Gwynn Guilford

Shares in Indian technology services giant Infosys fell 20%—the most in 10 years—as it announced a pronounced slowdown in revenue growth today. While analysts had expected sales growth on the order of 12.7%, the company said that it’s shooting for between 6% and 10% for the year ending March 2014. Sales failed to meet analyst expectations of around 107.5 billion rupees for the first quarter of 2013, coming in at just 104.5 billion rupees, up from 88.5 billion rupees in 2012.

Lending has shot up in China (again). Data released earlier today show that banks issued 1.06 trillion yuan ($171 billion) in loans in March (paywall), up from 620 billion yuan in February. Aside from the risks of more loans going bad, this is fueling a huge and ongoing problem with overcapacity: China is building more factories (and infrastructure projects) when it already has too many. As Michael Pettis, a Beijing-based economist, explains, the country “is producing far more of everything than it can absorb or export, but the only way to keep growth high has been to invest even more, at least part of which creates even greater production capacity.”

Roche Group today announced an unexpectedly strong first quarter, in part thanks to Tamiflu. Sales of the drug, which is thought to slow the cellular spread of the flu, were up 84% thanks to the nasty flu outbreak in North America over the winter.

The private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts just put the capstone on its recent Japan hiring spate, appointing turnaround specialist Hirofumi Hirano as its managing director and CEO. That team will have some of KKR’s $6 billion new Asia fund to play around with, reports DealBook.

Hong Kong celebrity institution Jackie Chan isn’t just an official “cultural ambassador” for the Chinese government—he’s the “ambassador for the return of relics“ from Beijing’s Old Summer Palace, which Western forces looted during the Opium War.

The UK economy saw another dram of possibly good news today, following on last week’s unexpectedly strong UK services PMI data. February industrial production rose 1.o% month-on-month, while manufacturing picked up 0.8% from January. That was way more than analysts expected—and much better than January, when both measures contracted markedly. Because the two combined make up a little more than one-fifth of the UK economy (services contribute around three-quarters of GDP, with a teeny fraction allotted to agriculture), these are critical measures of the UK’s economic health. Here’s how they look in chart form, via Markit:

Chinese authorities have hauled thousands of dead fish—around 550 pounds, to be exact—from a Shanghai river over the past four days. The fish were not related to the H7N9 avian flu virus afflicting humans, officials say, and no chemical substances (video) have been found in water samples. Authorities have also cleared nearby factories as a cause.

Despite the fact that her tenure as prime minister ended nearly 25 years ago, Margaret Thatcher continues to divide opinion. Here’s a roundup of views on her economic and business legacy:

The Chinese yuan got pricier this past week. Starting out at 6.2102 against the dollar, it came to rest at 6.206 before the Chinese currency authorities took off on Thursday on a four-day weekend to sweep tombs:

Markets might love Abenomics (Benankonomics? Kurodanomics?) but George Soros doesn’t.

Samsung said it expects first quarter 2013 profits to rise 53% to 8.7 trillion won ($7.7 billion), blowing past analyst expectations for guidance of $7.3 billion.

The Bank of Japan’s (BoJ) unveiling of its new monetary policy earlier today marked the first real test of “Abenomics,” as the world now calls prime minister Shinzo Abe’s bundle of policies aimed at escaping 20-plus years of deflation.

“Visual analytics for everyone,” proclaims Tableau Software’s homepage. True to its word, the company makes software for creating maps and charts that is both free and Luddite-proof—enough, at least, to be popular among reporters at the Wall Street Journal and the Huffington Post, as VentureBeat reports. Its bread and butter, though, is more sophisticated business analytics software and services, lumping Tableau firmly in with the Big Data business that everyone is getting so excited about these days.

Mervyn King, the outgoing Bank of England governor and fan of increased stimulus, lost to other BOE committee members, as the Bank of England sat tight again this morning:

To many, Abenomics seems like alchemy, albeit a dull, pinstriped kind that bows a lot. The concept involves lot of abstruse, scholarly talk about a process that will probably change nothing in the end. After all, if quantitative easing were easy, why didn’t Japan take steps to turn deflation into inflation two decades ago?

With the late Monday leak that Baidu, China’s biggest search engine, was developing what looked like an early prototype of Google Glass (link in Chinese), the wearable device craze and the ongoing drama of the Baidu-Google rivalry converged, whipping the tech media into a frenzy.

What do biotechnology and rice wine have in common? They both might cure bird flu. Or at least, Chinese investors are betting people will think they do.

More than 19 million people in the euro zone couldn’t find work in February (pdf), driving unemployment to 12.0%—the highest number in the monetary union’s history. Here’s a look at that:

Mammalian Easter candy may look cute, but it’s also the source of cutthroat legal battles among leading confectioners.

This piece has been corrected.

Earlier today, Japan’s central bank head, Haruhiko Kuroda, reminded politicians that the country’s debt—that dark cloud on the horizon that’s now around 230% of GDP—is “extremely high” and “not sustainable.”

Yale University economist and famous China bull Stephen Roach has long argued that the country can shift its economic model from investment and exports to consumption-driven growth. China’s new leadership team, which took office only three weeks ago, has only made him more confident.

Tencent, China’s largest tech company, just launched a multilingual version of its chat platform QQ on Facebook. QQ is the Chinese equivalent of Yahoo Messenger, circa 2003—only it has 800 million active users. And the version of QQ that Tencent made for Facebook isn’t much different: Its core function is pretty much the same as Facebook’s own chat function.

PT Garuda Indonesia, the country’s flag carrier and its biggest listed airline, rallied 6.3% today as the company reported $110.6 million in 2012 net income—more than analysts had expected and 73% higher than its 2011 income.