FINANCE
HNA execs plan to buy stock
HNA Group Co (海航集團) executives, including cochairman Chen Feng (陳峰), plan to buy shares in Bohai Capital Holding Co (渤海金控) after the Shenzhen, China-listed leasing unit’s stock fell by about one-third from its peak earlier this year. A total of 24 officials at HNA and its subsidiaries plan to buy 87 million yuan (US$13.1 million) of Bohai Capital shares from the market within three months, according to statements filed with the Shenzhen Stock Exchange yesterday. The purchases are meant to reflect confidence in the leasing unit, the statements said.
RETAIL
Dixons to scale back mobile
British electronics retailer Dixons Carphone PLC cut its earnings guidance and said it would scale back its mobile phone business as British consumers hold off on upgrading to new handsets. The company is to reduce the “complexity and capital intensity” of the mobile business model, it said in a statement yesterday, indicating that it plans to close stores. The moves come after it reduced its guidance for full-year pretax profit to £360 million to £400 million (US$480.6 million to US$534 million), cutting the top end of the range by £40 million. Dixons yesterday posted first-half revenue of £4.87 billion, 2.6 percent below average analyst expectations.
CRYPTOCURRENCIES
Bitfinex restores operations
Bitfinex, one of the world’s biggest bitcoin exchanges, has had its platform restored after hackers sought for the second time this month to prevent users from accessing it via a denial-of-service attack. The attack took about 12 hours to resolve and new user sign-ups were temporarily disabled to help defend against the attackers, it said. Bitfinex, which does not disclose on its Web site or in any public documents where it is located, ranks second in trading volume among exchanges worldwide, according to Coinhills. Bitfinex on Dec. 2 said it would no longer serve US customers, because it is too expensive to do business with them. This followed Wells Fargo & Co’s decision earlier in the year to end its role as a correspondent bank through which customers in the US could send money to Bitfinex and cryptocurrency Tether’s banks in Taiwan.
TRANSPORTATION
Uber teams up with Howa
Uber Technologies Inc yesterday said it would include Howa’s fleet of 4,000 taxis in its app so customers in Bangkok can get a quicker and more convenient ride. It is the latest partnership for the world’s most valuable start-up, which last week struck a deal to sell 51 percent of its Singapore car rental unit to taxi operator ComfortDelGro Corp for S$295 million (US$218.1 million) in cash. In Japan, where it has achieved little since starting operations about four years ago, the company is overhauling leadership and taking a less combative approach with regulators and taxi operators.
SAUDI ARABIA
Agency to oversee assets
The government is setting up an organization to manage assets relinquished by detainees as part of settlement agreements in the crackdown on corruption, people with knowledge of the matter said. The government is talking to consultants about how to set up the entity, which would evaluate and potentially sell holdings handed over by billionaires and princes in exchange for their freedom, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private. Authorities could recover as much as US$100 billion from the settlement deals, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman 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