News

Bloomberg Indonesia’s moratorium on new oil palm plantation permits is set to expire this week as the industry awaits clarity on whether the government will extend the policy. President Joko Widodo ordered a stop to permit issuance for new plantations and expansion of existing ones for three years in a decree signed on September 19, 2018. That order expanded on ...

Bloomberg Amazon.com Inc stressed it has zero tolerance for graft and will investigate all allegations of corruption fully, responding to a report by an Indian news outlet that the US e-commerce giant has begun an internal investigation into claims of bribery. The US company started a probe into its legal representatives’ conduct in India, the Morning Context, a two-year-old media ...

Bloomberg Alibaba Group Holding Ltd’s Lazada Group is creating a new role to lead payments in Southeast Asia for the first time, and tapped a former Alipay executive for the position. Dayong Zhang, former general manager of Southeast Asia for Ant Group Co’s Alipay, will become Lazada’s head of payments, the company said, confirming a report by Bloomberg News. The ...

Bloomberg Hong Kong could have a hard time attracting blank check companies after it proposed a high threshold to list in the city. In a consultation paper, Hong Kong Exchanges & Clearing Ltd proposed that special purpose acquisition companies would need to raise at least HK$1 billion ($128 million) when listing and that retail investors would be barred from participating. ...

Bloomberg UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said unprecedented surge in natural gas prices is a “temporary” problem caused by the global economy bouncing back after the pandemic, arguing a “phenomenal demand for gas” in Asia has affected UK supplies. “I want to give a general reassurance that the problems we’re seeing are temporary,” Johnson told reporters travelling with him to ...

Bloomberg Merck KGaA plans to invest more than 3 billion euros ($3.5 billion) through 2025 in its electronics business to capitalise on rising demand for semiconductor and display panel materials. The German company will expand production capacity, bolster research and development spending and is also considering bolt-on acquisitions, it said on Monday in a statement. Merck makes materials and technologies ...

Bloomberg Employment declined in 19 states and the District of Columbia in August, while the majority of other states posted modest increases, elucidating the abrupt stepdown in US hiring seen last month. North Carolina, Iowa and Hawaii posted largest declines in employment over the month, according to Labour Department figures on state employment. Meantime, California, Texas and New York — ...

Bloomberg The amount of corporate bonds investors can trade in Europe is shrinking for the first time since 2005. Despite a rush in deals by high-grade non-financial firms, there’s effectively a 21 billion-euro ($25 billion) drop in the investable pool of euro bonds because of calls, buybacks, upcoming redemptions and European Central Bank (ECB) debt purchases, according to Bloomberg calculations. ...

Bloomberg OVH Groupe SAS kicked off an initial public offering in Paris, looking to raise as much as $469 million that will give the cloud-storage provider funding to finance its competition with Amazon.com Inc. and accelerate its international expansion. Existing holders will also sell shares in the IPO, the company said in a statement on Monday. OVHcloud was valued at ...

Bloomberg Facebook Inc pushed back on reports that the company was aware of the negative impact of its products, claiming that the allegations don’t tell the whole picture. The issues of content moderation, mental health risks and misinformation are complex and defy simple policy solutions, according to a statement from Nick Clegg, Facebook’s head of global affairs. He said the ...