January, 2018

• 30 January

  Singapore’s dual-class idea is bad!

  

  Singapore is racing Hong Kong to the bottom in weakening shareholder rights. The city-state’s exchange said recently it will allow companies with dual-class share structures to list, a month after Hong Kong announced a similar proposal. The idea is to entice new-economy companies, but joining the dual-class-share club won’t improve the one thing Singapore needs more of: liquidity. In 1999, ...

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• 30 January

  What’s bad for GE will be even worse for US

  General Electric’s multi-billion-dollar loss in a unit that sold long-term-care insurance is a blow from which the iconic company is still reeling. But it’s also a harbinger of a much greater challenge for society at large: paying to care for the growing number of Americans who can’t look after themselves. GE’s travails stem from the early 1990s, when insurance companies ...

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• 30 January

  Europe’s youth have good reason to be mad

  Few topics are as discussed at Davos as ‘inequality.’ Business leaders and bankers take a great interest in debating how to ensure that globalization works for the many and not just for the few. This isn’t pure altruism, of course: They understand that a populist backlash could be devastating for their businesses too. These conversations too often fail to specify ...

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• 30 January

  China’s tourism industry is only just getting going

  

  If you want to gauge how Chinese consumers are reshaping the world, look at how many of them are leaving China. For vacation, that is. Outbound Chinese tourism has enjoyed explosive growth over the past decade and there’s plenty more where that came from: only 5 percent of the Middle Kingdom’s citizens hold a passport, compared with 40 percent in ...

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• 30 January

  Physics breakthrough could save the world

  

  If humans want to avoid boiling the oceans, we’ll have to find ways to use energy more efficiently. This, in turn, requires solving a problem that people don’t typically connect to climate change: the turbulence created when we pump air, water, oil, gas and other substances through countless miles of ducts and pipes. Thanks to its confounding effects, fully 10 ...

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• 30 January

  Germany’s attack on Facebook misses the point

  

  Of all the regulatory threats to Facebook’s dodgy business model, Germany’s is the hardest to shake off. The German Federal Cartel Office has questioned the company’s use of third-party data to help target advertisements. Now that Chancellor Angela Merkel is likely to keep her job through 2021, Facebook faces ever-increasing pressure on this front. But no matter how unpleasant this ...

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• 30 January

  Europe’s $900 billion a year gas market heading south

  

  Bloomberg The center of gravity in Europe’s natural gas market is heading south as one of the continent’s biggest pipeline operators builds a system that could make Italy an exporter of the fuel for the first time. Fortified with new supplies due from a $5.6 billion pipeline link to the Caspian Sea as well as tankers full of gas in ...

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• 30 January

  Nigeria plans to start building $5.8 billion power plant in 2018

  

  Bloomberg Nigeria plans to start building a $5.8 billion hydro-power plant in the eastern Mambila region this year, after it agrees on loan terms with China’s Export-Import Bank. “We hope to break ground this year if we can conclude the financing,” Power, Works and Housing Minister Babatunde Fashola said in a Jan. 23 interview in the capital, Abuja. “Contracts are ...

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• 30 January

  PetroChina expects profit to triple in 2017

  

  Bloomberg PetroChina Co, the country’s biggest oil and gas producer, forecast that full-year profit rebounded off a record low and may have tripled amid cost cutting and higher energy prices. Net income for 2017 may have jumped by as much as 16 billion yuan ($2.5 billion), the state-run oil giant said in a filing to the Hong Kong stock exchange, ...

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• 30 January

  Saudi Sipchem mulls US shale venture in first foreign foray

  Bloomberg Saudi International Petrochemical Co. is considering investing in the US shale industry in what would be the company’s first foreign venture as it faces higher costs and a shortage of feedstock at home in Saudi Arabia. Sipchem, as the business is known, may seek a US partner in its effort to tap into the booming shale industry, though Chief ...

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