Yaskawa Electric robots are pictured at a trade show in Tokyo, Japan, November 29, 2023. REUTERS/Sam Nussey Acquire Licensing Rights
TOKYO, Nov 30 (Reuters) – Japanese robot maker Yaskawa Electric (6506.T) is considering investing around $200 million in the United States, its president said, with an eye to making its industrial robots there for the first time.
The investment would follow other manufacturers from allied nations moving to build capacity in the U.S. as Washington tries to boost high-end manufacturing and strengthen its control over supply chains amid trade tension with China.
While Japanese rival Fanuc (6954.T) is a leading maker of factory robots for the automotive industry in the U.S., Yaskawa hopes to ride a wave of automation in other sectors.
Manufacturing locally “gives our customers a sense of security and reliability,” President Masahiro Ogawa said in an interview.
The more than 100-year-old company has previously said it is looking to invest more in the U.S. The potential scope of the expansion is reported here for the first time.
Yaskawa is the world’s top maker of servo motors, a type of high-precision motor that is widely used in chipmaking tools.
The company, which already makes components in Illinois, Wisconsin and Ohio, is considering expanding U.S. production to modules which incorporate its motors, Ogawa said.
The U.S. views securing access to cutting-edge semiconductors as a priority, with its leading chip equipment makers including Applied Materials (AMAT.O) and Lam Research (LRCX.O).
Foreign manufacturers building out capacity in the U.S. include automaker Toyota Motor (7203.T) and chipmakers TSMC (2330.TW) and Samsung Electronics (005930.KS).
Yaskawa, whose shares have risen by about a third year-to-date giving it a market capitalisation of around $10 billion, is looking at possible subsidies to fund some of the cost of the expansion, Ogawa said.
Reporting by Sam Nussey; Editing by Christopher Cushing
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
[1/4]An endangered coho salmon swims during spawning season in Lagunitas Creek in Marin County, California, U.S. January 13, 2022. Picture taken January 13, 2022. REUTERS/Nathan Frandino/File Photo Acquire Licensing Rights
Nov 8 (Reuters) – U.S. commercial fishing groups on Wednesday sued 13 tire manufacturers in California, saying a chemical used in their tires is poisoning West Coast watersheds and killing rare trout and salmon.
The Institute for Fisheries Resources and the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations sued Bridgestone Corp (5108.T), Continental (CONG.DE), Goodyear Tire & Rubber (GT.O), Michelin (MICP.PA) and others in San Francisco federal court, alleging a chemical used in their tires known as 6PPD is killing protected salmon and trout in violation of the Endangered Species Act.
The fishing groups said the chemical, which becomes toxic when it degrades, is released from tires as vehicles drive around and park. They said the degraded chemical can be flushed into waterways during storms, where it kills protected salmon and trout.
Declining fish populations have led to restrictions on commercial fishing, the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit said researchers have identified the degraded form of 6PPD as causing salmon mortality, and that scientists believe trout and other fish are also likely being killed by the chemical.
The groups, which say that pollution has decimated their industry, want the court to issue an injunction barring the companies from manufacturing tires with the chemical without first taking measures to protect fish and watersheds.
The tire manufacturers did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Wednesday.
The lawsuit is the first in the U.S. to target tire manufacturers for their use of 6PPD, which is found in nearly every tire on the planet, according to Elizabeth Forsyth, an attorney for the fishing groups with the environmental law firm Earthjustice.
Forsyth said the lawsuit focuses on West Coast impacts from the chemical, but that she expects there will be further scientific evidence tying the chemical to damages elsewhere in the future.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said earlier this month that it would take steps to regulate the chemical, which has been used in tires for decades and acts as a stabilizer to prolong the life of rubber. The EPA said exposure to the chemical can kill fish within a few hours.
In July, California’s Department of Toxic Substances Control adopted a rule requiring tire manufacturers to evaluate safer alternatives to 6PPD, noting the threat to coho salmon.
