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Bloomberg Traveloka, Southeast Asia’s biggest online travel startup, is planning to list in the US this year to raise funds using a special purpose acquistion company, known as SPAC, according to Chief Executive Offer Ferry Unardi. “SPAC is very efficient,” Unardi said in an interview with Bloomberg Television on Tuesday. “If we can do it faster we can then focus ...

Bloomberg The Philippines said it has enough orders of coronavirus vaccines in the pipeline to reach its goal of inoculating most of its population this year, even as it expects a supply crunch in the first half. The Southeast Asian nation is negotiating for as many as 170 million vaccine doses, presidential spokesman Harry Roque said. A fourth of the ...

Bloomberg Japan incentivising its companies to shift manufacturing facilities out of China and adding Bangladesh to a list of preferred destinations for relocating the factories may give the South Asian nation’s economy a boost. “As the pandemic started in China, Japanese companies needed to diversify” their supply chains further, Naoki Ito, the Japanese ambassador to Bangladesh, said in an interview. ...

Bloomberg The UK could need tax increases of about 60 billion pounds ($84 billion) if Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak wants to balance the books, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS). The warning sets the tone for the Treasury’s budget on March 3, when Sunak is due to outline how he intends to address the ruinous legacy ...

Bloomberg Colombia’s economy grew faster than expected at the end of 2020 as a rebound in consumer spending led the recovery from the worst slump in the nation’s history. The economy expanded 6% in last three months of the year compared to the previous quarter, beating the median forecast of 5.7% growth from analysts surveyed by Bloomberg. The recovery was ...

Bloomberg France is optimistic that the European Commission will sign off within days on an innovative plan for helping companies through the post-pandemic recovery, according to a finance ministry official, who asked not to be identified. The French government has proposed a program to partially guarantee billions of euros of so-called participatory loans to improve corporate balance sheets and encourage ...

Bloomberg Passenger-car sales in Europe’s five biggest markets tumbled by more than a quarter last month after lockdowns to combat the pandemic shuttered dealerships and consumers shied away from large purchases. Registrations fall 28% across Germany, the UK, France, Italy and Spain in January from the year-earlier period, according to Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Michael Dean. With lockdowns still in effect ...

Bloomberg The energy crisis crippling Texas’s power system continued to spread, with nearly 5 million people across the US plunged into darkness as authorities fought to avoid a total collapse of the grid. Homes and businesses from North Dakota to Texas are losing power in the middle of an unprecedented deep freeze that has broken daily temperature records in hundreds ...

ABU DHABI / WAM Edge, the UAE’s advanced technology group for defence and beyond, on Monday announced it signed a tri-party strategic cooperation agreement with Ukrainian state-owned defence conglomerate UkrOboronProm, and Ukrspecexport, a Ukrainian state-owned arms trading company. The agreement will enable the three entities to exchange and develop advanced technologies that could lead to over $1 billion worth of ...

ABU DHABI / WAM Dr Thani bin Ahmed Al Zeyoudi, Minister of State for Foreign Trade, said that the value of non-oil trade between the UAE and Africa totalled $40.7 billion in the first nine months of 2020, compared to $36.9 billion in the same period of 2019, underscoring the growing trade between the UAE and African countries despite the ...