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  BEIJING / AP China’s auto sales shrank in January following a sales tax increase, an industry group reported on Monday. Sales in the world’s biggest auto market declined 1.1 percent from a year earlier to 2.2 million, compared to December’s 9.1 percent expansion, according to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers. Total vehicle sales, including trucks and buses, rose ...

  Bloomberg India’s inflation grew at its slowest pace on record even as the central bank unexpectedly held interest rates in its monetary policy review last week. Consumer prices rose 3.17 percent in January from a year earlier, the Statistics Ministry said in a statement in New Delhi on Monday. That’s slower than the 3.24 percent median estimate in a ...

  Bloomberg Infosys Ltd.’s co-founder and former chairman Narayana Murthy is calling off his fight with the board, saying the company will deal with the questions about corporate governance that have been raised. Billionaire Murthy and several other founders had raised questions about the management of Asia’s second-largest IT services company, citing a spike in compensation for Chief Executive Officer ...

  Bloomberg The strength in exports that fueled a fourth straight quarter of economic growth in Japan underscores just how important it is for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to ease trade tensions with the Trump administration. Net shipments abroad added 0.2 percentage point to gross domestic product in the three months through December, while consumption in Japan was flat as ...

  Bloomberg Germany’s economy is running at full speed, yet some of its biggest companies are far from getting carried away about the future. Thyssenkrupp AG last week became the latest of the country’s top firms to intertwine words of caution in what’s shaping up to be a strong earnings season, joining peers like Siemens AG in warning against global ...

  Bloomberg Buying your sweetheart a box of Valentine’s Day chocolates could be cheaper this year thanks to booming cocoa supplies. Growers are collecting bigger harvests in Latin America and in West Africa, which accounts for about 70 percent of global production. The output gains have pushed cocoa futures to the lowest since 2008, cutting costs for companies including Mondelez ...

  Bloomberg The average price of a UK home hit a new record in January, continuing an upward trend that’s in part being driven by a supply-demand imbalance. The 0.3 percent increase in values lifted the average to 300,169 pounds ($374,000), Acadata and LSL said in a report on Monday. Annual growth was 3.1 percent, and prices are now double ...

  Bloomberg Volkswagen AG Chief Executive Officer Matthias Mueller sought to calm nerves at the German carmaker as festering disputes with labor leaders and allegations from former Chairman Ferdinand Piech threatened to disrupt efforts to overcome its diesel-cheating scandal. “You’re all certainly as irritated as I am, because Volkswagen needs something totally different now: namely, concentration in order to cleanly ...

  Bloomberg Property owners are likely to start cashing in to a greater extent this year after an eight-year rally in prices across the Nordic real estate markets, according to Pangea Property Partners. Potential sellers include funds, companies that want to streamline their portfolios and private investors who see good exit opportunities, Pangea said in its Real Estate Outlook 2017 ...

  Bloomberg There are limits to investors’ love affair with OPEC. After unprecedented optimism that the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries will manage to ease a global supply glut, money managers reduced their bets on rising West Texas Intermediate prices for the first time in a month. While the group and other major exporters are pumping less crude, US inventories ...