Together, the 13 tire manufacturers sued on Wednesday account for 80% of the domestic U.S. tire market, according to the lawsuit.
Reporting by Clark Mindock, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Sandra Maler
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
file photo: A logo of the autonomous driving technology startup Pony.ai is seen on a screen during an event in Beijing, China May 13, 2021. REUTERS/Tingshu Wang
BEIJING, Aug 4 (Reuters) – Autonomous vehicle technology startup Pony.Ai on Friday said it would set up a joint venture with Japan’s Toyota Motor (7203.T) with an investment of 1 billion yuan ($139 million) to mass produce robotaxis.
The new company, which will also involve Toyota’s joint venture with Chinese state-owned Guangzhou Automobile Group (GAC) (601238.SS), will be established this year and will see GAC-Toyota produce cars that will use Pony.Ai’s ride-hailing software, Pony.Ai said.
The venture marks a new development in the partnership between Pony.Ai and Toyota, which first teamed up in 2019. In the years since, the Japanese automaker has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in Pony.Ai.
Pony.Ai, which has offices in China and the United States, has launched robotaxi services in Beijing and Guangzhou.
Toyota last month said it planned to accelerate local design and development of “smart cockpits” that meet the needs of the Chinese market, as part of a broad pivot to electric vehicles as it seeks to catch up with increasingly aggressive local rivals.
($1 = 7.1806 yuan)
Reporting by Beijing newsroom; Writing by Liz Lee; Editing by Tom Hogue and Christopher Cushing
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
BENGALURU, July 25 (Reuters) – India’s Bajaj Auto (BAJA.NS) beat expectations on Tuesday, reporting a nearly 42% increase in first-quarter profit on the back of robust demand for its commercial vehicles.
Demand pick-up in rural areas and a prolonged wedding season in the country amid some ease in inflation helped automakers log gains during the quarter.
Profit rose to 16.65 billion Indian rupees ($203.45 million) for the quarter ended June 30, compared with analysts’ expectations of 16.41 billion rupees, according to IBES data from Refinitv.
Sales of commercial vehicles, which include three-wheeler auto-rickshaws and mini pick-up vans, more than doubled in the domestic market, while two-wheeler sales grew 73%.
This helped the Pulsar motorcycle maker book a total revenue increase of nearly 29% to 103.10 billion rupees.
However, exports of two-wheelers and commercial vehicles fell for a second consecutive quarter by around 34% from a year ago, as persisting macroeconomic headwinds affected its overseas markets.
Exports had fallen by 41% in the March quarter, dragging profit growth to 2.5% from 10% a year earlier.
In April, U.K.-based Triumph Motorcycles tied up with the company to transfer its distribution operations within India to Bajaj Auto, as overseas motorcycle makers began eyeing India’s premium motorcycle market.
Rival TVS Motors (TVSM.NS) also beat expectations on Monday on strong demand, while Hero MotoCorp (HROM.NS), the world’s largest two-wheeler maker by sales, will report on Aug. 10.
Shares of Bajaj Auto traded about 1% down on Tuesday. The stock climbed about 20.8% in the April-June quarter compared to a 23.7% rise in the Nifty auto index (.NIFTYAUTO) and a 10.5% rise in the blue-chip Nifty 50 (.NSEI).
($1 = 81.8375 Indian rupees)
Reporting by Biplob Kumar Das in Bengaluru; Editing by Janane Venkatraman
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
TOKYO, April 25 (Reuters) – Japanese startup ispace inc (9348.T) is preparing to land its Hakuto-R Mission 1 (M1) spacecraft on the moon early on Wednesday, in what would be the world’s first lunar landing by a private company if it succeeds.
The M1 lander is set to touch down around 1:40 a.m. Japan time (1640 GMT Tuesday) after taking off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a SpaceX rocket in December.
Success would mark a welcome reversal from the recent setbacks Japan has faced in space technology, where it has big ambitions of building a domestic industry, including a goal of sending Japanese astronauts to the moon by the late 2020s.
