International News

Bloomberg VIPKid, an online education company that matches Chinese students with North American teachers, was valued at more than $1.5 billion in a round of funding from investors including Sequoia Capital China and Tencent Holdings Ltd., according to people familiar with the matter. The Beijing-based company said on Wednesday it had raised $200 million to expand into new markets and ...

Bloomberg Manufacturers of “Made in the UK” cars are facing a worrying dilemma: Their vehicles might not be British enough to escape expensive tariffs after Brexit. Current trade pacts generally require exporters to prove that 50 to 60 percent of a product’s components are from the originating country to avoid tariffs. But UK cars are now just 44 percent British-made ...

Bloomberg Verizon Communications Inc. is introducing a lower-priced, lower-quality unlimited mobile data plan to compete more aggressively with smaller rivals like T-Mobile US Inc., while raising the cost for those who want the clearest videos. Starting Wednesday, Verizon is eliminating its popular $80-a-month unlimited plan and replacing it with an $85 premium plan with high-definition video and a $75 unlimited ...

Bloomberg Brazil’s antitrust watchdog weighed in on AT&T Inc.’s $85.4 billion deal for Time Warner Inc., saying it sees a high anti-competitive risk. The nation’s telecommunications regulator had asked the antitrust agency known as Cade in June to review the deal, saying remedies should be adopted because it may negatively affect Brazil’s pay-TV market. The merger combines one of the ...

Bloomberg Swiss watch exports climbed for a fourth month as growth in higher-end mechanical timepieces made up for a decline in cheaper quartz models. Shipments rose 3.6 percent to $1.8 billion in July, the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry said on Tuesday. Exports of watches wholesaling for more than 3,000 francs rose 5.9 percent, offsetting an 18 percent slump ...

Bloomberg Ford Motor Co. became the latest automaker to offer cash to UK drivers if they scrap the most polluting vehicles on the roads, targeting about 15 million cars and vans across the country. From September 1 to December 31, Ford will offer to pay drivers as much as $5,200 for cars and 7,000 pounds for vans if they replace ...

Bloomberg Facebook Inc. is lucky it owns Instagram. This year, the world’s largest social network will see a decline among teen users in the US, according to a forecast by EMarketer. It’s the first time the research company has predicted a fall in Facebook usage for any age group. EMarketer predicts 14.5 million people from the ages of 12 to ...

Bloomberg North Korea’s saber-rattling is at last being felt in its southern neighbour’s bullet-proof bond market. Foreign investors have started to look for the exits, selling a net $415 million worth of Korean notes last week, only the second weekly outflow since November, according to the nation’s Financial Supervisory Service. That’s a precipitous drop from the $4.3 billion of net ...

Bloomberg Singapore’s government will support technology startups by doing business with them rather than having them rely on grants as the city-state pushes ahead with a plan to become a high-tech hub, a top minister said. The government wants to fuel private-sector innovation, especially among small and medium-sized firms, in a bid to create a digitally integrated economy, Vivian Balakrishnan, ...

Bloomberg China’s money market is bracing for yet another squeeze. A record 2.3 trillion yuan ($340 billion) of negotiable certificates of deposit—a funding lifeline for medium and smaller banks—are set to mature next month, adding to the stress of an official deleveraging drive that has pressured onshore bonds lower in all but two months of this year. The flood of ...