Financial
• The South African government recently published a notice in the government gazette reviewing the tariff structure on solar equipment imported into the country. The outcome is that they want to increase the price of renewable energy products imported to promote local manufacturing. The notice includes solar photovoltaic, wind energy, battery energy storage systems, and a proposed increase on ordinary customs duties on other products used in these industries.
• According to TrendForce, geopolitical tensions are fuelling a wave of AI chip independence as both US and Chinese CSPs race to develop in-house ASICs, a move that is set to redefine the AI landscape. The prioritisation by CSPs on developing AI on ASICs is to reduce the reliance on NVIDIA and AMD GPUs and ultimately gain greater control over cost and performance. The move is also set to improve supply chain flexibility. Amongst US manufacturers Google is leading the charge with its TPU v6 Trillium, which offers improved energy efficiency and performance for large-scale AI models.
• The top 10 semiconductor packaging and testing (OSAT) companies of 2024 have been revealed with China seeing double-digit growth and reshaping the global market landscape. The combined revenue of the world’s top 10 OSAT companies reached $41,56 billion, up 3% YoY. ASE led the ranking with revenue of $18,54 billion, amounting to a 45% share of the top ten.
• The global demand for N-type SiC substrate has weakened in 2024 by 9% over the previous year due to a declining demand in the automotive and industrial sectors. Although long-term growth is promising, the outlook for 2025 shows that this market will continue to face pressures of low demand and oversupply.
• According to TrendForce, the boom in AI is driving the current surge in demand for data centre interconnect (DCI) products with the current market value expected to grow 14,3% in 2025 to surpass $40 billion. DCI enables high-speed data transmission across short distances between two or more data centres, which alleviates the massive computational load driven by AI data processing.
Companies
• South African Airways (SAA) recently announced that it was the target of a cyberattack that began on 3 May 2025. The attack temporarily disrupted several operational systems and prevented access to its website and mobile application. A swift response successfully contained the incident and minimised disruption to its core flight operations with normal functionality returned on the same day.
• Invertek Drives, part of Sumitomo Heavy Industries, has been awarded The King’s Award for Enterprise – International Trade 2025, recognising the company’s continued growth in overseas markets. The award acknowledges Invertek’s impressive 149% growth over a six-year period, despite setbacks like the COVID-19 pandemic and the electronics supply chain disruptions.
• At the 2025 South Africa Investment Conference, co-hosted by the Embassy of the Republic of South Africa in China, Brand South Africa, and South African Tourism, the Hisense Group was invited to participate as an outstanding example of Chinese enterprise investment in South Africa. During the high-level forum, Hisense shared its long-standing development experience in the country, under the theme of “Investing in South Africa: Towards a Shared Future & Common Prosperity”.The conference brought together nearly 200 representatives from Chinese enterprises across key sectors including finance, energy, infrastructure, agriculture, and manufacturing.
Technologies
• Siemens Digital Industries Software recently announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Excellicon. This will bring Excellicon’s best-in-class software for the development, verification, and management of timing constraints to Siemens’ EDA portfolio of software for IC design. The planned acquisition enables Siemens to deliver an innovative approach to both implementation and verification flows. This will enable SoC designers to improve power, performance and area, accelerate design closure, enhance functional and structural constraint correctness, improve productivity and address key gaps in the current workflows.
• KIOXIA Europe announced that it has collaborated with Linus Media Group to set a new Guinness World Records title for the most accurate value of Pi. A groundbreaking 300 trillion digits were calculated and officially verified and confirmed by Guinness World Records. The computation was enabled by a high-performance storage cluster comprising 2,2 petabytes of 30,72 terabyte CM Series and 15,36 TB CD Series PCIe NVMe-based SSDs from KIOXIA. These SSDs were configured in a network-attached storage environment connected to a dual-CPU compute server. The reliability and performance of KIOXIA’s NVMe SSDs enabled the project to run continuous, intensive compute operations at speeds up to 100 GB/s for seven months, without a single SSD failure.
• Yamaha Robotics Europe SMT Section has introduced instantaneous 3D component update, included with the latest software release for YRi-V automatic optical inspection (AOI) systems, letting users optimise inspection programs without stopping production, thereby enabling non-stop productivity. The latest software update is available free of charge for all Yamaha YRi-V users and is compatible with older Yamaha YSi-V systems already in service.
• At GTC 2025, NVIDIA announced two new networking switch platforms – Spectrum-X Photonics and Quantum-X Photonics - based on Co-Packaged Optics (CPO) technology. Spectrum-X, targeting Ethernet-based architectures, will be released in 2026 and offers configurations ranging from 128 ports at 800 Gb/s to 2,048 ports at 200 Gb/s, with total bandwidth reaching 400 Tb/s. Quantum-X, supporting InfiniBand and scheduled for late 2025, uses 200 Gb/s SerDes and delivers up to 144 ports at 800 Gb/s. Both platforms incorporate TSMC’s 3D hybrid bonding technology.
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