SRILANKAN AIRLINES MGT CONTRACT: Govt. may go for fresh round of bidding: Minister
The government would go for a fresh round of bidding for the management contract of Srilankan Airlines if the Prime Ministerial Committee tasked with choosing a finalist is not able to do so within the next 1-2 weeks, Public Enterprise Development Minister Kabir Hashim said yesterday.
“During the last meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Economic Management, the Prime Minister said that if a suitable candidate cannot be chosen from the shortlist, a new committee headed by myself and comprising of Malik Samarawickrama and Sarath Amunugama should call for fresh bids,” he said.
Hashim said that currently a Special Committee appointed by Premier Ranil Wickremesinghe is evaluating the three shortlisted candidates, and the results would be known in 1-2 weeks.
The shortlisted candidates are the American private equity firm Texas Pacific Group (TPG), Supergroup which has connections to the Maldives, and Peaceair which is owned by a local, but funded by partners from a number of countries including Switzerland and Monaco.
- China’s largest chip maker has announced it will invest US$30 billion to build a new semiconductor factory, as the world’s second largest economy seeks to reduce its dependence on foreign technology.
The state-owned Tsinghua Unigroup will open the facility in the city of Nanjing in eastern Jiangsu province, where it will mainly produce chips used in consumer electronics such as cellphones, cameras and computers, according to a statement posted Thursday on the company’s official website.
The project “is of great significance to the independent innovation, largescale production, and marketization of China’s integrated circuit industry”, the statement said.
The announcement comes after attempts by the company to take-over US chip makers Micron Technology and Sandisk were curbed by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) over national security concerns.
Its ambitions to acquire American technology thwarted, Tsinghua Unigroup has shifted its focus to building plants in China, launching a $24 billion memory chip factory in Wuhan city last month, according to online news site Sohu.
China was the largest market for semiconductors in the world in 2015.
Its excessive dependence on imported chips has raised concern in Beijing over the country’s national security, according to a report by the US Department of Commerce.