News

  Sharjah / Emirates Business Al Majaz Waterfront first ever Winter Festival got under way at the emirate’s popular leisure and tourist destination. The opening two days of the seasonal event, which is running until January 7, have seen an array of activities designed to impart the festive ambience of a wintry landscape without its attendant chilly temperatures. Creating a ...

  Bloomberg The road back down for this year’s best-performing commodity may be bumpy. While spot prices for coking coal have dropped about 16 percent this month from a record high above $300 a ton, possible heavy rain and flooding in Australia over the next few months may stall, or even reverse, the decline. The region is forecast to see ...

  Bloomberg Beijing municipal government ordered more than 1,200 factories in the printing, construction materials and petrochemical industries citywide to either suspend or cut output after earlier issuing this year’s first red alert warning for severely high levels of air pollution. Under a contingency plan for severe air pollution, the city shut down more than 700 plants with production procedures ...

  Bloomberg China must do more to deflate a property bubble that expanded this year by “strictly” controlling speculation while also stepping up the fight to rein in excessive corporate borrowing, a top economic official said a day after leaders announced plans for next year. “We need to give a higher priority to preventing and controlling financial risks,” Yang Weimin, ...

  Bloomberg Wangxiang Group, the owner of Karma Automotive, became the second auto-parts maker to receive permission from the nation’s top economic planner to produce electric cars under a special scheme to encourage companies outside auto manufacturing to develop new-energy vehicles. Founded by Chinese billionaire Lu Guanqiu, Wanxiang Group got approval from the National Development and Reform Commission to invest ...

  Bloomberg Verizon Communications Inc.’s deal with Yahoo! Inc. has hit a rocky patch, but the phone giant is forging ahead with a strategy focusing on mobile advertising and still has appetite for more deals. Whether or not the $4.83 billion Yahoo deal goes through, the company is likely to look at purchasing digital media companies that could drive more ...

  Bloomberg DeepMind, the London-based division of Alphabet Inc. that’s responsible for numerous recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, is hiring its first researcher in the US to boost collaboration across the Atlantic. The “applied research scientist position” described in a job posting on DeepMind’s website will be located at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. It would be the first ...

  Bloomberg General Motors Co. will begin producing self-driving cars at a Michigan factory — and testing them on the state’s roads — in a step toward building the vehicles on a large scale, Chief Executive Officer Mary Barra said. “We believe GM will be one of the first automakers to build high-volume autonomous vehicles in an assembly plant,” Barra ...

  Bloomberg After the worst French wheat crop in decades this season, the European Union’s largest producer looks set to return to global export markets. Output of soft wheat is expected to jump by about a third to 37.7 million metric tons in the season starting July, according to estimates from Tallage, publisher of the Strategie Grains report. That will ...

  DUBAI / WAM Trade between the UAE and China is expected to increase to US$60 billion (AED216 billion) by the end of this year, up from $54.8 in 2015, as the UAE is now China’s second largest trading partner in the Middle East and the region’s biggest market for Chinese goods, according to the Dubai Economic Council (DEC). China, ...