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Mérieux NutriSciences Enters Agreement to Acquire Worldwide Food Testing Business of Bureau Veritas

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The transaction will create a business with $1bn in revenue, significantly reinforcing Mérieux NutriSciences’ position as a global leader in food testing, inspection, and certification (TIC).It expands Mérieux NutriSciences’ geographic footprint, doubling its presence in Asia Pacific and Canada, and providing access to new regions with considerable growth potential.

CHICAGO, Oct. 7, 2024 /CNW/ — Mérieux NutriSciences, a world leader in food safety, quality, and sustainability, announced today that it has entered into an agreement to acquire the food testing business of Bureau Veritas for an Enterprise Value of EUR 360 million. This strategic acquisition, supported by its parent company, Institut Mérieux, reinforces Mérieux NutriSciences’ commitment to promoting safer, healthier, and more sustainable food systems on a global scale.

The scope of this deal covers Bureau Veritas’ food laboratory testing activities —microbiological and chemical analysis, and molecular testing. These serve food sector customers through a network of 34 laboratories and 1,900 technical staff across 15 countries in the Americas, Africa, and Asia Pacific. Additionally, Mérieux NutriSciences is in advanced discussions with AsureQuality, the New Zealand-based food assurance provider, to continue the joint ventures which currently exist between Bureau Veritas and AsureQuality in Australia and Southeast Asia.

Building on Mérieux NutriSciences’ existing worldwide presence and reputation for delivering high-value, science-based solutions to its customers, this acquisition will enhance its global footprint, extending its operations to 32 countries, and doubling its presence in Canada and the Asia Pacific region.

Mérieux NutriSciences is a leader in the ~US$15B global food TIC market, which is experiencing steady growth of around 5% annually, largely driven by rising consumer demand for food safety and quality, heightened stringency in regulations, sustainability and traceability of the food supply chain, and innovation in food technology. With a collaborative network of nearly 140 laboratories and over 10,000 employees, the company will be even better positioned to meet the evolving needs of this growing industry through its comprehensive services, including testing, auditing, consultancy, research, environmental footprinting, training, and digital solutions.

“The acquisition of Bureau Veritas’ food testing business marks a pivotal milestone for Mérieux NutriSciences. It will significantly enhance our ability to serve our customers, and ultimately increase our contribution to the safety, quality, and sustainability of global food systems. After closing of the transaction, together with the 1,900 future colleagues joining us from Bureau Veritas, we will be even stronger in fulfilling our purpose: ‘Better Food. Better Health. Better World.'” said Nicolas Cartier, CEO of Mérieux NutriSciences.

“We are pleased to partner with Mérieux NutriSciences, a leader in Food testing, whose global footprint and proven expertise is the perfect fit for our food business and would allow it to thrive and to contribute to make food systems safer, healthier and more sustainable.” added Hinda Gharbi, CEO of Bureau Veritas.

The transaction is expected to close by the end of the fourth quarter of 2024, once customary closing conditions have been met, including regulatory clearance in certain geographies.

About Mérieux NutriSciences:

At Mérieux NutriSciences, we leverage over 50 years of scientific and entrepreneurial expertise to answer food industry needs. Today’s global challenges transform the way food is produced, marketed and consumed, which is why we know our clients need more than reliable analytical results; they need practical and innovative solutions that will contribute to make food systems safer, healthier and more sustainable. Present worldwide, we are more than 100 accredited laboratories and a team of over 8,000 committed employees. We strongly believe that together, we can create solutions to offer our planet: BETTER FOOD. BETTER HEALTH. BETTER WORLD. www.merieuxnutrisciences.com

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Adyen appoints Ben Wong as General Manager, Southeast Asia and Hong Kong

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SINGAPORE, Oct. 7, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Adyen, the global financial technology platform of choice for leading businesses, today announces the appointment of Ben Wong as General Manager, Southeast Asia and Hong Kong. In his new role, Ben will oversee the company’s commercial operations in the region, focusing on growth strategies and strengthening partnerships in key markets like Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong.

A Singaporean native, Ben joined Adyen in 2016 in a technical role where he acted as a technology consultant to deliver strategic counsel to enterprises, at a time when the payments industry was in its nascency. Since making the switch to sales in 2017, Ben has led the company to major successes across retail, ecommerce, hospitality industries. His technical acumen, coupled with a deep understanding of the market and merchants’ needs has also allowed him to guide the commercial teams to deliver cross-channel payments excellence to businesses in Singapore.

