RETAIL
Court to hear Wal-Mart appeal
The US Supreme Court said on Monday it would decide if the largest sex-discrimination class-action lawsuit in US history against Wal-Mart Stores Inc can proceed, a case involving women workers who seek billions of US dollars in damages. The court agreed to hear an appeal by the world’s largest retailer and the largest private employer arguing the claims of as many as 1.5 million current and former female employees were too diverse to proceed as a single class-action lawsuit. The justices decided to review a ruling by an appeals court in California that upheld the class-action certification in the lawsuit alleging discrimination against every woman employed over the past decade at the company’s 3,400 US stores. The Supreme Court is expected to hear arguments in the case next March, with a ruling likely by the end of June.
RETAIL
Tesco posts Q3 sales rise
Tesco PLC, the world’s No. 3 retailer, said overseas markets drove a 7.2 percent rise in third-quarter sales and it was seeing a pick-up in demand in its main British market heading into peak Christmas trading. Finance director Laurie McIlwee said yesterday that UK trading had been ahead of the supermarket group’s expectations in recent weeks, with sales at UK stores open more than a year rising 1.5 percent, excluding fuel and including VAT sales tax, in the 13 weeks to Nov. 27. Growth had picked up to 3 percent by the end of the third quarter, despite a lower contribution from rising food prices compared with the second quarter, McIlwee said.
MEDIA
‘Post’ to monitor ‘NYT’
The Washington Post is monitoring efforts by the New York Times (NYT) and other newspapers to charge readers online, but has no plans to do the same for now, Post Co chairman Donald Graham said on Monday. “On pay models, obviously what the New York Times is doing is of interest to us,” Graham told financial analysts at the UBS 38th Annual Global Media and Communications Conference in New York. “We’ll be watching it and we wish them well,” he said, adding that his newspaper was also monitoring pay wall efforts by Rupert Murdoch’s the Times.
RETAIL
Store pulls Nazi costumes
A Japanese discount chain said yesterday it would pull a Nazi costume from its shelves after a complaint from a Jewish organization in the US. The costume on sale at retailer Don Quijote Co includes a black jacket with a red swastika armband in a package that has a sketch resembling Adolf Hitler on the cover, along with the phrase “Heil Hitler” in Japanese characters. The outfit was on sale for about ¥5,000 (US$60). Aico, a Japanese party goods maker, has made the costume for seven years and never had a complaint, spokesman Nobuyoshi Nasuzawa said.
FOOD AND BEVERAGE
Bright Food set to buy GNC
Chinese food company Bright Food Group Co (光明食品) is nearing a deal to acquire GNC Holdings Inc for up to US$3 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported late on Monday, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter. The Journal says the deal for the US-based vitamin retail chain is for between US$2.5 billion and US$3 billion. The newspaper said Bright Food had until recently been pursuing a buyout of snack maker United Biscuits. GNC issued a statement saying it does not comment on rumors or market speculation.
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