CHINA
Financial stocks dumped
Concern that Beijing would further free up bank deposit rates is prompting investors to dump financial stocks across the nation, with insurers such as Ping An Insurance (Group) Co (中國平安保險) becoming collateral damage. Ping An’s yuan-denominated shares are now trading at a discount to those in Hong Kong, where price moves are driven more by global sentiment than China policy. With less than six weeks to go before A-shares are included in MSCI indexes, investors are likely to focus on this discrepancy, which makes the insurer the only dual-listed financial stock to seem relatively cheap. Shares of Ping An yesterday fell 0.7 percent in Shanghai and were down 0.4 percent in Hong Kong.
AUTOMakers
Telsa suspends production
Tesla Inc is temporarily suspending production of the Model 3 sedan for the second time in about two months. The company announced to employees that the pause would be for four-to-five days, Buzzfeed reported on Monday. A Tesla spokesman referred back to a statement provided last month, when Bloomberg News first reported that the Model 3 was idled from Feb. 20 to Feb. 24. “Our Model 3 production plan includes periods of planned downtime in both Fremont and Gigafactory 1,” the company said in the e-mailed statement. “These periods are used to improve automation and systematically address bottlenecks in order to increase production rates. This is not unusual and is in fact common in production ramps like this.” The shutdown is taking place a week after chief executive officer Elon Musk gave CBS This Morning a tour of Tesla’s assembly plant in Fremont, California, and said the company should be able to sustain producing 2,000 Model 3 sedans per week.
AGRICULTURE
Cocoa prices set to skyrocket
Cocoa prices took off on Monday after Citigroup Inc predicted the tightest supply situation in a decade. One analyst said that this could just be the start of the rally and it is time to be a “raging long-term bull.” Cocoa for July delivery jumped as much as 5.4 percent to US$2,714 a tonne on Monday on ICE Futures US in New York, the highest since October 2016. Prices have surged 43 percent this year as dryness plagues crops in West Africa, which accounts for more than two-thirds of global supplies. This year’s gains for cocoa are a stark reversal from the last two years, when futures plunged more than 40 percent amid a global glut. The lower prices took a toll on growers, who cut spending on farm maintenance. That is now showing up in crop quality as yields begin to drop. At the same time, demand for chocolate has stayed strong.
TECHNOLOGY
Facebook headed to court
Facebook Inc is to face a group lawsuit over claims its photo-scanning technology violates users’ privacy rights. A federal judge in San Francisco on Monday ruled that it must face potentially millions of users who claim the company is gathering and storing biometric data without their agreement. US District Judge James Donato’s decision to let the lawsuit proceed as a class action is a significant step for users seeking to put Facebook on the hook for fines under a unique Illinois law of between US$1,000 and US$5,000 each time a person’s image is used without permission. The ruling could also help advance restrictions on Facebook’s use of biometrics in the US, similar to those in Europe and Canada.
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],”
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
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