Bloomberg Southeast Asian nations plan to discuss forming a joint fund to combat the coronavirus pandemic with China, Japan and South Korea during a virtual summit on Tuesday, according to a Thai official. The 13-nation special summit initiated by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations comes as the region struggles to contain the Covid-19 outbreak even after it spread to ...

Bloomberg Apple Inc’s iPhone shipments in China rebounded in March as the world’s second-largest economy worked to reboot its manufacturing industry following the disruption caused by the novel coronavirus outbreak. Shipments of Apple’s marquee device jumped 19% in March from a year earlier to 2.5 million units, according to Bloomberg calculations based on monthly data from the China Academy of ...

Bloomberg The coronavirus outbreak will reduce Japanese automakers’ combined operating profit by 38% this fiscal year, but the manufacturers may rebound faster than they did after the global financial crisis more than a decade ago, analysts at Goldman Sachs Group Inc said. Demand could “recover relatively quickly” once the pandemic nears an end, Kota Yuzawa and other analysts wrote in ...

Bloomberg China has started the process of potentially merging its two biggest brokerage firms to create a company that can better compete with the global investment banks as the country opens up its financial markets, according to people familiar with the matter. Citic Securities Co and CSC Financial Co, along with their government shareholders Citic Group and Central Huijin Investment ...

Bloomberg The Philippines is allowing health workers with existing overseas contracts to leave, relaxing an order earlier this month to keep them in the country to reinforce the healthcare system amid the pandemic. Future applications for healthcare jobs abroad are “frozen until further notice,” Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro Locsin, who called the ban unconstitutional, said. President Rodrigo Duterte said that ...

Bloomberg A researcher at China’s biggest oil company said the country’s drillers should copy the hedging strategies of Mexico and shale firms in the US, which use financial derivatives to protect against falling oil prices. Most of China’s oil production is unhedged, leaving the stability of the sector exposed to global market fluctuations, according to Dai Jiaquan, director of the ...

Bloomberg Japan revised lower its latest greenhouse gas emissions figures, which it had already reported as the least since records began in 1990. Emissions fell 3.9% from a year earlier, data on Tuesday from the environment ministry showed, a bigger drop than the 3.6% estimate in November. The figures, for the year through March 2019, are the latest available. The ...

Bloomberg Springtime is a difficult moment to puzzle out what the ongoing economic shutdown means for global warming. Carbon-dioxide levels always drop throughout the spring and summer in the Northern Hemisphere, as hungry plants absorb the primary greenhouse gas. This seasonal effect is occurring as pandemic lockdowns have stopped billions of people from driving and working, slashing fossil-fuel use and ...

Bloomberg China’s overseas energy purchases weakened in March as demand from the top importer took a hit from the coronavirus pandemic. Crude oil imports fell to the equivalent of about 9.72 million barrels a day, the least since July, according to customs data released on Tuesday. Natural gas shipments were little changed from a year ago at 6.92 million tons ...

Bloomberg Russia’s deepening economic crisis is on the verge of spilling into some of the most remittance-dependent economies in the world. Migrant workers from the former-Soviet Union send $13 billion home each year from Russia, where they are allowed to work visa-free. But now that money is starting to dry up due to lockdowns in Moscow and St. Petersburg that ...