In one of the biggest blows, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) last month lost its new medium-lift H3 rocket to forced manual destruction after it reached space. That was less than five months since JAXA’s solid-fuel Epsilon rocket failed after launch in October.
The 2.3-metre-tall (7.55 ft) M1 will begin an hour-long landing phase from its current position, in the moon’s orbit some 100 km (62 miles) above the surface moving at nearly 6,000 km/hour (3,700 mph), Chief Technology Officer Ryo Ujiie told a media briefing on Monday.
Ujiie likened the task of slowing down the lander to the correct speed against the moon’s gravitational pull to “stepping on the brakes on a running bicycle at the edge of a ski jumping hill.”
Only the United States, the former Soviet Union and China have soft-landed a spacecraft on the moon, with attempts in recent years by India and a private Israeli company ending in failure.
After reaching the landing site at the edge of Mare Frigoris, in the moon’s northern hemisphere, the M1 is to deploy a two-wheeled, baseball-sized rover developed by JAXA, Japanese toymaker Tomy Co (7867.T) and Sony Group (6758.T), as well as the United Arab Emirates’ four-wheeled “Rashid” Rover.
The M1 is also carrying an experimental solid-state battery made by NGK Spark Plug Co (5334.T), among other objects to gauge how they perform on the moon.
In its second mission scheduled in 2024, the M1 will bring ispace’s own rover, while from 2025, it is set to work with U.S. space lab Draper to bring NASA payloads to the moon, targeting building a permanently staffed lunar colony by 2040.
Shares of the Tokyo-based lunar transportation startup had a blistering market debut on the Tokyo Stock Exchange this month as investors bet its lunar development and transportation business will fit in with Japan’s national policy of defence and space development.
Reporting by Kantaro Komiya; Editing by Chang-Ran Kim and Stephen Coates
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
BENGALURU, April 3 (Reuters) – India’s top two-wheeler manufacturers saw a rise in domestic sales in March, spurred by festive demand, while commercial vehicle sales continued to grow on pre-buying ahead of the implementation of tighter fuel emission norms.
Volume growth for the final month of the fiscal year indicates healthy demand during the festive season and higher dispatches before the transition to new emission norms, analysts at Motilal Oswal said in a note.
These norms, which were implemented on April 1, require automakers to fit their vehicles with a device to check emissions, leading to extra costs. Maruti Suzuki Ltd (MRTI.NS), Hero MotoCorp Ltd (HROM.NS) and Tata Motors Ltd (TAMO.NS) have all announced price hikes in the last few weeks to meet the additional costs.
Domestic sales at Hero, India’s largest bike-maker by volume, grew 20.9%, while TVS Motor Co Ltd (TVSM.NS) posted a 22.5% rise in sales. Eicher Motors’s (EICH.NS) Royal Enfield bikes reported a 2.4% rise in domestic sales.
Sales of two-wheelers, indicative of the financial health of India’s rural economy and demand in the country’s largest consumption segment, loosely defined as lower middle-income households, have been stressed.
While it grew month-on-month in March, a recovery in two-wheeler sales is still not in sight, the analysts said, without providing additional details.
Among passenger vehicles, Maruti Suzuki saw a 0.8% decline in domestic sales, while Tata Motors reported a 4.1% jump in sales.
However, demand for costlier and popular utility vehicles (UV) was undeterred, with Maruti Suzuki’s UV sales jumping 48% and Mahindra and Mahindra Ltd (MAHM.NS) reporting a 31% rise in the segment.
The domestic commercial vehicle segment continued to see a rise in sales as fleet operators and logistics firms made purchases ahead of the fuel emission norms, when buses and trucks are set to become more expensive.
Ashok Leyland Ltd (ASOK.NS) reported a 23.3% rise in domestic sales, while Eicher Motors’ monthly sales grew 42%. Market leader Tata Motors posted a 2% rise in domestic sales.
