strong foundation in place and accelerate Envision's growth going forward."
ASSA ABLOY has acquired HKC, a leading manufacturer of alarms and cloud based monitoring solutions, based in Ireland. "I am very pleased to welcome HKC into the ASSA ABLOY Group. HKC offers a comprehensive portfolio of wired and wireless alarm products as well as monitoring solutions that in a very good way complements the ASSA ABLOY offering in the Irish market”, says Nico Delvaux, President and CEO of ASSA ABLOY. HKC was established in 1991 and has some 45 employees. The head office is located in Dublin, Ireland. Sales for 2018 are expected to reach some EUR 18 million (approx. SEK 180 million) with a good EBIT margin and the acquisition will be accretive to EPS from start.
ASSA ABLOY acquires HKC in Ireland
Hochwald planning for new dairy plant
The Hochwald Cooperative Group with its head office in Thalfang, in the Rhineland Palatinate region, is planning a new production site for long-life dairy products in North Rhine-Westphalia. An extensive analysis of the production network, the milk collection area and the distribution channels revealed that the optimum location for the new site, in which around 800 million litres of milk will be processed by more than 250 employees into high quality dairy products, is within commercial area III in the town of Mechernich in Obergartzem. Negotiations between the company and the town reached a positive conclusion during the Corpus Christi public holiday, according to the deputy mayor, Thomas Hambach. The other options Hochwald has considered are no longer contenders. According to the documents from the meeting, the project will be presented to Mechernich town council’s structural funding committee next week.
Dippin' Dots and Doc Popcorn to debut in China
More than three years in the making, Dippin' Dots and Doc Popcorn will debut in China for the first time. America's leading flash frozen beaded ice cream company and the largest franchisor of fresh-popped popcorn plan to open six locations by this fall and a total of 10 by May 2019. The Dippin' Dots and Doc Popcorn team identified warehouse locations and constructed cold storage facilities, as product will be made in the U.S. and shipped throughout China. The sister brands' franchising group established a business entity in Asia and signed its first licensing agreement with Shanghai Desire Food Co. LTD. Later this month, the group will open its first two locations, in Pudong and Yangpu in Shanghai. A third location is scheduled to open early August at the Shanghai South Railway Station and a flagship store is planned for the Shanghai Shimao Plaza Store on Nanjing Road. An estimated six Dippin' Dots and Doc Popcorn locations will open in China by this fall with the goal to have 10 locations open by May 2019.
The Board of Directors of Orkla ASA has decided to consolidate production of biscuits in the Group, and to build a new biscuits factory outside Riga, Latvia. This is part of the Group's strategy of consolidating production in fewer and more efficient plants. By investing in a new, modern factory and concentrating production in one location, we can strengthen our future competitiveness and innovative ability and at the same time reduce our climate footprint. The new production plant will allow us to focus investments on new technology, increase cost effectiveness and create a stronger production platform, says Ann-Beth Freuchen, Orkla Executive Vice President and CEO of Orkla Confectionery & Snacks. Consequently, the current biscuits production operations in Kungälv and Riga will be closed down and relocated to the new factory. This change will be carried out by the end of 2022.
Orkla to build a biscuits factory outside Riga, Latvia
IHG(InterContinental Hotels Group) has launched voco, its new upscale hotel brand, alongside announcing a first signing in Australia. voco will focus primarily on conversion opportunities and will strengthen IHG’s offer in the $40 billion upscale segment, which is expected to grow by a further $20 billion by 2025. Working with high-quality individual and locally-branded hotels, this distinctive brand will offer owners the ability to drive higher returns through delivering a compelling guest experience and leveraging IHG’s powerful systems. This includes best-in-class revenue management and technology capabilities and IHG® Rewards Club, one of the world’s largest hotel loyalty programmes. voco, inspired by the meaning ‘to invite’ or to ‘come together’ in Latin, will combine the informality and charm of an individual hotel, with the quality and reassurance of a global and respected brand.
