Business

BLOOMBERG Meituan has become Hong Kong’s second-largest food delivery platform since debuting in the city last May, a sign that splashy subsidies are boosting the company’s first major foray outside mainland China. The internet firm’s sister app “KeeTa” accounted for 37% of the local food delivery market in December, according to data from Measurable AI, a Hong Kong-based firm that ...

BEIJING / WAM The Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Centre for Forecasting Science released a report, projecting that China’s economy will sustain steady growth in 2024, with an estimated GDP growth rate of approximately 5.3 percent. According to China Daily, the report indicated that in 2024, the year-on-year growth rates for the primary, secondary and tertiary industries’ output are expected to ...

SEOUL / WAM The Republic of Korea logged a current account surplus for the seventh straight month in November on the back of an increased trade surplus, Yonhap News Agency quoted the Bank of Korea (BOK) as saying. The country’s current account surplus reached $4.06 billion in November, narrowing from the surplus of $6.8 billion the previous month, according to ...

BLOOMBERG In the industrial hub of Wuxi near Shanghai, car owners recently took part in China’s largest experiment to rewire the grid and take advantage of its world-leading fleet of electric vehicles. Instead of charging up after plugging in, 50 EVs did it the other way around. For 30 minutes, the cars combined to feed around 2 megawatts of electricity ...

BLOOMBERG South Korea is again in damage control mode, seeking to contain fallout from a construction firm’s debt woes that risk replicating replicating a recent credit crunch. In the cross-hairs this time is Taeyoung Engineering & Construction, which shocked markets late last month with a request to reschedule payment terms for project financing loans. These securities were also the source ...

DUBAI / WAM Dr Abdulrahman Al Awar, Minister of Human Resources and Emiratisation, welcomed Li Zhong, Vice Minister of Human Resources and Social Security of the People’s Republic of China, and his accompanying delegation at the ministry’s headquarters in Dubai. The meeting explored opportunities for the two countries to cooperate and exchange experiences in areas related to labour, human resources ...

BLOOMBERG Hong Kong’s exports in August posted their longest streak of monthly declines on record, as weak demand and China’s slow recovery continue to pose challenges for the financial hub’s economic growth.  Overseas shipments fell 3.7% from a year earlier to HK$358.3 billion ($45.8 billion), the Census and Statistics Department said. That was better than the median estimate of a ...

NEW DELHI / WAM India’s first green hydrogen fuel cell bus was put on the national capital’s roads and flagged off by the Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas, Hardeep Singh Puri. Fifteen more such buses will be deployed in Delhi, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh states after operational trials of those vehicles are completed, the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural ...

BLOOMBERG BYD Co, China’s best-selling car brand, unveiled a new electric sport utility vehicle — the Denza N7 — at a glitzy event in a former factory in Beijing, stepping up its push into the premium sector. The model, which comes in six versions, has a starting price of 301,800 yuan ($41,680), which Morgan Stanley noted was pretty much in ...

BLOOMBERG Alphabet Inc’s Google is set to appoint a manufacturing and policy veteran as its top government affairs executive in India to tackle legal challenges and expand hardware assembly to the country. Sreenivasa Reddy, currently a senior engineering executive at Microsoft Corp, is likely to join Google towards the end of this year, people familiar with the matter said, asking ...