“Medium and heavy duty trucks dispatches were above estimates, led by strong demand from underlying industries and heavy pre-buying before BS6-II transition,” the analysts said in the note.
Below is a list of overall sales figures from some of India’s leading auto companies that have reported so far:
Reporting by Ashish Chandra in Bengaluru; Editing by Sonia Cheema
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
BERLIN, March 17 (Reuters) – Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE) plans to invest in mines to bring down the cost of battery cells, meet half of its own demand and sell to third-party customers, the carmaker’s board member in charge of technology said.
Europe’s biggest carmaker wants its battery unit PowerCo to become a global battery supplier, not just produce for Volkswagen’s own needs, Thomas Schmall told Reuters in an interview.
PowerCo will start by delivering cells to Ford (F.N) for the 1.2 million vehicles the U.S. carmaker is building in Europe on Volkswagen’s electric MEB platform, he said.
Long-term, Volkswagen plans to build enough cells to meet half its global battery needs, with most production capacity located in Europe and North America, according to Schmall.
“The bottleneck for raw materials is mining capacity – that’s why we need to invest in mines directly,” he said.
The carmaker was partnering on supply deals with mining companies in Canada, where it will build its first North American battery plant.
Schmall declined to comment on further locations under consideration or where or when Volkswagen might invest directly in mines, saying the company would not disclose that information until the market was more settled.
“In future, there will be a select number of battery standards. Through our large volume and third-party sales business, we want to be one of those standards,” he said.
AMBITIOUS ROADMAP
Making or sourcing batteries at a reasonable cost is a key challenge for carmakers like Volkswagen, Tesla (TSLA.O) and Stellantis (STLAM.MI) as they seek to make electric vehicles (EVs) affordable.
Only Tesla has pledged more investment into battery production than Volkswagen, according to a Reuters analysis – though even the U.S. EV maker is struggling to ramp up production and is recruiting Asian suppliers to help.
Few carmakers have disclosed direct stakes in mines, but many have struck deals with producers to source materials like lithium, nickel and cobalt and pass them onto their battery suppliers.
PowerCo, set up last year, is targeting 20 billion euros ($21.22 billion) in annual sales by 2030.
It’s an ambitious roadmap for a unit not yet producing at scale. Production will start in 2025 at PowerCo’s plant in Salzgitter, Germany, 2026 in Valencia, Spain and 2027 in Ontario, Canada.
Still, Schmall is confident the carmaker can expand quickly – and must do so if it wants to build an affordable EV, in which 40% of the costs come from the battery.
Volkswagen released on Thursday the details of a 25,000-euro EV it aims to sell in Europe from 2025.
China’s BYD, which also produces batteries, is far ahead of Volkswagen in the affordable EV race and outsold the German carmaker for the second time in four months in China in February.
REDUCING COSTS
In Volkswagen’s 180-billion-euro five year spending plan, up to 15 billion is earmarked for its three announced battery plants and some raw material sourcing.
The carmaker has so far nailed down raw material supply until 2026 – by which time the German and Spanish plants will be in operation – and will decide in the next few months how to meet its demand from then on, Schmall said in the interview.
It has also ordered some $14 billion in batteries from Northvolt’s Swedish plant.
“Bringing down battery costs further is a challenge,” Schmall said. “We’re using all the instruments with PowerCo.”
Asian producers like CATL, LG Chem and Samsung SDI dominate global cell production, with almost half of planned battery cell capacity in Europe by Asian players.
Half the staff at Volkswagen’s PowerCo are industry veterans from Asia, Schmall said, enabling the battery unit to enter the industry at the top of the learning curve.
($1 = 0.9427 euros)
Reporting by Victoria Waldersee; Editing by Susan Fenton
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
SHANGHAI/HONG KONG, Dec 12 (Reuters) – For more than a decade, Chinese developers’ debt-fuelled construction boom enriched the country’s shadow banks, who were eager to capitalise on the needs of an industry desperate for credit and too risky for traditional lenders.
