Quanta says name used to defraud US$100m
have said.
Billionaire SoftBank chairman Masayoshi Son is trying to close the Vision Fund, backed by his own company along with money from Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Development Co. Apple, Qualcomm Inc and Oracle Corp chairman Larry Ellison may invest US$1 billion each in the fund, people familiar with the matter have said.
The fund’s mandate is to back next-generation technologies, such as artificial intelligence and the Internet of things.
SoftBank is already a backer of Didi’s but Son may now be doubling down on a bet that technology will transform transportation in China — the same way he gambled on e-commerce giant Alibaba and shifts in domestic consumption.
“The car-hailing business might be limited in market size, but if you look at the entire transport industry and possibilities, then Didi is very well-positioned,” said Zhou Xin, a consultant at Trustdata, here.
Didi, led by chief executive officer Cheng Wei, became China’s ride-sharing leader after buying out Uber’s domestic operations.
As it doesn’t charge taxi drivers any fees, the bulk of its revenue comes from taking a commission from rides in private cars and limos — a sector that’s been hampered by stricter qualification requirements for drivers and cars.
Didi wants to take advantage of data on 300 million users across some 400 cities. The four-yearold company opened an artificial intelligence lab in Mountain View, California this month. Called Didi Labs, it’s already wooed dozens of stalwarts in the field. Bloomberg VILNIUS/TAIPEH: Taiwan-based electronics manufacturer Quanta Computer Inc has acknowledged that its name was used as part of an email fraud scheme that bilked two United Statesbased Internet companies out of more than US$100 million (RM441 million).
US prosecutors last week indicted a Lithuanian man, Evaldas Rimasauskas, for the fraud.
Rimasauskas’s alleged scheme involved sending emails to employees of the two companies asking them to wire money that they owed to the Asian hardware vendor to the accounts of companies in Latvia and Cyprus that carried the name Quanta.
In order to conceal his fraud from banks that handled the transfers, Rimasaukas forged invoices, contracts and letters purportedly signed by executives of the two victim companies, according to prosecutors.
In a statement on Monday, Quanta spokesman Carol Hu said the company had been “impersonated” as part of the fraud.
Quanta, with a market capitalisation of US$8.4 billion, is a supplier of servers and other hardware to major technology companies. Reuters