After experiencing a period of economic uncertainty and overcapacity last year, the Citigroup Private Bank Taiwan yesterday expressed a bullish view about the global investment climate.
"In spite of continued uncertainty, 2004 will be the year of `more' [opportunity]," the banks chief global investment strategist Clark Winter told reporters yesterday.
Winter said that there will be more economic growth, commodity price increases, deployment of capital, demand for capital and more economic stimulus this year.
Since the global economy, led by the US, is delivering healthy doses of growth, the Citigroup strategist said that he expects investors to pursue opportunities in capital growth by diversifying capital deployment while shifting away from the pattern of capital preservation used in the past three years.
According to Winter, the returns of hedge funds, which yielded a cumulative return of 55.43 percent, topped other asset investment products including those of Thai equities and US corporate and treasury bonds for the past three years, while most stock equities in Asia plummeted to post negative returns.
However, he added that most Asia and US asset class returns gradually increased last year, with Thai equities topping the others to yield an annual return of 136.68 percent.
Ravi Raju, head of the bank's Asia Pacific & Middle East Investments, further expressed a bullish view towards equities' performance worldwide, with the exception of Japan.
Citing US analysts' estimates, he said that he expects the equities' year-over-year earnings growth may be 22.4 percent last quarter and 13.3 percent this quarter.
In general, Raju expressed a neutral view toward global fixed-income bond performance, while holding a bearish view toward government bonds in the US, UK and Japan.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained