Bloomberg South Korea’s economy expanded at the slowest pace in more than a year in the fourth quarter as a political scandal engulfing impeached President Park Geun-hye and conglomerates including Samsung Group hurt consumer confidence and spending. Construction investment fell as the government took steps to curb household debt and property market overheating in some areas. Gross domestic product ...

  Bloomberg As China welcomes the Year of the Rooster this week, bets that a recovery in Asian palm oil production will drive prices lower may be something for consumers to crow about. While high prices may keep Chinese buyers on the sidelines in the first part of the new year, an expected surge in supply later in 2017 in ...

  Bloomberg Vietnamese clothing maker NhaBe Garment Corp. had a lot riding on the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The supplier to brands such as Calvin Klein, Michael Kors and Kenneth Cole has seen its exports more than doubled since 2011 to $729 million last year — and it increased its factories two-fold to 35, betting on a big drop in tariffs from ...

  Bloomberg China’s proposal to halt some metals production to fight air pollution over the winter would create shortages of alumina but have a more limited impact on aluminum supply, according to China’s top industry body, which has been consulted on the plan. The proposal involves an alumina suspension in three provinces that would affect about a fifth of the ...

  Bloomberg Maruti Suzuki India Ltd. reported third-quarter profit climbed 47 percent as India’s biggest automaker increased its share of sales of sport utility vehicles, a more affluent market segment that better weathered the cash crunch affecting predominantly the country’s poor. Net income climbed to 17.4 billion rupees ($255 million) in the quarter ended Dec. 31, in line with analysts’ ...

  Bloomberg Donald Trump’s push against trade deals he says have devastated small-town US workers is bringing disappointment to another key piece of his rural American coalition: Farmers and ranchers who heartily supported the president in hopes of less regulation and lower taxes. Trump’s decision on Monday to pull out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would have reduced tariffs and ...

  Bloomberg Cisco Systems Inc. agreed to acquire AppDynamics Inc. for $3.7 billion, snapping up the fast-growing software maker just before it planned to go public. Cisco, the world’s biggest maker of networking gear, will add AppDynamics’ software and services that help companies to monitor and fine-tune the performance of their own business systems. AppDynamics, based in San Francisco, was ...

  Bloomberg The UK economy may have cleared its 2016 Brexit test, but that’s not easing companies’ concern about the approaching challenges. Days before figures are predicted to show a healthy 0.5 percent expansion in the last quarter of 2016, businesses from airline EasyJet Plc to telecommunications firm BT Group Plc cited Brexit-linked problems such as a weaker pound and ...

  Bloomberg Defects that caused Samsung Electronics Co.’s Note 7 phones to burst into flames last year revealed that the industry’s voluntary standards for the design and manufacture of rechargeable batteries aren’t adequate, a US consumer-safety regulator has concluded. The Consumer Product Safety Commission, which negotiated a recall of 1.9 million of the phones and is conducting its own investigation, ...

  Bloomberg Alphabet Inc. re-hired Yoky Matsuoka to oversee technology at its Nest Labs Inc. smart home unit, snapping up the robotics and artificial intelligence expert after she recently left Apple Inc. As Chief Technology Officer, Matsuoka will work closely with Nest’s engineering and product teams to define a long-term technology roadmap. She’ll be responsible for identifying important enabling technologies ...