After months of extreme disruption and challenge, retailers badly need their holiday season to go right. Unfortunately, they might find themselves confounded by a thorny problem borne of pandemic-related safety concerns: A crush of e-commerce orders on a scale the industry has never seen, putting stress on their supply chains and those of their shipping partners. The result could be ...

Six years ago Scotland voted by a 10-point margin to stay part of the UK. Yet the last nine consecutive opinion polls show the backing for leave as high as 58 per cent, and averaging at 53 per cent. This sustained lead for independence spells trouble for Boris Johnson’s government, which fears demands for a second referendum will become overwhelming. ...

Bloomberg Hong Kong’s exports rebounded in September on the back of a recovering Chinese economy, Financial Secretary Paul Chan said his blog post on Sunday. The city’s third-quarter gross domestic product should show a significant improvement from the two preceding three-month periods, Chan said. Hong Kong’s GDP slumped by about 9% in both the first and second quarters as the ...

Bloomberg Singapore is seeking to reduce the amount of time it takes to regularly check migrant workers for coronavirus infection by piloting the use of antigen rapid tests. For a period of four weeks, a group of 1,000 migrant workers will undergo antigen rapid testing every seven days, the Ministry of Manpower said in a statement. That’s in addition to ...

Bloomberg The Malaysian Estate Owners Association says new virus-related restrictions on palm operations will cause potential losses of as much as 900 million ringgit ($217 million) a month to the oil palm sector in the state of Sabah. If the entire oil palm supply chain in Sabah is constrained by a recent order to operate at 50% capacity, the state ...

Bloomberg Holding companies controlled by energy-to-mining tycoon Anil Agarwal face the highest debt repayments in several years just as credit rating firms step up warnings. Vedanta Ltd holding companies Vedanta Resources Ltd and Volcan Investments Cyprus Ltd must repay a combined $1.17 billion next year. That’s the most since 2017, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. A Vedanta Resources bond ...

Bloomberg Ant Group Co set the price of its record initial public offering in Shanghai, its billionaire founder Jack Ma said, without disclosing the price. Ma’s Chinese fintech giant is one of the most hotly anticipated IPOs in years, on course to make history by surpassing Saudi Aramco’s record $29 billion share sale in 2019. He commented on the pricing ...

Bloomberg Cheng Uei Precision Industry Co, a Taiwan-based cable and connector maker, will start mass production for Apple Inc later this year from its new plant in India, according to a person familiar with the matter, the latest sign of the US company’s increasing presence in the South Asian country. Apple’s major assembly partners, Taiwan’s Foxconn Technology Group, Pegatron Corp ...

Bloomberg China is reconsidering its strategy for the internationalisation of the yuan and planning for more policy support after completing a comprehensive review recently, according to a senior central bank official. “As everybody knows in the past, the internationalisation of the RMB (yuan) sticks to the market principles,” Zhu Jun, director general of the People’s Bank of China’s international division, ...

Bloomberg The big margin of support among rural voters that helped Donald Trump secure victory four years ago is looking less firm in 2020 with the potential to shift the outcomes in key battleground states. Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee, is nowhere near winning the rural areas of the country, where roads are lined with Trump-Pence lawn signs and barn ...