AUTOMAKERS
Ford expects China rebound
Ford Motor Co’s partner in China, Chongqing Changan Automobile Co (重慶長安汽車), expects sales to rebound this year as they introduce more models to help reverse losses in the world’s biggest vehicle market. The venture is to speed up the rollout of new cars, including those under the Lincoln brand, to revive sales, Changan president Zhu Huarong (朱華榮) said in an interview yesterday. Automakers are reeling from a decline in deliveries in China, contributing to a fourth-quarter loss of US$534 million for Ford. Sales at the venture dropped 54 percent last year and might have contributed to profit plunging as much as 93 percent at Changan.
E-COMMERCE
Safaricom, Alibaba team up
Safaricom PLC, Kenya’s biggest mobile operator, agreed to a partnership with a unit of Alibaba Group Holdings Ltd (阿里巴巴) that is to facilitate electronic payments. The deal extends Safaricom customers’ ability to use its mobile-money service, M-Pesa, outside Kenya. The partnership allows shoppers on AliExpress to pay for purchases using M-Pesa. It targets micro-traders in Kenya who source goods from China, the Nairobi-based company said in a statement yesterday. Mobile money accounts for 30 percent of Safaricom’s revenue and is forecast to grow 14 percent this financial year. About 46 percent of international e-commerce transactions in Kenya are on AliExpress, chief customer officer Sylvia Mulinge told a briefing.
EQUITIES
Meituan freeze to end
The worst may be to come for Meituan Dianping (美團點評), as key investors who could only watch the stock shed more than US$12 billion in market value since it listed are to be able to join in the selling next week. A six-month lockup during which employees and cornerstone investors are banned from disposing of their shares is set to expire next week. Meituan shares have dropped 23 percent since listing in September last year, and were dumped yesterday after the food delivery company reported widening losses for the December quarter.
MALAYSIA
PM mulling airline options
Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said he is studying options for flagship carrier Malaysian Airline System Bhd, including whether to invest more funds, sell it off or shut it down. Malaysia Airlines has sought to turn itself around since being taken private by sovereign wealth fund Khazanah Nasional Bhd in 2014. Khazanah is demanding the carrier come up with a strategic plan to compete in the industry after pouring 6 billion ringgit (US$1.47 billion) into the airline to make it profitable.
OIL
Mars Blend value surges
Heavy, higher-sulfur crude on the US Gulf Coast surged in value on Monday as Saudi Arabia was said to extend its deeper production cuts through next month. Meanwhile, a power outage that darkened most of Venezuela this weekend curtailed output from the nation’s already-fragile oil operations. High-sulfur Mars Blend crude was just US$0.40 a barrel below Light Louisiana Sweet, the narrowest gap since 2011. Western Canadian Select, a heavy, high-sulfur oil from Alberta, was valued at about US$3.75 a barrel above US benchmark West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude for delivery next month at Nederland, Texas, people familiar with the matter said. In December last year, it was worth at least US$2 a barrel below WTI, two of the people said.
CHIP RACE: Three years of overbroad export controls drove foreign competitors to pursue their own AI chips, and ‘cost US taxpayers billions of dollars,’ Nvidia said China has figured out the US strategy for allowing it to buy Nvidia Corp’s H200s and is rejecting the artificial intelligence (AI) chip in favor of domestically developed semiconductors, White House AI adviser David Sacks said, citing news reports. US President Donald Trump on Monday said that he would allow shipments of Nvidia’s H200 chips to China, part of an administration effort backed by Sacks to challenge Chinese tech champions such as Huawei Technologies Co (華為) by bringing US competition to their home market. On Friday, Sacks signaled that he was uncertain about whether that approach would work. “They’re rejecting our chips,” Sacks
It is challenging to build infrastructure in much of Europe. Constrained budgets and polarized politics tend to undermine long-term projects, forcing officials to react to emergencies rather than plan for the future. Not in Austria. Today, the country is to officially open its Koralmbahn tunnel, the 5.9 billion euro (US$6.9 billion) centerpiece of a groundbreaking new railway that will eventually run from Poland’s Baltic coast to the Adriatic Sea, transforming travel within Austria and positioning the Alpine nation at the forefront of logistics in Europe. “It is Austria’s biggest socio-economic experiment in over a century,” said Eric Kirschner, an economist at Graz-based Joanneum
BUBBLE? Only a handful of companies are seeing rapid revenue growth and higher valuations, and it is not enough to call the AI trend a transformation, an analyst said Artificial intelligence (AI) is entering a more challenging phase next year as companies move beyond experimentation and begin demanding clear financial returns from a technology that has delivered big gains to only a small group of early adopters, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Taiwan said yesterday. Most organizations have been able to justify AI investments through cost recovery or modest efficiency gains, but few have achieved meaningful revenue growth or long-term competitive advantage, the consultancy said in its 2026 AI Business Predictions report. This growing performance gap is forcing executives to reconsider how AI is deployed across their organizations, it said. “Many companies
France is developing domestic production of electric vehicle (EV) batteries with an eye on industrial independence, but Asian experts are proving key in launching operations. In the Verkor factory outside the northern city of Dunkirk, which was inaugurated on Thursday, foreign specialists, notably from South Korea and Malaysia, are training the local staff. Verkor is the third battery gigafactory to open in northern France in a region that has become known as “Battery Valley.” At the Automotive Energy Supply Corp (AESC) factory near the city of Douai, where production has been under way for several months, Chinese engineers and technicians supervise French recruits. “They
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