THAILAND
Growth stalls at 0.3%
The economy barely grew last quarter as rising government spending failed to counter falling exports and weakening local demand. The outlook for the rest of the year is not that much better. GDP rose 0.3 percent in the three months through March from the previous quarter, the National Economic and Social Development Board (NESDB) said in Bangkok on Monday. The median of 17 estimates in a Bloomberg survey was for a 0.6 percent contraction. GDP grew 3 percent from a year earlier, compared with a prediction of a 3.4 percent gain. The NESDB cut its GDP growth forecast for this year to between 3 percent and 4 percent from an earlier forecast of between 3.5 percent and 4.5 percent. It lowered its export growth forecast to 0.2 percent from 3.5 percent. Exports fell for a third month in March, while consumer confidence dropped to a 10-month low last month. If overseas sales contract this year, that would be a record third straight year.
MINING
South32 debuts in Australia
BHP Billiton’s spin-off mining company South32 debuted on the Australian Securities Exchange yesterday at the lower end of expectations, valued at about A$11.3 billion (US$9.1 billion), but its chief executive said it offered long-term value. Shareholders in the Anglo-Australian giant overwhelmingly approved the demerger earlier this month to allow it to focus on its most profitable areas of iron ore, copper, petroleum, coal and potash. The new entity, South32, has a more diversified metals and mining portfolio, including aluminium, coal, nickel, manganese, silver, lead and zinc, with most of its mines in the Southern Hemisphere. It began trading at 2am GMT at A$2.13 and closed at A$2.05. Analysts had expected the price to range between A$2 and A$3.50.
SWITZERLAND
‘No signs of deflation’
Swiss National Bank (SNB) Governing Board member Fritz Zurbruegg does not foresee the country suffering from a broad-based and self-perpetuating fall in consumer prices, according to a newspaper interview. “Currently, we see no signs of a deflationary development as was experienced in the 1930s, that means negative price development across all goods and with a self-reinforcing downwards spiral,” he said in an interview with the Berner Zeitung published yesterday. Although exports are weakening in the first half of the year and the SNB cut its growth forecast for this year, “nevertheless we don’t expect this slowdown to turn into a recession,” he said. The franc has appreciated about 15 percent since mid-January, when the central bank gave up its cap of 1.20 per euro on the franc and instead cut its deposit rate to minus-0.75 percent. The SNB foresees a fall in consumer prices of 1.1 percent for this year, with the annual inflation rate turning positive only in 2017.
AUTOMAKERS
Self-driving by 2020: Nissan
Nissan Motor Co will have vehicles packed with autonomous driving technology by 2020, but whether people will be able to drive them on roads is up to government regulators, chief executive Carlos Ghosn said yesterday. Many of the world’s automakers, and companies outside the auto industry, such as Google, are working on technologies that allow cars to navigate without human intervention. The bigger hurdle for such vehicles becoming readily available to consumers is approval from regulators around the world, he said.
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