BizChina

Toyota Motor Co announced it will cut 50 to 70 percent of production in China, Sina.com reported Thursday.

The production cuts are due to insufficient supply of parts caused by the devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Toyota, the world's largest automaker, said the production cut will last until June 5.

China is the third largest production base for Toyota, with factories mainly located in Tianjin, Guangzhou and Sichuan.

China Datang Corporation Renewable Power Co Ltd will join efforts to establish a joint venture for developing wind farms and other renewable energy resources in Australia, said Datang in a statement published on its website Wednesday.

This joint venture -- AusChina Energy Group -- will be founded by Datang Renewable in cooperation with CBD Energy Limited, an Australian-based company, and Baoding Tianwei Baobian Electric Co Ltd, a company based in north China's Hebei province, according to the statement.

The telecom equipment maker Alcatel-Lucent said on Wednesday that it has signed a research memorandum with China's biggest telecom carrier, China Mobile Communications Corp, in areas such as the next generation mobile networks and cloud computing.

The partnership will help the French-American telecom gear vendor to be in a better position to profit from the world's most populous mobile telecom market.

Ben Verwaayen, chief executive of Alcatel-Lucent, said the partnership will have a fundamental impact on the company as the focus of the world's telecom market is changing from networks to applications and services.

"The network is becoming more intelligent, not just access and transition but also applications," said Verwaayen in an interview on Wednesday.

China's power consumption rose 13.41 percent year on year in March to 388.8 billion kilowatt hours (kwh), the National Energy Administration (NEA) said Thursday.

Combined electricity use in the first quarter totalled 1.09 trillion kwh, up 12.72 percent from a year earlier, the administration said.

In the first quarter, power use by the primary, or agricultural, industry rose 3.16 percent to 19.5 billion kwh year on year. The use of power by the secondary, or industrial, industry rose 12.31 percent to 802.5 billion kwh. The tertiary, or service, sector consumed 123.6 billion kwh of electricity, up 15.51 percent.

China's power demand could increase by 12 percent to 4.7 trillion kwh this year, said the research institute of the State Grid Corp. of China on Wednesday. The forecast is higher than the NEA's January estimate which said demand could rise 9 percent to 4.5 trillion kwh this year.