Bloomberg Facebook Inc. is taking another stab at turning its Oculus Rift virtual reality headset into a mass-market phenomenon. Later this year, the company plans to unveil a cheaper, wireless device that the company is betting will popularize VR the way Apple did the smartphone. Currently VR hardware comes in two flavors: cheap headsets that turn smartphones into virtual reality ...

Bloomberg Investing in the South Korean equity market has taken an interesting turn: look past the Samsung trade. Foreigners were net sellers of Samsung Electronics Co. even as they bought more than $15 billion of stocks in the past 12 months, helping push the MSCI Korea and Kospi indexes to record highs. Instead of piling into the tech giant, they ...

Bloomberg Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. forecast quarterly revenue that trailed estimates, dashing hopes that Apple Inc.’s iPhone will help the world’s largest contract chipmaker pull out of a smartphone industry slump and avert the impact of a strong currency. The Taiwanese maker of the iPhone’s processors forecast third-quarter sales of $8.12 billion to $8.22 billion, short of the $8.6 billion ...

Bloomberg Later this year, Apple Inc. will put augmented reality software in as many as a billion mobile devices. Alphabet Inc.’s Google beat Apple by three years in releasing AR tools, but its features are on very few phones and haven’t gained wide acceptance. By contrast, Apple can easily pair its software and devices, an advantage that will help it ...

Bloomberg Wells Fargo & Co. has lost ‘tens of millions of dollars’ in revenue from municipal and state clients since a sales scandal in its consumer bank erupted 10 months ago, Chief Financial Officer John Shrewsberry said in a statement. Shrewsberry said the decline isn’t material to Wells Fargo’s earnings, but added the company is working to regain the business. ...

Bloomberg The Indian rupee may weaken as global funds start to hit buying limits for the nation’s debt and valuations for equities look expensive, according to HSBC Holdings Plc. “I won’t be surprised if we drift down to 65-65.25 to the dollar over the next two months,” Pradeep Khanna, HSBC’s head of global markets trading for India in Mumbai, said ...

Bloomberg Fears of a long spell of low oil prices haven’t shaken Wall Street’s confidence in the sector. With the price of crude languishing around $46 a barrel in New York, the industry’s bankers remain optimistic about their energy investments, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Wells Fargo & Co. That’s different from a year earlier, when banks pulled ...

Bloomberg The pound rose to its highest since September as weak inflation data in the U.S. weighed on the dollar, while traders are increasingly betting on tighter monetary policy in the U.K. Sterling, which crossed $1.30 and rose against all of its major peers, has largely defied signs that the UK economy is slowing, with some Bank of England policy ...

Bloomberg South Africa’s central bank will persist in seeking a court order to set aside an instruction from the nation’s anti-graft ombudsman that its mandate must be changed, even after Public Protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane said she won’t oppose the regulator’s application. In a report last month, Mkhwebane instructed the legislature to start a process to amend the nation’s constitution to ...

Bloomberg UniCredit SpA and Koc Holding AS are weighing a capital increase of about $1 billion for their Turkish venture Yapi & Kredi Bankasi AS to strengthen its buffers, according to people with knowledge of the matter. UniCredit, which together with Koc owns 82 percent of the Turkish bank, wants to carry out the fundraising by the end of the ...