IHG launches new upscale brand, voco in Australia
Hyatt Regency brand unveils its first property in the capital of China
Hyatt Hotels Corporation announced the continued expansion of the Hyatt Regency brand in China with the opening of the first Hyatt Regency property in the capital of China – Hyatt Regency Beijing Wangjing. The 348-key hotel is set in an urban environment with energizing, intuitive experiences and a deep connection to design and nature. Posed to be a landmark within the district, Hyatt Regency Beijing Wangjing is situated at the juncture of the new Central Business District and a charming residential area. As the new centerpiece of the area of Wangjing, the hotel projects the very core of Wangjing’s unique culture, from its history and local community to its ever-changing and modernized look today.
JA Solar Holdings Co., Ltd., a leading global brand of high-performance solar products, announced that it has founded a new subsidiary in South Korea to continue expanding its presence in the region. In 2001, JA Solar entered the South Korean market, in order to provide solar cells to its customers. Thanks to the excellent quality of its products, JA Solar has obtained a remarkable recognition from its customers, and has developed a solid customer base over the years. In November 2016, JA Solar successfully received certification for KS modules (South Korean industrial standards), which indicates that its products fully comply with the national certification standards of South Korea. Subsequently, JA Solar officially entered the South Korean market to supply solar modules to local customers. With the foundation of this subsidiary in South Korea, JA Solar can provide clients in the region with assistance and services in a timely and effective manner, in addition to gaining greater influence in the South Korean market and continuing to expand its presence worldwide.
JA Solar establishes a new subsidiary in South Korea
World Bank approves additional financing for Morocco to develop a second Solar Power Complex
The World Bank announced US$ 125 million in additional support for Morocco’s adoption of innovative solar technology, as part of the national goal of developing the country’s world-class solar and wind energy resources to reduce the dependence on fossil fuels and move toward a green energy future. The additional financing, which includes US$25 million from the Clean Technology Fund, will support the development and construction of the Noor-Midelt I and II plants, which will have a total capacity of 600-800 megawatts. The Noor-Midelt complex will be Morocco’s second concentrated solar power (CSP) complex built under the Noor Solar Plan. The Solar Plan is a critical component of the country’s goal of producing 52 percent of its electricity through renewable energy by 2030. The 580-megawatt Noor-Ouarzazate complex is due for completion this year and will be the world’s largest CSP complex. Along with providing power to over one million people, the Noor-Ouarzazate complex will decrease Morocco’s dependence on oil by about 2.5 million tons per year and reduce carbon emissions by 760,000 tons per year. Once complete, the Noor-Midelt complex will be even larger. .
Meeting in Luxembourg the Board of the European Investment Bank approved a total of EUR 4.4 billion of new financing for 30 projects located across Europe, Asia and Africa. This includes financing to roll-out ultra-high speed internet across Germany, upgrade the Cairo metro, expand and rehabilitate forests in China, and improve access to off-grid solar power in Africa. “The EU Bank is now moving on from crisis recovery to focusing on investments that can make Europe more competitive worldwide. This also involves making growth more sustainable and smart. Financing gaps still hold back investment in climate action and in the key product-to-market segment of the value chain. We want to enable companies to run with all the good ideas Europe has in abundance, to create jobs and expand. New projects endorsed today by the EU Bank will contribute to address these gaps. They also take us very close to achieving the Juncker Plan target of mobilising investments worth EUR 315 billion by this year”, said Werner Hoyer, President of the European Investment Bank.
EIB approves US$ 5.2 billion for small business, housing, transport and energy investment
Dugree KnowledgeWorks 13 F, Gopala Towers, 25 Rajendra Place New Delhi - 110008, India, Website: www.globalfdi.net
11 - 16 June 2018
GlobalFDI.net portal is designed to aid professionals from the Infrastructure, Healthcare, IT & BPM, Food, Textiles, Engineering, Tourism, and construction industry in their investment process (cross border investment, mergers & acquisitions, greenfield and brownfield expansion projects).
it & BPM i FOOD I HEALTHCARE i TEXTILES i INFRASTRUCTURE i ENGINEERING i tourism
