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Bloomberg SoftBank Group Corp. is in talks to back leading online insurance aggregator PolicyBazaar at a valuation of at least $800 million, according to people familiar with the matter. The two sides are examining how the Japanese company can take a stake without pushing foreign investment in PolicyBazaar above 49 percent, the limit under India’s regulatory policies, said one of ...

Bloomberg One of China’s top smartphone makers is targeting Japan for its next conquest. Oppo, which vanquished Apple Inc. and Xiaomi Corp. in just a few years to become No. 2 in its home market, will introduce its flagship R11s model next month, Deng Yuchen, chief of Japan operations, said. Oppo is aiming to reach a market position that matches ...

Bloomberg After a 3,985 percent rally since its 2008 listing, V-Guard Industries Ltd. that has evolved into one of India’s leading consumer-durable companies has found its next big growth plan: Internet of Things (IOT). The company, which started 40 years ago with a mere 100,000 rupees, now has products ranging from food mixers to fans and is betting that rising ...

Bloomberg Saudi Aramco’s trading unit started swapping the kingdom’s crude oil for products refined in other countries, allowing the company to tap new markets, according to its chief executive officer. The company has supplied crude to refiners in the Mediterranean region and gotten fuel in return, Ibrahim Al-Buainain, chief executive officer of Saudi Aramco Products Trading Co., said by phone. ...

DAVOS / Reuters US Energy Secretary Rick Perry told oil super-powers Russia and Saudi Arabia he believed US shale oil boom would not become a spoiler for oil markets because new production would be absorbed by fast rising global demand. Perry, a former governor of Texas, the heartland of the US shale oil boom, was speaking at a rare joint ...

BEIJING / Reuters Russia held firm as China’s top crude oil supplier in December for the 10th month and racked up its second year as the largest supplier in 2017, customs data showed, leaving rival exporter Saudi Arabia in second place on both fronts. Exports from Russia hit 5.03 million tonnes in December, down 0.2 percent from a year earlier, ...

Bloomberg Oil just got an extra tailwind from a weakening dollar as this month is shaping up to be the best January for black gold in 12 years. That’s because when the greenback is losing value, investors tend to flock to commodities as a store of value, and this is coming on the back of a record streak of declines ...

Bloomberg Kuwait Foreign Petroleum Exploration Co. reduced its output target for oil and natural gas due to the drop in crude prices that started in 2014, Chief Executive Officer Sheikh Nawaf Saud Al-Sabah said. Kufpec, a unit of state-run Kuwait Petroleum Corp., revised its production goal for 2020 to 150,000 barrels a day of oil equivalent from 200,000 barrels a ...

Bloomberg Iraqi Kurdistan-focussed Genel Energy expects oil and gas production to fall for a third year in 2018, it said, as it shifts its focus to two new gas fields. The decline in production is due to a continuing slide in output from the Taq Taq field, once considered Genel’s flagship field, after the well hit water in 2016. Genel’s ...

Bloomberg Google’s top executive said the search giant would welcome higher taxes. Uber Technologies Inc.’s new CEO said it must be more accommodating with regulators. Salesforce.com Inc.’s veteran leader Marc Benioff said Silicon Valley has been arrogant and compared Facebook to the tobacco industry. At the World Economic Forum in Davos this week, technology executives struck a conciliatory note in ...