Now, in the wake of a government clampdown on real estate firms’ debt binge, that credit demand has collapsed – and so too has the single biggest revenue stream for shadow banks, also known as trust firms.
China’s shadow banking industry – worth about $3 trillion, roughly the size of Britain’s economy – is scrambling for new business, including direct investment in companies, family offices and asset management.
It is also shrinking, with once-well-paid employees leaving for other jobs after scavenging for new deals. The industry’s plight is a sharp contrast to China’s main street financial firms, which the crisis has not yet seriously affected.
“Everyone was eating a mouthful of rice, surviving another day,” said Jason Hao, who left his job this year at a Shanghai trust firm after his pay plunged from as much as 4 million yuan ($570,000) a year to about 240,000 yuan ($34,000).
He is now working at an asset management company.
Data from industry-tracking website Yanglee.com shows 1,483 real estate-related trust products were sold in 2022 through the end of September, down 69.7% from 4,891 during the same period last year.
The value of the 2022 deals was 117.2 billion yuan, down 77.9% from 531.3 billion yuan. Real estate products accounted for 8.7% of all trust products in September, compared with about 30% in the same month the last two years.
The National Audit Office and China’s banking regulator have both been reviewing trust firm accounts and deals this year for risk, said three people with knowledge of the matter.
The National Audit Office and the CBIRC did not respond to requests for comment.
In an internal meeting in October, an executive at Shanghai Trust, a state-owned firm that once focussed on property, said revenue was down by almost half this year compared with the year before, according to two people with direct knowledge of the meeting.
The firm plans to focus on asset management and family offices to shore up its finances while pivoting away from lending to developers, once its core business, one of the people said.
Shanghai Trust did not respond to requests for comment.
The top priority for all trust companies now is “how to transition, what will let you survive,” said another trust firm employee, who like the other current employees interviewed for this article declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter.
CONTAGION RISK
Trust firms were dubbed “shadow banks” because of how they operated outside many of the rules that govern commercial banks. Banks in China sell wealth management products, the proceeds of which are channelled by trust firms to property developers and other sectors that are unable to tap bank funding directly.
Because of the risk, shadow banks could charge interest rates of up to 18%, far higher than the typical 2% to 6% seen at banks at the height of the boom.
Concerns about outsized exposure to property developers have grown this year as the embattled sector in the world’s second-largest economy has slowed rapidly.
Beijing has stepped up support in recent weeks to undo a liquidity squeeze that has stifled the real estate market, which makes up a quarter of the Chinese economy and has been a key driver of growth.
OUT OF OPTIONS
At the trust unit of state-owned China Construction Bank (CCB) and Zhongrong International Trust, previously one of China’s largest shadow bankers, investing like private equity and venture capital funds has become more common, two people with direct knowledge of the companies said.
CCB Trust wants to invest in leading companies in niche fields; it recently invested in Beijing Tianyishangjia New Material Corp, which manufacturers materials used in train brakes, said one person who works at the company.
Zhongrong International Trust has been working with local governments, including Qingdao provincial authorities, to source early stage deals in intelligent manufacturing, an executive there said.
Jiangxi-based Avic Trust has been investing in waste-processing firms, including funding photovoltaic power stations that it then rents out, said a person with direct knowledge.
CCB Trust, Zhongrong International Trust and Avic Trust
did not respond to requests for comment.
In some cases, trust firms are buying projects from struggling developers and hiring new managers to recoup their losses, according to corporate records and three people in trust firms who are aware of such acquisitions.
Ping An Trust, Zhongrong International Trust, Everbright Xinglong Trust and Minmetals International Trust have all bought project companies from struggling developers in the last few months, corporate records and company announcements showed.
Ping An Trust, Zhongrong International Trust, Everbright Xinglong Trust
and Minmetals International Trust did not respond to requests for comment.
For Hao and other former trust employees, the companies’ search for stability feels familiar.
“My situation now is better than it was when I left the trust, but will never be as good as it was at the height of the boom when I was there,” Hao said.
