International News

Bloomberg HNA Group Co. agreed to sell two plots of land in Hong Kong to the city’s second-richest man for HK$16 billion ($2 billion) as the cash-strapped Chinese conglomerate accelerates asset disposals to repay its mounting debt. The sites, purchased just over a year ago, were sold to billionaire Lee Shau Kee’s Henderson Land Development Co., according to a statement ...

Bloomberg Coffee shipments from Vietnam, the world’s biggest robusta producer, will surge this year as farmers harvest a bigger crop, according to Industry and Trade Minister Tran Tuan Anh. Exports may total 1.55 million metric tons in 2018, Anh said in a written response to Bloomberg questions. Production is set to increase about 4.5 percent to 1.6 million tons in ...

Bloomberg Warburg Pincus, the private equity firm that’s been betting on the growth of the Asian logistics sector, is forming a joint venture to develop industrial properties in Vietnam. The New York-based firm and Vietnam’s Investment & Industrial Development Corp., the state-owned firm known as Becamex IDC, are committing more than $200 million to the partnership, Warburg Pincus said in ...

Bloomberg Millions of Chinese cram onto trains to make the annual pilgrimage home for the Lunar New Year holiday. It’s a crowded and often uncomfortable experience that is rapidly being transformed by the country’s push into the world of high-speed rail. China already has the globe’s longest bullet-train network, but it’s plowing 3.5 trillion yuan ($556 billion) into expanding its ...

Bloomberg US President Donald Trump proposed a $4.4 trillion federal budget for fiscal 2019, a plan Congress is expected to all but ignore that would slash entitlements and other domestic programs in favour of higher spending on the military and immigration enforcement. Trump’s $686 billion defense request for the coming fiscal year would propel the Navy towards a new goal ...

Bloomberg Amazon.com Inc. is cutting hundreds of jobs at its headquarters in Seattle, paring back older departments focused on selling goods online while hiring in newer lines of business like cloud computing and its Alexa platform. The reductions are part of a broader reorganisation at the company, but some see the moves as a shift towards using more robots and ...

Bloomberg International Business Machines Corp. called foul on Microsoft Corp’s hiring of its chief diversity officer in a case that elevates recruiting and promotion of an inclusive workforce to the level of safeguarding proprietary technology. IBM claims the information that Lindsay-Rae McIntyre possesses — including confidential data about diversity, strategies and initiatives — can cause “real and immediate competitive harm” ...

Bloomberg EMagin Corp. Chief Financial Officer Jeffrey Lucas said that Apple Inc. didn’t invest in the augmented-reality display component maker, contradicting a listing in a regulatory filing mentioning the technology giant. An EMagin filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission listing Apple among “specified investors” was reported by TechCrunch, Bloomberg News and others. The document, from Jan. 23, proposed an ...

Bloomberg Singapore may unveil an e-commerce tax in next week’s budget, setting the tone for a region that’s grappling with online retail’s assault on brick-and-mortar vendors. Eight of the 12 economists in a survey said the February 19 budget will contain a new tax on online vendors, with another betting that cross-border digital transactions will now be included in goods-and-services ...

Bloomberg Takata Corp.’s US operations, pushed into bankruptcy by the largest automotive recall in US history, settled with two groups representing victims of its faulty air bags, the company said in court documents. Two committees for people suing over the air bags have agreed to support a bankruptcy-exit plan that would resolve lawsuits by channeling them into a trust funded ...