GERMANY
Downside scenario ‘unlikely’
Germany retained the euro-area’s only stable “AAA” rating because its finances are more robust than those of its partners, said Moritz Kraemer, Standard & Poor’s managing director of European sovereign ratings. “We think that the metrics are strong enough,” Frankfurt-based Kraemer said in a conference call on Saturday. “Germany is much stronger than its other ‘AAA’ peers” and can better withstand any shocks. Any “downside scenario” for Germany is “fairly unlikely,” he said.
TELECOMS
Austria’s Orange sold
France Telecom and its partner Mid Europa are selling their Austrian mobile unit Orange to Hong Kong-based Hutchison in a 1 billion euro (US$1.3 billion) deal, a press report said on Saturday. Final details are being worked out, but the long-awaited deal should be signed in the coming days, Austrian daily Die Presse reported, without citing sources. Orange head Michael Krammer declined to comment, the newspaper said. The sale price will be 1.4 billion euros, but Hutchison, which is also already active in Austria with its “3” brand, will sell assets worth 300 to 400 million euros to rival Telekom Austria to satisfy regulators, the report said. The deal will create a company with 3.5 million customers and a 28 percent market share, Die Presse added.
SPAIN
Unemployment still rising
The number of people unemployed in the country hit an “astronomical” level of 5.4 million at the end of last year, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said on Saturday. The figure is more than 400,000 higher than the level reached in the third quarter last year, when the unemployment rate hit a 15-year high of 21.5 percent, the highest in the industrial world. Economists have warned that the country may be back in recession with the economy likely to contract in the first quarter of this year. The Bank of Spain said the economy shrank in the last quarter. The last comparable unemployment figure from the National Statistics Institute at the end of September showed 4.98 million people were unemployed.
HOTELS
Qatar firm snaps up assets
A Qatar-owned company says it has taken over the famous Raffles Hotel Singapore and an affiliated luxury hotel in Paris in the latest high-profile acquisitions by the Gulf state. The Qatar National Hotels Co said on Saturday that it recently took ownership of the 125-year-old Raffles Hotel Singapore and Le Royal Monceau Raffles hotel in Paris. It did not disclose financial terms in the deal with Toronto-based Fairmont Raffles Hotels International, which had owned both hotels. State-owned Qatari companies have been snapping up investments at a brisk pace recently, including stakes in European energy companies and Germany’s largest builder, Hochtief AG.
GREECE
Debt swap talks planned
The country will resume talks with the Institute of International Finance on Wednesday on a debt swap accord and aims to present the outline of the plan at a meeting of euro-area finance ministers on Monday next week, Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos said on Saturday. “We want to be able to publicly announce about Feb. 6 to Feb. 10 the procedure for the private-sector involvement,” Venizelos said. “We’ll then have to wait about three weeks for the response of the credit institutions and then do the bond exchange in an unprecedented and unusual legal framework that needs to have been formed in the meantime.”
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