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🇰🇷 South Korea sells $60 billion of chips in one month: Exports rose 83.5% in September to a record $120.9 billion. Half of that came from semiconductors: South Korea sold $60.3 billion of chips, 263% more than a year earlier. Memory chips for AI data centers and much higher prices drove the jump. Shipments to China reached $26 billion and those to the US $24.33 billion, both more than double last year's level. Car exports fell 5.5% to $6.05 billion. From January to September, South Korea has exported more than $800 billion, already above last year's full-year record of $709.3 billion. One in every two export dollars now comes from the chip industry.

🇨🇳 State-owned lessor financed servers with restricted Nvidia chips: Semi-Tech Leasing is majority-owned by city and provincial governments, including Shenzhen and Beijing. According to filings with Beijing regulators reviewed by Bloomberg, the company financed listed firm Glory View's purchase of more than 700 servers for over 3 billion yuan ($440 million). Thirty-two of them are Asustek machines running Nvidia's B300, a chip that cannot be sold to China without a US license. The filings list most of the servers at a China Mobile data center in Zhongwei, Ningxia province. By the end of June, Semi-Tech had replaced the entries with redacted versions that leave out server models, suppliers and locations. Nvidia says it is looking into the case with its hardware partner.

🇮🇳 Moneyview jumps 62% on its first trading day: The Bengaluru-based finance app has been making personal loans by phone since 2014. On Thursday, the stock opened at 55 rupees in Mumbai against an issue price of 34 rupees. The IPO raised 10.9 billion rupees, of which 7.5 billion went to the company as fresh capital and the rest to existing shareholders. The offering was 98 times oversubscribed, and the institutional tranche 227 times. A retail investor allotted one lot of 441 shares was up about 9,500 rupees on day one.

🇸🇬 VSMC opens a $7.8 billion chip plant in Singapore: VSMC is a joint venture between Taiwanese foundry Vanguard International Semiconductor, in which TSMC holds a stake, and Dutch chipmaker NXP. Its first plant in Tampines processes 300-millimeter wafers, the silicon discs the chips are cut from. It makes mature, proven nodes from 130 to 40 nanometers for power supply and analog chips in cars, industrial equipment and phones. Volume production starts in the first quarter of 2027. By 2029 the plant is to turn out 44,000 wafers a month and employ around 1,600 people. Carmakers and machine builders gain another source of standard chips outside China and Taiwan.

🇨🇳 Leapmotor delivers a record 105,656 cars: The Hangzhou-based EV maker delivered 58.5% more cars in September than a year earlier, topping 100,000 for the third month in a row. After nine months it stands at 666,539 cars, already more than the 596,555 it delivered in all of last year. More than 27,000 cars went abroad in September, sold through Leapmotor International, its joint venture with Stellantis, which now has over 1,000 sales and service points in Europe. To hit its full-year target of 1 million cars, Leapmotor still needs 333,461, an average of 111,154 a month. That means beating its record month every month until December.

ALSO LAST WEEK

🇯🇵 Japan's big manufacturers are at their most confident since 2018. The Tankan, the Bank of Japan's quarterly business survey, rose from 22 to 24 points for large manufacturers, its sixth straight increase. Companies expect 13.6% higher profits and 10.3% higher exports this fiscal year, but they see the index slipping to 21 by December.

🇨🇳 Camsense jumps 185% on its Hong Kong debut. The Shenzhen company makes laser and lidar sensors that help robot vacuums spot obstacles and find their way around a home. The stock opened at HK$168 against an issue price of HK$58.85, and the retail tranche was 3,546 times oversubscribed. Close to two thirds of the HK$682 million (about $87 million) raised goes into research.

🇨🇳 Chinese makers build 95% of all humanoid robots. According to IDC, almost 25,000 humanoids shipped worldwide in the first half, up 432% year on year. Nine of the ten largest vendors are Chinese, led by AgiBot with about 8,600 units and Unitree with about 5,000. IDC expects annual shipments to exceed 750,000 by 2030.

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