International News

  Bloomberg GN Store Nord A/S, the world’s third-largest listed producer of hearing aids, signed a conditional agreement to buy Audigy Group LLC in a deal that could value the U.S. audiology and hearing services company at as much as $151 million. GN will pay $91 million up front and as much as $60 million more depending on Audigy’s financial ...

  Bloomberg Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro announced undefined “military exercises” for the embattled nation, just a day after pledging to prolong his government’s special emergency powers. Speaking in Caracas’s Ibarra Square after a march on Saturday by several hundred supporters, Maduro said his opponents are orchestrating foreign military intervention in Venezuela. Exercises by the army and militia groups would prepare ...

  Bloomberg Federally mandated ethanol blending is adding extra pressure to the faltering profits of U.S. refiners. The worst crude oil downturn in a generation, which at first helped refiners’ profits, has now passed through to the fuel prices. Now, gasoline is cheaper than the ethanol that refiners have no choice but to use. Ethanol averaged 30 cents above gasoline ...

  New Delhi / AFP Narendra Modi was elected two years ago this week promising to ease India’s notorious red tape and unpack regulatory tangles, but for foreign firms, doing business in the world’s fastest-growing large economy can still be a costly headache. With a billion consumers and rising middle class, India holds dazzling potential — yet despite signs of ...

  Beijing / Bloomberg China’s home sales continued to grow in April, signaling that tightening measures designed to stem a home-price surge in some large cities have yet to slow the market’s upward momentum. New-home sales gained 63.5 percent to 793.7 billion yuan ($122 billion) last month from a year earlier, according to Bloomberg calculations based on data the National ...

  Singapore / AFP Singapore Telecom (Singtel) reported a full-year net profit rise, driven by increased mobile data usage as more customers browse the Internet on handheld devices. Investments in high-speed Internet networks and services are paying off as the easy mobile connections allow people to consume more data while on the go, said Singtel, Southeast Asia’s biggest telecom firm ...

  Kolkata / Bloomberg The monsoon in India, which accounts for more than 70 percent of the annual rainfall, will arrive a week later this year, prolonging a drinking water shortage and delaying planting of crops from rice to cotton and sugar cane. Southern Kerala state will start receiving the seasonal rains from June 7, the India Meteorological Department said ...

  Shanghai / AFP China’s key economic indicators moderated in April from the previous month, official figures showed on Saturday, raising worries over the strength of a rebound in the world’s second-largest economy. Industrial output rose 6.0 percent year-on-year in April, the National Bureau of Statistics said, down from a 6.8 percent jump in March. Economists had estimated a 6.5 ...

  Tokyo / AFP Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe plans to postpone a sales tax hike a second time, judging that boosting the tariff could hurt the world’s third-largest economy, a newspaper said on Saturday. Abe has already informed senior government officials he plans delay the consumption tax hike, scheduled for next April; that would raise levy from eight to ...

  Jakarta / WAM Bank Indonesia reported the country’s current account deficit narrowed to US$4.7 billion or 2.1 percent of its gross domestic products (GDP) in the first quarter of this year from US$5.1 billion or 2.4 percent of the GDP in the previous three months period. The central bank attributed the improvement in current account performance to growing surplus ...