LABOR
Royal Mail to lay off 10,000
Royal Mail yesterday said it would cut 10,000 jobs after projecting a full-year operating loss that it blamed partly on a series of crippling strikes. The UK postal service, whose parent company has been renamed International Distributions Services PLC (IDS), said it expects adjusted operating losses of about ￡350 million (US$394 million), following a ￡219 million shortfall in the first half through September. IDS tumbled as much as 17 percent, the most in two-and-a-half years, after saying it would start the process of consulting on the cuts “in response to the impact of industrial action, delays in delivering agreed productivity improvements and lower parcel volumes.”
SINGAPORE
Central bank tightens policy
The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) yesterday tightened monetary policy settings for a fifth time in the past year, warning of persistent price pressures and a clouded outlook for the global and local economy. The central bank, which uses the exchange rate as its main policy tool, recentered the midpoint of the currency’s policy band up to its prevailing level, it said in a statement. The decision follows better-than-expected economic growth last quarter, which showed signs that elevated prices and tighter financial conditions could damp demand. The economy returned to growth in the three months through September, expanding 1.5 percent from the previous quarter, the Ministry of Trade and Industry said in a statement. That was faster than the median estimate for a 0.7 percent expansion in a Bloomberg survey. On a year-on-year basis, the economy expanded 4.4 percent.
TECHNOLOGY
Musk under investigation
Tesla Inc CEO Elon Musk is being investigated by federal authorities over his conduct in his US$44 billion takeover deal for Twitter Inc, the social media company said in a court filing released on Thursday. While the filing said he was under investigation, it did not say what the exact focus of the probes was and which federal authorities are conducting them. Twitter, which sued Musk in July to force him to close the deal, said attorneys for Musk had claimed “investigative privilege” when refusing to hand over documents it had sought. Musk’s attorneys late last month provided a “privilege log” identifying documents to be withheld, Twitter said. The court filing, which asked Delaware judge Kathaleen McCormick to order Musk’s attorneys to provide the documents, was made on Thursday last week — the same day that McCormick paused litigation between the two sides after Musk reversed course and said he would proceed with the deal.
TRADE
EU posts record deficit
The eurozone in August posted its largest trade deficit since it expanded to 19 countries in 2015, as high energy prices boosted its import bill, official estimates released yesterday showed. The EU’s statistics office Eurostat said that the eurozone’s balance for trade in goods with the rest of the world in August was in the red by nearly 51 billion euros (US$49.6 billion), compared with July’s 34 billion euros, marking the 10th consecutive month of a negative balance, in what is a major shift for the trade bloc which has historically recorded large surpluses. For the wider 27-nation EU, payments for energy imports from January to August rose 154 percent to 543.8 billion euros, contributing to an overall trade deficit of 309.6 billion euros.
South Korea’s equity benchmark yesterday crossed a new milestone just a month after surpassing the once-unthinkable 5,000 mark as surging global memory demand powers the country’s biggest chipmakers. The KOSPI advanced as much as 2.6 percent to a record 6,123, with Samsung Electronics Co and SK Hynix Inc each gaining more than 2 percent. With the benchmark now up 45 percent this year, South Korea’s stock market capitalization has also moved past France’s, following last month’s overtaking of Germany’s. Long overlooked by foreign funds, despite being undervalued, South Korean stocks have now emerged as clear winners in the global market. The so-called “artificial intelligence
CONFUSION: Taiwan, Japan and other big exporters are cautiously monitoring the situation, while analysts said more Trump responses ate likely after his loss in court US trading partners in Asia started weighing fresh uncertainties yesterday after President Donald Trump vowed to impose a new tariff on imports, hours after the Supreme Court struck down many of the sweeping levies he used to launch a global trade war. The court’s ruling invalidated a number of tariffs that the Trump administration had imposed on Asian export powerhouses from China and South Korea to Japan and Taiwan, the world’s largest chip maker and a key player in tech supply chains. Within hours, Trump said he would impose a new 10 percent duty on US imports from all countries starting on
Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek’s (深度求索) latest AI model, set to be released as soon as next week, was trained on Nvidia Corp’s most advanced AI chip, the Blackwell, a senior official of US President Donald Trump’s administration said on Monday, in what could represent a violation of US export controls. The US believes DeepSeek will remove the technical indicators that might reveal its use of American AI chips, the official said, adding that the Blackwells are likely clustered at its data center in Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region of China. The person declined to say how the US government received
Like many of us who are mindful of our plastic consumption, Beth Gardiner would take her own bags to the supermarket and be annoyed whenever she forgot to do so. Out without her refillable bottle, she would avoid buying bottled water. “Here I am, in my own little life, worrying about that and trying to use less plastic,” she says. Then she read an article in this newspaper, just over eight years ago, and discovered that fossil fuel companies had plowed more than US$180 billion into plastic plants in the US since 2010. “It was a kick in the teeth,” Gardiner
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