International News

Bloomberg European car sales jumped in October, although not enough to reverse a decline since the start of the year as demand wanes in key markets. Registrations rose 8.6% to 1.21 million vehicles, the European Automobile Manufacturers Association said. The increase was due to a low comparison with a year earlier when sales suffered from new emissions tests. The latest ...

Bloomberg The world’s biggest lithium-ion battery is about to get even bigger, with Tesla Inc set to beef up capacity at the Hornsdale site in South Australia. The system will be expanded by 50% to 150 megawatts, according to an announcement from Neoen SA, the French company that operates the site. The storage site has already saved consumers more than ...

Bloomberg Google announced plans to buy enterprise software firm CloudSimple Inc, another sign the search giant isn’t letting a flurry of antitrust investigations interrupt its expansion strategy. CloudSimple will join Google Cloud, a priority business for the Alphabet Inc unit. The companies didn’t disclose financial terms. The acquisition could help Google get a foothold in a corner of the cloud-computing ...

Bloomberg When fires raged across Brazil this summer and deforestation rates reached startling highs, users began downloading a small German search engine in a modest effort to counteract the devastation. Ecosia GmBH, a Berlin-based alternative to Google, donates as much as 80% of the profit it makes from running ads alongside search results to plant trees around the world. As ...

Bloomberg Masayoshi Son, after backing startups around the world, is engineering a complex deal on his home turf to create a national champion that can more effectively compete with global rivals like Google and Amazon.com Inc. Son’s SoftBank Group Corp plans to combine its Yahoo Japan internet business with Line Corp in a deal that values the country’s leading messaging ...

Bloomberg India unveiled rules to help creditors recover loans due from large shadow lenders as a prolonged upheaval in the nation’s credit markets raises the risk of defaults by the financiers. The amended law provides a generic framework for insolvency and liquidation proceedings of systemically important financial services providers, other than banks, according to a government statement. The 15-month-old credit ...

Bloomberg Japan’s trade curbs on South Korea have so far been a case of “the bark was worse than the bite,” with only limited fallout for South Korea’s economy, according to Citigroup Inc. Japan’s tighter scrutiny of exports of three key materials used in the chip industry and Tokyo’s removal of its neighbour from a list of trusted trading partners ...

Bloomberg Indonesia’s budget deficit has ballooned to more than $20 billion and is set to widen further as Southeast Asia’s largest economy struggles amid a global slowdown. With the government on pace to miss revenue targets, the 2019 budget deficit is now expected to reach as much as 2.2% of gross domestic product, from an initial target of 1.84%. Figures ...

Bloomberg After months of political protests and the onset of a recession, Hong Kong’s resilient labour market is starting to crack. Retailers, restaurants and hotels are cutting wages and hours or letting staff go just to survive. The city’s once record-low unemployment level is likely to accelerate its current rise if no solution to the five months of turmoil can ...

Bloomberg Thai companies are likely to raise the most money from initial public offerings in four years in 2019 as the formation of the nation’s first democratic government since the 2014 military coup has encouraged domestic firms to tap equity markets. Companies have raised 80 billion baht ($2.6 billion) this year on the Stock Exchange of Thailand and the Market ...