Prior to Adyen, Ben spent half a decade working in fintech, information technology and project management. His tenure at previous organizations built a strong foundation for technical expertise and problem-solving skills in the fast-evolving payments industry.

“We are thrilled to have Ben in this new role, bringing his expertise and insights from working with customers in different sectors to the broader region,” said Warren Hayashi, President, Asia Pacific at Adyen. “Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong have been pivotal markets for us and with Ben’s demonstrated experience in Adyen, we are confident that he will lead the region to address the ever-evolving needs of our customers.”

“I am honored to step into this new role and contribute to Adyen’s continued growth,” said Ben Wong, General Manager, Southeast Asia and Hong Kong at Adyen. “My deep roots in the industry fuel my drive for creating exceptional experiences for consumers and building strong, lasting partnerships with our customers. I look forward to driving the business forward and achieving sustained growth for our customers and us in a region filled with immense potential.”

About Adyen

Adyen (AMS: ADYEN) is the financial technology platform of choice for leading companies. By providing end-to-end payments capabilities, data-driven insights, and financial products in a single global solution, Adyen helps businesses achieve their ambitions faster. With offices around the world, Adyen works with the likes of Meta, LVMH, SHEIN, Uber, L’Oréal, Cathay Pacific, Grab, Klook, and Singapore Airlines. For more information, visit adyen.com.

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CogX Unveils Innovative Knowledge Networking Platform, Proxxi AI, at the CogX Leadership Summit

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New platform uses pioneering “Expert-in-the-Loop” model that matches questions from users with the best specialists to answer them – all assisted by state-of-the-art AI

LONDON, Oct. 7, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — CogX Group Ltd, the tech community and online platforms group, which brings together the sector’s leaders and innovators from across the world, will showcase today its new knowledge networking platform, Proxxi AI, an “expert-in-the-loop” model that connects users and specialists to provide bespoke answers to their questions, assisted by state-of-the art AI.

Proxxi AI will be unveiled later at CogX’s London Leadership Summit at the historic Royal Albert Hall. Proxxi AI understands user questions, identifies the best available experts, assists them with answers based on their own trained “proxxi”, and features a broad range of subjects to deliver the best of AI, but with human oversight.

The live stream of the Summit will be available on YouTube from 10 am here.

Proxxi AI aims to play a leading role within a global knowledge management marketplace projected to grow beyond $1 trillion by 2026 (MarketsandMarkets), with organisations seeking faster, reliable, and lower-cost ways to access expertise and stay ahead of the curve.

Employing the latest large language models (LLMs), Proxxi AI will continuously learn and improve each expert’s proxxi and ranking. The platform will initially be accessed via Slack, Teams, and the CogX Insights app. Shortly after it will be available via API for web and mobile app developers. It supports a broad range of use cases for startups and enterprises, governments, universities and research institutions.

CogX will be demonstrating Proxxi AI at today’s Leadership Summit throughout the day.

Also announced today is the organisation of CogX’s businesses — CogX Ltd (UK Events and the CogX Insights app) and Proxxi AI (Knowledge Network)— under CogX Group Ltd  enabling the community to connect both in-person at our events, and through its two online platforms.

Charlie Muirhead, Founder and CEO of CogX, said:

“CogX’s mission is to convene our community to address the question: How do we get the next 10 years right?  To do so, we need to connect the right people to the right expertise, just when they need it.

So we’re hugely excited to be sharing Proxxi AI today at the Leadership Summit, which will instantly connect people to subject specialists through Slack and Teams our own CogX Insights app, and shortly after via our API for web and mobile app developers.

By blending AI-driven insights with trusted expert oversight, we will empower organisations, large and small, to better navigate the rapid technological changes taking place and enhance their overall performance.”

Notes to editors

About CogX

Co-founded by Charlie Muirhead in 2017, CogX is a tech community and online platforms business that convenes inspirational events featuring leading voices from a huge range of sectors. The community brings together entrepreneurs, business leaders, academics, investors and policy makers both in-person, and online.

