In March, Premier Li Keqiang named semiconductors as the top priority of the 10 industries China wants to foster in its “Made in China 2025” initiative. But China’s ambitions were already clear in 2014 when it launched the National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund — better known as the Big Fund — in 2014 with 138 billion yuan ($21.9 billion) in seed capital, which it hoped would turbocharge investment from local governments and the private sector. Source Asian Review
Dutch airline KLM is cutting another 800 to 1 thousand jobs. The aviation sector is not recovering and it is increasingly difficult to make ends meet, the Dutch airline announced on Thursday.
KLM is cutting 500 full-time jobs among the cabin crew, 100 jobs among pilots, and 200 to 400 jobs among the ground crew. This comes on top of the 5 thousand job cuts the airline announced last year with its reorganization plans to get through the coronavirus pandemic. Source NLTimes
Fraport Greece reported a 71.4% annual decline in passenger traffic last year at the 14 regional airports it operates in Greece. The total number of passengers who used the airports of Thessaloniki, Corfu, Hania, Cephalonia, Zakynthos, Aktio, Kavala, Rhodes, Kos, Samos, Mytilene, Mykonos, Santorini and Skiathos reached 8,611,780, of which 5,994,180 were on international flights – a year-on-year decline of 74.2%. Source Ekathimerini
Russian oil drilling giant Gazprom Neft opened a crypto mining farm running on associated gas energy unlocking the power of Russia’s oil and gas resources for the needs of bitcoin (BTC) mining, reports Yahoo Finance. The venue for cryptocurrency mining is on one of the company’s oil drilling sites in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug in Siberia. It is using the associated gas from Gazprom Neft’s oil field as an energy source and has its own power plant to transform this gas into electricity. Source Realnoevremya
