Bloomberg Lukoil PJSC is seeking opportunities for growth in the Middle East as Iran opens more of its oil fields to international partners, according to the Russian energy company’s regional head. The Moscow-based company plans to add output from the region to existing operations in Iraq and Egypt as long as it finds projects with production costs as low ...

  Reuters Saudi Arabian money supply growth picked up in December in a sign that the economy is regaining strength after a slump last year caused by low oil prices and government austerity measures, central bank data showed on Sunday. Annual growth in M3 money supply, the broadest money supply measure, rose to 0.7 percent in December, its highest level ...

  Bloomberg Toshiba Corp. is looking to sell more assets to repair a balance sheet facing multibillion-dollar writedowns. The conglomerate happens to have more than 600 different businesses, but raising cash from the firesale will be far from simple. While Toshiba’s two biggest enterprises are nuclear reactors and semiconductors, the Tokyo-based company also has its hands in a wide range ...

  Bloomberg After years spent languishing behind its neighbors, the Philippines is finally catching up with its fellow Asian tiger economies as it posts some of the fastest growth rates in the world. With the World Bank forecasting expansion of more than 6 percent for eight years until 2019 — unparalleled in the nation’s history — the Philippines is mimicking ...

  Bloomberg Alphabet Inc.’s medical arm Verily Life Sciences LLC is getting a major influx of cash from a Singapore-based investment company, boosting the odds of taking their futuristic approach to healthcare into Asian markets. Temasek Holdings Pte Ltd, a state-owned firm, is investing $800 million in Verily, according to a statement from the company Thursday. In exchange, Temasek will ...

  Bloomberg China’s voracious demand for cotton is sparking the fiber’s best rally in six months. Chinese buyers have committed to purchasing almost five times more American cotton than at this time last year, the US government said in a report this month. The price of the commodity is heading for its biggest monthly advance since July. Hedge funds are ...

  Trade wars, encouraged by President Trump, are inching closer. The White House has rejected the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), an agreement involving 12 Asian-Pacific countries, including the United States, Japan, Malaysia and Vietnam. It is threatening to do the same with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) by slapping a 20 percent duty on Mexican exports to the United ...

  It’s hard to quibble with the continued success of Google’s advertising business. Already the dominant company in the $200 billion annual market for web and mobile commercials, Google parent company Alphabet Inc. padded its advertising revenue by about $12 billion from 2015 to 2016. That means in a single year, Google found new business that was equivalent to half ...

  The European Union is grappling with Uber and its peers, asking how best to regulate businesses that connect buyers and sellers in the so-called sharing economy. EU policy is shaping up to be much too heavy-handed. A big question for these new enterprises is whether the people supplying the services are deemed to be employees (with rights protected by ...

  US President Donald Trump held phone calls with five world leaders, including Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Trump and Angela Merkel discussed issues ranging from NATO to Russia to the situation in the Middle East. The conversation affirmed the importance of close German-American cooperation to each country’s security. Trump accepted Merkel’s invitation to attend the ...