December, 2018

• 8 December

  Doctors, economists have a prescription for Grab

  

  GrabTaxi Holdings Pte has a lot of smart people on its payroll. Let’s hope the transportation startup spends more time listening to its economists. Yeah I know, startup and economics in the same sentence. Go-Jek Indonesia PT’s entry into Singapore was inevitable the moment Grab bought out the local business of Uber Technologies Inc. It already had its sights on ...

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• 8 December

  Retailers try payment apps to sidestep $90bn in third-party swipe fees

  

  Bloomberg Retailers have been trying for years to escape the clutches of the credit-card companies, which this year will levy more than $90 billion in swipe fees on an industry already struggling to navigate the shift online. Some believe the answer lies in payment apps. While shoppers have largely shunned mobile payments offered by third-party providers like Apple Inc., retailers ...

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• 8 December

  Scooter-rental startup Skip gets $100 million in debt

  

  Bloomberg Skip Transport, one of two companies that won licenses to rent scooters on the streets of San Francisco, received $100 million in debt and is seeking more funding from investors, said three people familiar with the matter. While it explores an equity deal, Skip plans to use the debt on a project to design and build scooters that would ...

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• 8 December

  Apple’s HomePod heads to China

  

  Bloomberg Apple Inc. said its HomePod wireless speaker will go on sale in China next year, potentially beating Amazon.com Inc. and Google to the world’s most-populous nation. On its website in China, Apple added a banner that said the speaker will go on sale in “early 2019”. The Hong Kong website announced a similar move. The speaker will cost HK ...

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• 8 December

  BYD plans battery IPO amid electric-car boom

  

  Bloomberg BYD Co., the electric-car maker backed by Warren Buffett, plans to list its battery business by 2022 to raise funds to expand as the global auto industry transitions away from the traditional combustion engine. The listing will occur sometime by the end of 2022 and the company hasn’t decided yet where the shares will be trading, Chairman Wang Chuanfu ...

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• 8 December

  ECB set to give long-term loans to banks next year

  

  Bloomberg The European Central Bank will offer new long-term loans to banks next year while going slow on interest rates to underpin the region’s increasingly fragile upswing, according to a Bloomberg survey of economists. Almost three-quarters of respondents said they expect an announcement of such funding by March, to be handed out three months later. A deposit-rate hike is still ...

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• 8 December

  Big deflation sparks talk of no rate hike in Brazil during 2019

  

  Bloomberg Bets that Brazil may hold interest rates at a record low throughout 2019 gained strength after the country posted its biggest monthly deflation in 1-1/2 years. Consumer prices measured by the benchmark IPCA index fell 0.21 percent in November, three times as much as economists expected. Swap rates on futures contracts, a barometer of expected interest-rate decisions, dove following ...

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• 8 December

  Canadian banks’ record earnings driven by gains abroad

  

  Bloomberg Canada’s eight big banks extended their record earnings streak this year, posting a 7.5 percent jump in annual profit fuelled by operations outside their home turf. Net income for the companies totalled C$45.9 billion ($34.3 billion) in the fiscal year ended October 31. Toronto-Dominion Bank and Bank of Montreal profited from their US consumer-lending divisions, while Bank of Nova ...

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• 8 December

  Kenyan bank-merger plan creates bigger rival for West Africa lenders

  

  Bloomberg Plans to merge two Kenyan banks will create a lender that can compete adequately with West African banks that are expanding into the region, Treasury Secretary Henry Rotich said. NIC Group Plc, one of Kenya’s mid-sized publicly traded banks, is in merger talks with Commercial Bank of Africa Ltd., the nation’s biggest closely held lender, the two said. The ...

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• 8 December

  ‘Germany willing to merge Deutsche, Commerzbank’

  Bloomberg The German finance ministry is willing to “orchestrate” a mer-ger between Deutsche Bank AG and Commerzbank AG, according to Focus magazine. Various scenarios have been discussed, including one in which the German state would become Deutsche Bank’s largest shareholder for about five years before merging the two banks, Focus reported without saying how it got the information. Alternatively, Deutsche ...

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