Yunnan Aluminum Co Ltd, China’s fourth largest producer of the metal, announced last week it has signed a contract with ABB and SMS Demag Co, which will provide a complete set of electrical equipment for a cold rolling mill.
The equipment and automation technology group ABB and Germany’s Demag will help to expand operations to increase Yunnan Aluminum’s processing capacity by 80 percent.
The metal maker is the largest electricity consumer on the Yunnan Power Grid,. In recent years it has invested 3.7 billion yuan in energy-saving initiatives to lower consumption to 13,600 kWh per ton of aluminum - more than 1,000 kWh per ton, or 7 percent, less than the national average.
The company recently installed the what its says is the world’s most advanced continuous casting and rolling technology using Demag and ABB technologies to achieve energy savings of 26 percent.
The fourth joint project in China between Demag and ABB will include main motors and drives, automation systems, and engineering and commissioning work for Yunnan Aluminum.
Search engines ranked
Chinese Internet search engines Baidu.com and Alibaba.com were ranked among the world’s 10-most popular search engines last month by comScore, an InterNet research firm.
Nasdaq-listed Baidu was listed third, with 5.2 percent of worldwide searches, according to the survey of 66.2 billion search queries.
Baidu is sometimes termed China’s version of Google due to the Chinese-language search engine’s soaring popularity and profits. It reported a net profit of $24.2 million in the third quarter of 2007.
Alibaba.com had 0.8 percent of global searches, working its way to tenth place, its first appearance in the top 10, according to the survey.
Hong Kong-listed Alibaba.com, the business-to-business unit of Alibaba Group, is one of China’s fastest growing Internet companies.
Its registered members soared to 24.6 million in 2007 from six million in 2004. Paying members increased to 255,000 by June 2007 from 77,000 in 2004.
Google ranked first with 62.4 percent search share, about five times more than runner-up Yahoo with 12.8 percent.
Microsoft’s websites came in fourth with 2.9 percent, followed by South Korea’s NHN Corp with 2.4 percent.
Mines acquired
China Minmetals announced last Tuesday that it purchased a majority stake in Northern Peru Copper (NPC) of Canada, acquiring the EL Galeno copper and gold mine and the Hilorico gold mine in northern Peru.
The announcement said the acquisition has met with a positive response from the majority of NPC’s shareholders and has been approved by the Chinese government.
The acquisition was funded by Copper Bridge Acquisition Corp (CBAC) jointly established by China Minmetals and Jiangxi Copper Corp. A total of 31,761,682 shares, or 93.92 percent of NPC’s total, have been transferred, according to the announcement.
CBAC will pay C$436.7 million on January 28 for the purchase and to comply with Canadian law, the remainder will be transacted within two months through compulsory buying.
The latest data shows that NPC’s total resources include 8.05 million tons of copper and 198 tons of gold. Development of the Galeno project will require an investment of $1.5 billion and is expected to be operational in 2012.
Telecom deal
China’s biggest private telecom equipment company Huawei Technologies Co has signed a $500 million contract with Reliance Communications Ltd (RCOM), India’s largest mobile carrier, the company said late last month.
It was Huawei’s first large overseas order this year and marks another move by the Shenzhen-based company to expand in the global market.
The deal is expected to help Huawei become more competitive in the third-generation mobile phone era, industry insiders said.
Under the contract, Huawei will provide products and mobile solutions to RCOM for three years.
The deal will significantly reduce the total cost of RCOM’s global system for mobile communications (GSM) network. The nationwide GSM rollout, covering 20,000 towns and 600,000 villages, will enhance RCOM’s GSM business competitiveness in attracting new subscribers on the next generation network, Huawei said in a statement.
The contract is a follow-on to a $200 million CDMA network expansion deal with RCOM last July.
"With its established global credentials, it was rather easy for us to decide upon Huawei as our preferred partner," Anil Dhirubhai Ambani, RCOM’s chairman, said in the statement.
Huawei now serves 35 of the world’s top-50 operators, along with more than one billion users worldwide.
Snow cuts metals output
Zhuzhou Smelter Group Co, China’s largest zinc smelter, has cut production after heavy snow caused power shortages, a company official said last week.
Power cuts have already reduced the country’s aluminum output, Beijing Antaike Information Development Co’s chief analyst Wang Feihong said.
Zhuzhou’s zinc smelter is based in Central China’s Hunan Province, which was hit by the worst snowstorm in 50 years. Production was reduced since mid-January, said Wang Jianjun, managing director of the company’s trading unit. He declined to elaborate, citing compliance rules, according to Bloomberg News.
Aluminum output may decline 200,000 tons in the first quarter, according to Antaike’s Wang.
China is the world’s biggest producer of zinc and aluminum, but industrial production has been disrupted by the worst in snowstorms in decades that swept Hunan, Guizhou, Anhui and Jiangxi provinces, the China Meteorological Administration said.
Lower zinc availability due to the storms "is viewed as the reason supporting domestic cash prices which have been higher than front-month futures since the start of the year", said Wu Peng, an analyst at Jinrui Futures Co.
Little Swan stake sale
Washing-machine maker Wuxi Little Swan Co is courting large white goods companies, looking to sell a 24-percent stake in the company, its controlling shareholder said last week.
Buyers must have registered capital of at least 1 billion yuan, or its equivalent in foreign currency, and 3 billion yuan in 2006 net assets , said Wuxi Guolian Development (Group) Co Ltd, its State-owned shareholder.
Qualified buyers must be in the white goods business and have been profitable for three consecutive years, the company told the Shenzhen Stock Exchange.
Both overseas and domestic firms were invited to submit an application to Guolian. The company’s shares will resume trading in Shenzhen from today, the statement said.
Guolian announced earlier this month that it will sell its entire stake of 87.67 million A-shares in Little Swan.
Little Swan’s net profit reached 48 million yuan in the first half of last year, surging 103.46 percent from a year earlier.
The 24-percent stake could be worth between 1.6 billion yuan and 1.8 billion yuan, according to calculations by State Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission and the China Securities Regulatory Commission.
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