ABU DHABI / EMIRATES BUSINESS The Emirates Securities Market Index has increased by 0.24% to close at 4574.07 points. Accordingly the Market Capitalization has gained AED 1.75 billion attaining AED 741.97billion. A total of 0.94 Billion Shares were traded with a total value of AED 1.15 billion during the trading session of 08-03-2016 through 11363 transactions. The number of companies which has ...

BEIJING / Bloomberg HSBC Holdings Plc winning approval to start a credit-card business in China’s $1 trillion market offers Chief Executive Officer Stuart Gulliver added flexibility in his push into the nation’s retail banking and wealth-management industries. The approval from Chinese authorities came as HSBC ended a card venture with Bank of Communications Co., the bank’s Asia-Pacific head Peter Wong ...

CAPE TOWN / Bloomberg FirstRand Ltd., Africa’s biggest bank by value, said first-half profit was little changed after South Africa’s economy slowed and non-performing loans increased. Net income rose to 10.48 billion rand ($683 million) in the six months ended December 31 from 10.3 billion rand a year earlier, the Johannesburg-based company said in a statement on Tuesday. Earnings per share ...

Canberra / Bloomberg Australian central bank Deputy Governor Philip Lowe said that low wage growth and contained inflation provide scope to cut rates further and said, like most of his global peers, he’d prefer a weaker currency. The Reserve Bank of Australia’s official said the economy had proved pretty resilient to the winding back of a massive mining investment boom and ...

BLOOMBERG Arnaud Droitcourt, Bank of America Corp.’s head of Asia-Pacific equity trading, left the company as it cuts jobs to trim expenses, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Droitcourt, a Hong Kong-based managing director who oversaw both cash equity and equity derivatives trading of the bank, left Tuesday, said the person, who asked not to be identified ...

BLOOMBERG European Central Bank (ECB) Executive Board member Yves Mersch has said he wants evidence that high-denomination euro banknotes facilitate crime. While there’s been much coverage of the matter, Mersch would be “very happy if any substantiated evidence would be shipped to the ECB.” Step forward the Spanish police, who arrested two men at Madrid airport and seized 200,000 euros ...

Bloomberg For the biggest US bank, the best way to fight Silicon Valley is to mimic it. JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s. new technology hub across the street from the Hudson Yards development on Manhattan’s West Side — a 125,000-square-foot space so vast it’s subdivided into five neighbourhoods — has all the trappings of a start-up: foosball tables, a game room, ...

BLOOMBERG FastJet Plc will start closing routes after burning through cash in its efforts to become the first pan-African discount airline, predicting 2016 earnings will fall “materially” below analyst estimates. The share price almost halved in the biggest decline since the company was founded in 2012. The impact of challenging market conditions and currency fluctuations has proved “a lot more ...

Bloomberg Thai Union Group Pcl, producer of “Chicken of the Sea” canned tuna and other seafood products, is planning at least two overseas acquisitions this year to boost revenue by about $500 million, following a failed bid for the rival Bumble Bee Foods LLC last year. The Samutsakorn-based company is considering purchases of seafood producers in Europe and developing countries ...

Bloomberg Lindt & Spruengli AG is challenging Godiva as the Swiss company set a goal of becoming the world’s largest premium chocolate retailer by 2020, bolstering its direct sales to consumers. Lindt plans to open 20 to 30 shops each year, the Kilchberg, Switzerland-based maker of Lindor balls said in a statement on Tuesday as it reported full-year profit growth ...