First, South Korea’s finance minister, now the CEO of Ford Motors: It’s becoming increasingly popular to blame the yen for your woes.
China’s one-child policy has created one of the biggest demographic disasters in the history of mankind: A ratio of nearly 118 boys for every 100 girls. And the country’s booming reproductive black market is a crucial component contributing to the imbalance.
Almost all of the mined deposits of what are known as “rare earths”—the name for 17 elements used in high-tech gadgets like tablets, smart phones and electric cars—belong to China. That’s left Japan, which consumes around 60% of the global supply each year, in between a rock and a hard place.
Some news about Norway today offers a glimpse at a unique collision of economic clichés: the “resource curse” hitting the “welfare state.”
This post has been corrected.
Legislation that could knock the world’s richest man off his perch—and make phone and internet service way cheaper for Mexicans—cleared another hurdle in Mexico City today. Here’s a summary:
Despite beating 2012 earnings expectations yesterday, shares for Tencent, China’s biggest tech company, fell in Hong Kong trading today, after analysts downgraded the stock. The reason? Shrinking margins and slowing growth in online games.
France has so far dodged the “problem child” reputations that Spain and Italy have earned. But it looks like that will be increasingly hard to keep up. Data today on France’s business output hinted not just that its economy is decaying—but that it’s doing so rapidly.
No one can do all that much two days into a job. But even if Haruhiko Kuroda, the new governor of the Bank of Japan, spent the entire two days finding the coffeemaker and getting his Wi-Fi set up, the mere expectation that he’ll adopt a truly aggressive monetary policy—which Prime Minister Shinzo Abe believes to be key to defeating deflation—should work in favor of a weakening yen.
Search ads—those little listings that appear when you search for anything online—might be wasting big retailers $2.36 billion each year, suggested a report last week from eBay Research Labs. And search-engine marketers were not amused. Nor, doubtless, was Google, which sells most of the search ads on the web.
Though China’s three state-owned telecoms enjoy a comfy oligopoly, some things have been eating into their profits of late.
Tencent, the biggest digital company in China, just announced that its revenue in 2012 was $7 billion, up 54% year-on-year (here’s the pdf). While the company’s online games cash cow is responsible for a lot of that—a big chunk of the $5 billion from the internet value-added services segment—the notable things in Tencent’s earnings are probably the furious growth of its online B2C business and the company’s steady expansion overseas.
There is a lot of hype around China’s 360buy Group, sometimes called the “Amazon of China,” including speculation that the online shopping site is gearing up for an IPO. However, a source in the industry told Quartz, an IPO is not in the cards for 2013. And there are several reasons why 360buy should in fact wait even longer.
Airbus just closed its biggest deal ever: 234 A320 jets for a whopping $24 billion. Its customer is Lion Air, one of Indonesia’s popular budget airlines.
This post has been corrected.
It would seem like terrible timing to have to report earnings the day after announcing trip-ending malfunctions on two of your ships, and a month after an onboard fire has left one ship adrift in the Gulf of Mexico, with its passengers mired in their own waste for days on end.
School was in session in the euro zone last night, and the lesson was on competitiveness. Specifically, it was on the gaps between productivity (too low) and labor costs (too high) in some European countries, which make them less competitive than others. European Central Bank president Mario Draghi lectured the 17 euro-zone heads of state for two hours, starting at 11pm yesterday. Apparently, there were lots of charts involved.
This post has been corrected.
At China’s big political pow-wow last week, the head of one of China’s big brick-and-mortar retailers, BBK, said that only around 30% of goods bought online were invoiced (link in Chinese)—and the rest sold tax-free. That constituted an unfair pricing advantage for e-commerce retailers.
The Chinese government is not doing anything to prevent gold from being the worse investment of 2013. Today, Yi Gang—he’s both the director of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, which manages China’s currency, and a vice governor of the central bank—said the Bank of Chinawill probably keep gold at about 1-2% of its $3.3 trillion in reserves.
This great profile of a one-time Chinese military hacker in the Los Angeles Times makes one thing clear about China’s military cyber hacking unit: It ain’t exactly Mission: Impossible.
Both the EU27’s and the euro zone’s industrial production fell 0.4% in January, compared with December. The drop was worse than expected, offering little to assauge the worrying trends of late (such as the UK’s economic splat) and suggesting that flagging industrial output is helping to drag the region’s economy deeper into a double-dip recession.
This post has been updated.
This item has been updated.
