NEW ZEALAND
Central bank hikes rates
The Reserve Bank of New Zealand yesterday delivered its eighth consecutive interest rate hike, sending the nation’s borrowing costs to their highest level in more than seven years, as it joins a global battle against surging inflation. The central bank stayed true to its course of the past 18 months, unveiling another increase of 50 basis points in its key rate to 3.5 percent — a level not seen since May 2015 — and warned of more rises in a bid to stymie price rises. It said inflation could climb beyond the current 7.3 percent rate, which is a 32-year high.
SINGAPORE
Chinese top property buyers
Chinese buyers have scooped up the biggest number of Singapore’s private apartments this year compared with other foreigners. Buyers from China purchased 932 private units in the first eight months of this year, almost twice the number bought by Malaysians, which came in second, a report by industry watcher OrangeTee & Tie Pte (橙易產業) said. Chinese buyers have been the biggest foreign buyer group since 2016, and took up 6.7 percent of total transactions this year, almost bouncing back to pre-COVID-19 levels. Other countries within the top five foreign buyers include India, followed by the US and Indonesia.
HONG KONG
M&A slumps 40 percent
The Chinese territory is letting people go on a proper holiday for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic began. For bankers, the chance to take a break also speaks to a steep fall in dealmaking activity — in the territory and across the region. While the decline has been global, it has been particularly acute in the Asia-Pacific region. The volume of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in the Asia-Pacific region plunged by more than 40 percent from last year to about US$156 billion in the third quarter, the worst such period since 2014, data compiled by Bloomberg showed. In China, Asia’s biggest market, M&A activity was the weakest of any third quarter in a decade.
E-COMMERCE
Amazon freezes hiring
Amazon.com Inc has paused hiring for corporate positions in its retail business, the latest sign that the world’s largest e-commerce company is adjusting its workforce to slowing online sales. The company is to pause recruitment until the end of the year, a person familiar with the matter said. The freeze applies to corporate roles in the Worldwide Amazon Stores division, not the warehouse network where most of its employees work, the person said. Amazon reduced its workforce — primarily through attrition, the company says — by almost 100,000 people between March and June, the biggest quarterly decline in its history. As of June 30, Amazon had more than 1.5 million full and part-time workers.
FINANCE
Dalio steps down as co-CIO
After 12 years of trying, Ray Dalio is finally letting go. The billionaire founder of Bridgewater Associates has given up control of the firm he built into the world’s largest hedge fund, entrusting its future and US$150 billion in assets to a younger generation of leaders with their own ideas about investing. On Friday last week, he transferred all of his voting rights to the board of directors and stepped down as one of Bridgewater’s three co-chief investment officers (co-CIO). “Ray no longer has the final word,” co-chief executive officer Nir Bar Dea said in an interview. “That’s a big change.”
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