E-COMMERCE
Adobe to acquire Magento
Adobe Systems Inc has agreed to buy e-commerce company Magento for US$1.68 billion in a bid to capture a bigger slice of the digital commerce industry from Salesforce.com Inc and Oracle Corp. The Photoshop software provider is making its third-biggest acquisition to create an end-to-end system for designing digital ads, building e-commerce Web sites and other online customer experiences and completing transactions, the company said in a statement on Monday. Campbell, California-based Magento offers software to build and run Web stores, handle online purchases, shipping and returns. It also helps merchants sell products through social media ads and competes with Shopify Inc. Magento technology supports more than US$155 billion in gross merchandise volume and customers.
TRANSPORTATION
France to take on SNCF debt
The French government plans to absorb about 35 billion euros (US$41.35 billion) of SNCF’s debt burden of about 47 billion euros as part of planned reforms to the national railway operator, French business daily Les Echos said on Monday. The plan, which would see the government take on chunks of SNCF’s debt in 2020 and 2022, is to be announced by French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe to rail unions on Friday, the newspaper said, citing unnamed sources. The government has said it would start taking over a substantial part of SNCF’s debt from 2020 as part of the reform, which is to change SNCF’s status and aims to prepare it for competition, but had not said how much it would absorb. Unionized workers of the debt-ridden state-run company have been carrying out rolling strikes since early last month, downing tools for two out of every five days until June 28, in protest against the changes.
BANKING
Emirates to buy DenizBank
The biggest bank in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, has agreed to buy a Sberbank PJSC unit in Turkey’s biggest takeover deal since 2012. Emirates NBD yesterday said in a statement that it is to buy 99.9 percent of DenizBank AS for 14.6 billion lira (US$3.2 billion) and take on subordinated debt. The Dubai state-controlled lender would also pay interest on the deal from Oct. 31 and receive all of Denizbank’s profit from that date in a so-called locked-box agreement. Persian Gulf lenders are expanding in markets like Turkey with acquisitions and license applications as they face limited expansion opportunities at home.
MALAYSIA
Foreign investment vanishes
While locals cheer the ouster of the Barisan Nasional coalition for the first time since independence, foreign stock investors are voting with their feet. Foreign inflows into the local stock market of US$937.8 million were wiped out as concern remains on how the new coalition under 92-year-old Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad would continue economic growth. As of Monday, foreign outflows from stocks stood at US$21.2 million after overseas investors sold a total of US$949 million of stocks over 11 days. The nation had recorded inflows of as much as US$2.4 billion last year. The benchmark FTSE Bursa Malaysia KLCI yesterday fell 0.5 percent. While the market has maintained its calm by gaining 0.4 percent last week after the election outcome, foreign investors are less sanguine about the nation’s outlook. Local funds and retail investors have been plowing money into stocks by buying 2.5 billion ringgit (US$630.4 million) of equities as foreigners exit.
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