JAPAN
Fewer firms file bankruptcies
Bankruptcies last month edged down from a year earlier, suggesting that government measures might be helping keep businesses afloat amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The number of bankruptcies last month fell 1.6 percent to 789 cases, data released yesterday by Tokyo Shoko Research showed. About 89 firms said that the coronavirus was a factor that drove them out of business, with restaurants and hotels hit hardest. There has so far not been a surge of local bankruptcies during the pandemic.
CONSUMER GOODS
Tax risks Unilever’s UK plan
Unilever said that the consumer goods maker would abandon its plan to unify its headquarters in London and scrap its Dutch base if a proposal by an opposition party for a corporate exit tax goes ahead. Unilever said that it believes the proposal, submitted by the opposition Green party, is contrary to international law, but if it were implemented, the company would face a bill of about 11 billion euros (US$12.96 billion). The proposal would need to go through both houses of the Dutch parliament and it is not clear how long that would take, or how probable it would be.
CHINA
Auto sales continue recovery
Auto sales last month rose by 16.4 percent to 2.1 million units from a year earlier in a sign of sustained recovery for the industry’s biggest global market, an industry group said yesterday. The China Association of Automobile Manufacturers reported that sales of passenger cars jumped 8.5 percent to 1.67 million from a year earlier. In the first seven months of this year, passenger vehicle sales tumbled 18.4 percent to 9.5 million from a year earlier, the association said, as many cities imposed shutdowns during the first quarter to battle COVID-19.
UNITED KINGDOM
Q2 employment dipped
The number of employed people fell by 220,000 in the three months after the country was put into lockdown as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, official figures showed yesterday. That quarterly decline, which took the number of employed people to 32.92 million, is the biggest since the deep recession in 2009 in the wake of the global financial crisis. The British Office for National Statistics also said that the number of people on payrolls in the UK last month fell by another 81,000, taking the total decline since the start of the pandemic in March to 730,000. While the number of people on payrolls has fallen to 28.27 million since the start of the pandemic, the country’s official unemployment rate is not rising, holding steady in June at 3.9 percent.
FRANCE
TikTok probe launched
The country’s data watchdog CNIL opened a probe into TikTok, marking another examination of ByteDance Ltd’s (字節跳動) social media app, which is facing broader scrutiny of its privacy policies. A CNIL spokesman said that the agency opened an investigation after receiving a complaint in May, but declined to give details about the grounds of the complaint, or the timing on a ruling. The CNIL “is particularly vigilant with regard to this company, particularly with regard to this complaint and questions and other complaints that the commission is likely to receive,” the spokesman said. TikTok did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
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