TRADE WAR
China files WTO challenge
China announced that it yesterday filled a WTO challenge to US President Donald Trump’s proposal for a tariff hike on US$200 billion of Chinese goods, reacting swiftly amid deepening concern about the economic impact of the countries’ spiraling technology dispute. The one-sentence statement by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce gave no legal grounds for the challenge or other details. It is an unusually rapid move for a trade case, coming less than one week after US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer announced the tariff plan, which would not take effect until at least September. China criticized the move, but has yet to say whether it would retaliate for the second round of tariffs. Its lopsided trade balance with the US means that it has only US$80 billion of annual imports of US goods left for retaliation following its earlier measures.
TELECOMS
MegaFon to delist in London
Billionaire Alisher Usmanov’s MegaFon PJSC plans to spend as much as US$1.26 billion buying back its entire free float and delisting from the London Stock Exchange to take Russia’s second-largest phone carrier private. MegaFon Investment Cyprus Ltd, a unit of the carrier, is to buy up to 129 million shares at US$9.75 apiece by Aug. 22, the company said in a statement yesterday. That is a 21 percent premium to MegaFon’s close in Moscow on Friday. The shares rose as much as 17 percent on the country’s Micex index to 589.9 rubles and gained 7.8 percent in London yesterday. Russian companies have been pulling back from London’s stock market after being hit by falling valuations as investors fret about geographical and corporate governance risks, with sanctions hurting sentiment.
RETAIL
Thai giant mulls listing
Central Group, one of Thailand’s biggest conglomerates, is studying options including a potential initial public offering of retail assets, people with knowledge of the matter said. The group is working on a restructuring of its retail operations ahead of a possible initial listing as soon as next year, the people said, asking not to be identified because the information is private. The listing could include department store businesses owned by Central, one of the people said. Any share sale could raise at least US$1 billion, the people said. A deal that size would be Thailand’s biggest first-time share sale since Jasmine Broadband Internet Infrastructure Fund’s US$1.7 billion listing in 2015, data compiled by Bloomberg show. Central, which is targeting sales of 397.3 billion baht (US$11.94 billion) this year, gets about 40 percent of revenue from its department store group, its Web site showed.
BANKING
DB outperforms forecasts
Germany’s biggest lender Deutsche Bank (DB) yesterday said that it far outstripped analysts’ estimates of its earnings in the second quarter of the year, but its bottom line remained short of last year’s performance. The group said it would report net income of “approximately 400 million euros” (US$468.3 million) between April and June — 10.5 percent lower than in the same period last year. However, the result is much beefier than predictions from analysts surveyed by data company Factset, who forecast net income of about 120 million euros. Meanwhile, Deutsche Bank said that second-quarter revenues would be stable year-on-year at about 6.6 billion euros — higher than analysts’ consensus forecast of about 6.4 billion.
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],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
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