($1 = 6.9905 Chinese yuan renminbi)
Reporting Engen Tham in Shanghai, Clare Jim and Julie Zhu in Hong Kong; Editing by Sumeet Chatterjee and Gerry Doyle
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Nov 22 (Reuters) – Japan’s Mazda Motor Corp (7261.T) will invest about 1.5 trillion yen ($10.58 billion)to electrify its vehicles, including boosting production of battery EVs, and aims to increase their share in the company’s overall global car sales by 2030.
Mazda’s senior managing executive officer Akira Koga said the investment would be made along with its “partners”, without elaborating, and will be used for research and development. The news was first reported by the Nikkei business daily.
The ratio of electric vehicles (EVs) in global sales is expected to rise to between 25 percent and 40 percent as of 2030, from 25% previously, the company said in a statement.
Mazda CEO Akira Marumoto also told a news conference that the company had reached an agreement with Envision AESC, the battery business of Chinese renewable energy group Envision, to procure batteries for EVs produced in Japan.
The automaker also said it had agreed to work with seven companies, including electric component manufacturer Rohm Co (6963.T), to jointly develop and produce electric drive units.
Automakers worldwide are spending billions of dollars to ramp up battery and EV production in the face of tougher environmental regulations.
In August, Toyota Motor Corp (7203.T) said it would invest up to 730 billion yen in Japan and the United States to make batteries for fully electric vehicles as opposed to hybrid gasoline-electric cars like the Prius.
Its rival Honda Motor Co (7267.T) also said in the same month it would build a new $4.4 billion lithium-ion battery plant for EVs in the United States with Korean battery supplier LG Energy Solution Ltd (373220.KS).
Mazda is aiming for about 4.5 trillion yen in net sales for the business year ending March 2026, a jump of about 45% from the financial year ending March 2022, the company said.
Shoichi Matsumoto, Envision AESC chief executive, told Reuters last month it was in talks with automakers in Japan, Europe, the United States and China for new supply deals.
Envision AESC, based in Japan, was originally established as a joint venture between Nissan Motor Co (7201.T), NEC Corp (6701.T) and its subsidiary NEC TOKIN Corporation.
($1 = 141.7400 yen)
($1 = 141.7500 yen)
Reporting by Tokyo Newsroom; Editing by Christopher Cushing, Kenneth Maxwell and Ana Nicolaci da Costa
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
MEXICO CITY, Oct 27 (Reuters) – Auto manufacturing companies Volkswagen and Continental both pledged major investments in Mexico on Thursday totaling nearly $1 billion, one of the biggest sums for the sector to be announced in a single day during the current government.
Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE) said it will invest $763.5 million between 2022 and 2025 at its complex in the central state of Puebla, one of Volkswagen’s largest facilities globally, to build a new paint plant and start production of a new gasoline-powered car.
The company, which currently makes Jetta, Taos and Tiguan models at the plant, did not detail which car it would add to the line-up.
It added that the paint plant would be powered by wind turbines, becoming the carmaker’s first to run exclusively on clean energy
.
Earlier in the day, fellow German auto parts maker Continental AG (CONG.DE) said it would invest around 210 million euros ($209.16 million) to open a new automotive electronics factory and expand capacity at an existing brake components plant in the central state of Guanajuato.
Both projects are nearly completed, with openings expected early next year, it said in a statement.
Continental said it expects to generate more than 1,500 new jobs over the next three years through the expansion.
Among the other large auto companies pumping money into the country is General Motors, which last year announced a $1 billion investment at its Ramos Arizpe complex, where it will begin making electric vehicles in 2023.
Nissan in May announced a $700 million investment over the next three years.
Jeep maker Stellantis is also reported to be looking to invest billions to make electric vehicles in Mexico, while Tesla chief executive Elon Musk is considering investing in the north of the country, sources told Reuters this week.
($1 = 1.0040 euros)
Reporting by Isabel Woodford; Editing by Christian Plumb and Jonathan Oatis
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.