Bloomberg SoftBank Group Corp will invest $2 billion in Indonesia through ride-hailing giant Grab over the next five years and plans to explore investment opportunities in the country’s electric battery and renewable energy sectors. The Japanese conglomerate, which announced plans last week to raise a total of $108 billion for its second Vision Fund, will also increase its investment in ...

Bloomberg With no let-up apparent in global and regional trade tensions, Singapore’s business community has slashed its expectations for the near-term economic outlook. “Because we are hugely export-dependent, because of the slowing down in the economy, because of tension, because of loss of business confidence — we need to adjust” growth expectations, Ho Meng Kit, CEO of the Singapore Business ...

Bloomberg India’s growing affluence is seeing its population turn more carnivorous, leading the country with the world’s highest number of vegetarians to import more corn for chicken feed than ever before. Corn purchases by Asia’s second-biggest grower are set to climb to a record 1 million tons in the year starting in November, said Jaison John, general manager for procurement ...

Bloomberg China Evergrande Group may be a long way from challenging Tesla Inc, but it’s at least thinking about how customers can charge their electric cars more cheaply. The property developer has established a joint venture with State Grid Corp of China to co-develop smart car-charging technology, according to a statement on Evergrande’s website. In China, electric-vehicle owners pay about ...

Bloomberg Japan’s unusually long and cool rainy season dampened demand for apparel, furniture and other goods, with some retailers already reporting steep drops in merchandise sales. Shimamura Co, a chain of affordable clothing shops, reported that same-store sales through July 20 fell 18 percent from a year earlier. Many of Shimamura’s customers reach the company’s 1,433 locations in Japan via ...

Bloomberg Deutsche Telekom AG is the closest it’s ever been to securing the US wireless mega-merger that Chief Executive Officer Tim Hoettges has attempted to clinch three times. The German phone company rose the most in almost 10 months on Monday after clearing a major hurdle for the $26.5 billion takeover of Sprint Corp by its T-Mobile US Inc unit ...

Bloomberg Neither the European Union nor Britain is ready for a no-deal Brexit on October 31, according to a study of contingency plans by the UK’s biggest business lobby group. “There are no areas of relevance to the economy where the UK, EU and the business community are all prepared well enough for no deal,” the Confederation of British Industry ...

Bloomberg Facebook Inc’s “Like” button makes third-party websites responsible for processing people’s data under the European Union’s privacy rules, according to the EU’s top court. The EU Court of Justice weighed in on a dispute after an online fashion retailer was accused of violating EU law by embedding a Like plugin, which a consumer association said allowed the social media ...

Bloomberg The so-called Snooper’s Charter, which allows the UK government to access data from emails and mobile phones, survived a court challenge from a privacy group. A pair of UK judges dismissed the lawsuit, saying they weren’t persuaded that the legislation is incompatible with European Union rules. Judge Rabinder Singh said the 2016 Investigatory Powers Act included several “safeguards against ...

Bloomberg Pharmaceutical behemoth Pfizer Inc has transformed itself under new leadership through a series of spinouts and joint ventures, mitigating risk by placing some units at arm’s length while continuing to reap rewards from them. Chief Executive Officer Albert Bourla, 57, who took the helm in January after serving as the drugmaker’s operations chief, has rapidly transformed the company through ...