AUTOMAKERS
Nissan dives on scandal
Nissan Motor Co’s passenger car sales in Japan plummeted more than 55 percent last month, data showed yesterday, after the company suspended all domestic production due to an inspection scandal. Sales of Nissan-brand passenger cars stood at 10,134 vehicles, down by 55.2 percentage points from a year earlier, the Japan Automobile Dealers Association said. The drop comes after Nissan admitted it had failed to meet domestic rules on final vehicle inspections and recalled about 1.2 million vehicles produced and sold in Japan for reinspection. The dramatic fall in Nissan cars compares with a more modest decline of 4.4 percentage points in overall sales in the Japanese market in the month.
AUSTRALIA
Housing boom over: UBS
The housing boom that has seen the nation’s home prices more than double since the turn of the century is “officially over,” after data showed prices are flatlining, UBS Group AG said. National house prices were unchanged last month from September, while annual growth has slowed to 7 percent from more than 10 percent as recently as July, CoreLogic Inc data released yesterday showed. The cooling housing market might encourage the Reserve Bank of Australia to keep interest rates at a record low. A rate hike would be undesirable, as it would put further downward pressure on housing prices, AMP Capital Investors Ltd senior economist Diana Mousina said.
TECHNOLOGY
Grab wallet for Singapore
Grab, Southeast Asia’s largest ride-hailing app, is launching a new digital wallet service in Singapore as it stakes a claim to the region’s burgeoning mobile payments sector. Starting yesterday, Grab’s 4 million users in the city-state could scan a quick response, or QR, code to pay for dishes at hawker stands. Grab plans to increase the number of small merchants accepting GrabPay from 25 to 1,000 by the end of next month. Grab, which is bigger than Uber Technologies Inc in the region, wants to build on its success in ride-hailing by adding new services in the more lucrative payments market. The company has expanded from taxi booking to private vehicles, rental cars and shuttle bus services. The five-year-old start-up plans to roll out mobile wallet services across the region next year.
NIGERIA
Crop park to be established
The government plans to establish a US$1 billion crop-processing park with Turkish investors in Niger State as part of efforts to improve value and boost agricultural exports, according to the Nigerian Investment Promotion Council. The Badeggi Crop Processing Zone is expected process more than 750,000 tonnes of crops, including rice, maize, yam, cassava, groundnuts and peas annually, the council said. The government plans to set up 15 similar crop zones nationwide.
MACAU
Casino revenue soars
Casino revenue last month climbed to the highest in three years as many high-stake bettors and recreational players visited the territory after China’s Golden Week holiday. Gross gaming receipts rose 22.1 percent to 26.6 billion patacas (US$3.3 billion), according to data released yesterday by the Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau. That compares with the median estimate for a 14.5 percent increase in a Bloomberg survey of nine analysts. The gains in casino revenue is the highest since October 2014.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
MAJOR DROP: CEO Tim Cook, who is visiting Hanoi, pledged the firm was committed to Vietnam after its smartphone shipments declined 9.6% annually in the first quarter Apple Inc yesterday said it would increase spending on suppliers in Vietnam, a key production hub, as CEO Tim Cook arrived in the country for a two-day visit. The iPhone maker announced the news in a statement on its Web site, but gave no details of how much it would spend or where the money would go. Cook is expected to meet programmers, content creators and students during his visit, online newspaper VnExpress reported. The visit comes as US President Joe Biden’s administration seeks to ramp up Vietnam’s role in the global tech supply chain to reduce the US’ dependence on China. Images on
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last