07th FEBRUARY 2021,

• Apple supplier Dialog in talks with Renesas with $6 billion sale. 

Renesas Electronics Corp. of Japan has agreed to acquire Apple Inc. supplier Dialog Semiconductor Plc, the latest UK-based chipmaker being sold to Asian investors. Renesas is making an all-cash offer of about 4.9 billion euros ($5.9 billion), at 67.50 euros per share, according to a statement made by the companies on Monday. Dialog has agreed to the terms of the transaction. Dialog shares rose as much as 18% in early trading in London on Monday. Renesas shares dropped as much as 6.9% in Tokyo. The offer price represents a 20% premium to Dialog’s Friday close of 56.12 euros. 

Dialog and Renesas have been working together for over a decade. The U.K. company said in August that it would collaborate with Renesas on-car computing platforms. Both companies have noted themselves as part of tensions concerning the semiconductor supply chain. Within the auto industry, a semiconductor shortage is forcing carmakers to halt production lines and is straining their relationship with chip suppliers. Like Dialog, Renesas is also a supplier to Apple. The U.S. tech giant was reported to be in talks to buy Renesas SP Drivers, 55% owned by Renesas, in 2014. The unit, which managed LCD displays, was later sold to Synaptics Inc. for $475 million.

• Porsche sales to comprise 80 % Electric cars by 2030. 

Over 80% of the vehicles sold by Porsche by the end of this decade will be electric, CEO Oliver Blume told German newspaper Bild am Sonntag in an interview on Sunday. This will include fully electric and hybrid variants, while Porsche will continue to offer its 911 model with internal combustion engines, albeit able to handle synthetic fuels, the newspaper quoted the executive as saying. According to the report, Porsche will invest $18.1 billion in the electrification of its vehicles over the next five years.

Porsche said earlier that it expects about half of the cars it sells by 2025 will be electric. Over the next five years, Porsche will invest 15 billion euros ($18.1 billion) in the electrification of its vehicles, the newspaper said. Of the company’s fully electric Taycan model, which starts at 80.000 euros, over 20,000 units were shipped to customers last year.

• We should be teleporting not transporting, ourselves: Zuckerberg

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, while speaking on the private audio-based social media app Clubhouse, talked about how virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) can widen the scope for remote work. The Facebook founder spoke on the company’s AR and VR developments saying that its research into space from Facebook Reality Labs is about delivering presence without physical travel. Facebook apparently has a roadmap for the development of VR and AR technologies expected to take four to five years and that such technology could be used in remote working environments. 

"We should be teleporting, not transporting, ourselves," Zuckerberg said, adding that VR and AR will allow people to live wherever they want while appearing more present than video-chatting apps. Speaking about the coronavirus pandemic, Mr. Zuckerberg said that lockdowns have revealed there is no reason for employers to tie recruiting employees to physical locations and offices hypothesizing that VR and AR could unlock the ability for people to live where they want while being ‘present’ where they need to be.

• Bitcoin rally takes market cap of over 6,000 cryptocurrencies to whopping new high of $1.24 trillion 

The world’s most valuable cryptocurrency Bitcoin had traded at $41,973 price on January 8, 2021, as per data from Coin Metrics. It’s since declined below the $41,000 level. The Bitcoin worth rally, which topped $40,000 once more to hit the $40,664-mark at 10.29 pm GMT on Saturday, as tracked by Coindesk, has helped the market cap of all cryptocurrencies scale to a recent report. The new high got here practically a month after the full market cap scaled to $1.1 trillion on January 10, 2021, after hitting the sooner all-time high of $848 billion on January 6, 2018.