More about CogX Leadership Summit London

Taking place at the Royal Albert Hall – the historic venue that hosted the 1851 Great Exhibition, a showcase of the 1st Industrial Revolution – the CogX Summit will focus on the 4th Industrial Revolution, an era of technological convergence that will change the way we live and work.

The Summit is being held on Monday 7th October 2024, and will bring together over 100 world-class speakers, and host over 20 editorially curated salons and mixers to answer the central question: “How do we seize the AI opportunity?

Leaders from Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Meta, Hugging Face, Northern Data, Stanford University, and companies at the forefront of generative AI will join over 2,500 delegates to discuss how to apply AI safely and responsibly today and improve productivity and drive business growth.

The live stream of the Summit is available on YouTube from 10am here. (https://shorturl.at/lj3HP).

 

 

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LG Innotek Becomes Industry’s First to Use AI to Prevent Input of Defective Raw Materials in Production

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Achieved early detection of cause of defects in raw materials through AI, becoming “first to overcome this challenge in the industry”Applied to high-value semiconductor substrates, analyzing raw material defects in only one minuteReduces defect analysis time by up to 90%

SEOUL, South Korea, Oct. 7, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Today, LG Innotek (CEO Moon Hyuksoo) announced the development and application of the industry’s first “Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based inspection system for incoming raw materials”, designed to detect defects at the point of receipt and prevent the use of substandard raw materials in the process.

LG Innotek applied its AI-based inspection technology, developed by combining material information and AI image processing technologies, to the RF-SiP (Radio Frequency System-in-Package) process. Recently, the technology was also introduced for the FC-BGA (Flip Chip Ball Grid Array), and is expected to further enhance the competitiveness and quality of LG Innotek’s high-value semiconductor substrate products.

Previously, incoming raw materials underwent only a visual inspection before entering the production process. However, the continued advancement of semiconductor substrate technology changed this. Even after improving all in-process defect causes, failures in reliability evaluations continued to rise. This led the quality of incoming materials to gain attention as a decisive factor affecting reliability evaluations. 

The core raw materials (i.e. Prepreg (PPG), Ajinomoto Build-up Film (ABF), and Copper-Clad Laminate (CCL)) that comprise semiconductor substrates arrive as a mixture of glass fibers, inorganic compounds, and other components. In the past, air voids (gaps between particles) or foreign particles generated during the material mixing process did not significantly impact product performance. However, as substrate specifications, such as circuit spacing, have become increasingly stringent, the presence of air voids and foreign particles, depending on their size, has started to cause defects.

As a result, it is virtually impossible to identify which part of the raw material is responsible for the defect using traditional visual inspection methods, which has become a significant challenge for the industry.

If we were to compare one lot of raw materials mixture (unit of raw materials with the same characteristics that goes into the production process) to a batch of cookie dough, it is impossible for the eye to perceive the concentration of salt or sugar in a certain portion, the number of air holes in the dough, or the number of foreign particles.

LG Innotek has found a way to overcome this industry challenge with AI. Its “AI-based Inspection System for Incoming Raw Materials” has been trained with tens of thousands of pieces of data on the composition of materials that are either suitable or unsuitable for a product. Based on this, it analyzes the components and defective areas of semiconductor substrate raw materials in only one minute, with an accuracy rate of over 90%, and visualizes quality deviations in each lot of raw materials.

By using AI machine learning to visualize, quantify, and standardize material configurations optimized for quality, LG Innotek has been able to prevent defective raw materials from entering the production process. The company can change the material design based on the quality deviation information visualized by the AI system, allowing it to ensure that the quality of the raw materials lot is uniform at a suitable level before entering the process.

An LG Innotek official commented, “With the “AI-based Inspection System for Incoming Raw Materials”, the time required to analyze defects has been decreased by up to 90%, and the cost of resolving the causes of defects has been significantly reduced.”

LG Innotek plans to enhance the AI system’s detection capabilities by sharing raw materials-related data with customers and suppliers in the substrate sector through digital partnerships.

Additionally, the company aims to expand the system’s application to optical solutions, such as camera modules, where the image-based detection of material defects can play a crucial role.

LG Innotek CTO S.David Roh said, “With the “AI-based inspection system”, we will complete LG Innotek’s unique AI ecosystem, which delivers exceptional customer value by identifying causes of product defects early in the production process.” He added, “We will continue innovating in digital production technology to create top-quality products at the lowest cost and in the shortest time.”

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