International News

Bloomberg Telecom Italia SpA Chief Executive Officer Amos Genish expects to restore the credit rating of Italy’s former phone monopoly to investment grade next year, potentially opening up a cheaper source of financing and a wider pool of investors. Genish plans to demonstrate progress in 2018 on Telecom Italia’s goal of lowering debt to 2.7 times its earnings before interest, ...

Bloomberg Britain announced plans to generate savings of as much as 15 billion pounds ($20 billion) a year by improving productivity in sectors such as construction and transport. New programmes to increase efficiency were published alongside the government’s 600 billion-pound infrastructure pipeline, which sets out a series of publicly and privately funded projects over the next 10 years, the Treasury ...

Bloomberg China is upending the global plastics market. The world’s biggest user of scrap has stopped accepting shiploads of other countries’ plastic trash as it phases in a new ban. That’s bad news for the recycling industry, as China has been a major consumer of salvaged materials it processes into resin that ends up in pipe, carpets, bottles and other ...

Bloomberg Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s Jack Ma said China benefits from the stability of its single-party system, contrasting that with the unpredictability of US politics. The Chinese billionaire made the comments in response to a question about the country’s economy and its prospects for growth. He said he has confidence in China’s potential and cited as his number one reason ...

Bloomberg Go-Jek, Indonesia’s first billion-dollar tech startup, has a ‘set plan’ to become a listed company, Chief Executive Officer Nadiem Makarim said. “We are definitely going to IPO,” Makarim said at Bloomberg’s Year Ahead Asia Conference in Jakarta on Wednesday. The initial public offering is expected “hopefully within the next few years,” he said. Jakarta-based Go-Jek, backed by investors including ...

Bloomberg PT Blue Bird Group, Indonesia’s largest taxi operator, said conventional modes of public transport such as taxis still have room to grow even with the increasing popularity of new ride-hailing applications. “People still need to have a safe, reliable and good value kind of public transport,” said President Director Noni Purnomo in Jakarta. “At the end of the day, ...

Bloomberg The tide is turning against multinational brands, which have been losing market share to local products not just in Asia’s emerging markets but also in the US and Europe, according to Anglo-Dutch consumer goods giant Unilever NV. “Consumers are changing, not craving for global brands just for the sake of it,” said Hemant Bakshi, president director of Unilever Indonesia, ...

Bloomberg A $7.1 billion rail corridor in Rajasthan that’s set to cut freight times between India’s capital New Delhi and the business hub of Mumbai to 14 hours from 14 days is finally showing signs of progress. About 800 kilometres away in Gujarat, a 920-square-kilometre industrial area is taking shape near the village of Dholera, with hundreds of workers fusing ...

Bloomberg China is set to extend a 10 percent tax rebate to buyers of new energy autos as manufacturers from BMW AG to Tesla Inc. vie for a greater share of the world’s biggest market for clean-fuel cars, according to people with knowledge of the plan. The rebate was due to expire at the end of this year and will ...

Bloomberg Mercedes-Benz, edging past long-time China luxury-car market leader Audi, expects another 2018 to be another bumper year in the world’s biggest auto market as consumer appetite for high-end vehicles like the E-Class sedan shows no signs of slowing. “Significant double-digit growth” is expected for next year after a 28 percent jump in deliveries there this year through November, Hubertus ...