Nigeria’s government is in talks for concessionary loans worth US$3.5 billion from the World Bank and African Development Bank to help finance a planned record budget this year, Nigerian Minister of Finance Kemi Adeosun said.
While discussions are ongoing, a formal request has not yet been made to the World Bank for US$2.5 billion and the African Development Bank for US$1 billion, Adeosun said by telephone on Sunday, adding that the government plans to tie them to specific capital projects, she said.
Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration is seeking to spend its way out of an economic crisis triggered by a collapse in oil prices. Nigeria is Africa’s biggest oil producer and relies on crude for almost all its exports and two-thirds of government revenue.
Buhari has proposed boosting this year’s budget to a record 6.1 trillion naira (US$30.7 billion). Adeosun on Jan. 21 said that authorities are to borrow about US$5 billion in external debt from multilateral agencies and the Eurobond market to plug a record budget gap of 3 trillion naira.
Lawmakers in Nigeria’s parliament are to begin deliberations this week on this year’s spending plan, Adeosun said on Sunday.
Authorities are to begin non-deal roadshow meetings with investors to sound out a potential sale of US$1 billion of Eurobonds this month, she said.
Nigeria has issued US dollar bonds twice, most recently in 2013.
Crude oil prices have dropped about 46 percent since June last year and were trading as low as US$35.14 per barrel in London yesterday.
The West African nation’s economy probably grew 3.2 percent last year, the slowest pace since 1999, according to a Bloomberg survey of economists.
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