March, 2017

• 20 March

  Oppo, Vivo founder reveals how he toppled Apple in China

  

    Bloomberg Duan Yongping is convinced Tim Cook didn’t have a clue who he was when they first met a couple years ago. The Apple boss probably does now. Duan is the reclusive billionaire who founded Oppo and Vivo, the twin smartphone brands that dealt the world’s largest company a stinging defeat in China last year. Once derided as cheap ...

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• 19 March

  Foreigners buy AED22bn shares at UAE markets

  

    ABU DHABI / WAM The value of shares bought by foreign traders at the UAE financial markets stood at AED21.8 billion in the first two months of 2017. This volatility reflects high frequency of entering of this investor category to the market compared to the same period in 2016. An Emirates News Agency (WAM) analysis shows that foreign purchases ...

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• 19 March

  Making Medicaid great

  

    It’s time to take control of Medicaid before it takes control of us. Unless we act — and there is little evidence that we will — Medicaid increasingly becomes another mechanism by which government skews spending toward the old and away from the young. In the raging debate over the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), this is a subject that ...

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• 19 March

  China’s drugmakers need panacea for nation’s deal dearth

  

    Have money, can’t buy. That’s the dilemma facing China’s drugmakers as they look to acquire overseas assets to sate the country’s growing healthcare needs. Snapping up vitamin producers and the like hasn’t proved a problem, but snaring actual pharmaceuticals manufacturers is a different matter, and will be put to the test as Germany’s Stada Arzneimittel AG hits the brakes ...

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• 19 March

  Little to celebrate in Dutch elections

  

    It says something about the state of European politics that the Dutch election results are widely seen as cause for celebration. Geert Wilders — a far-right populist who makes Donald Trump look like a cautious centrist — did worse than expected. But he was by no means crushed, and the anger Wilders and his ilk are channeling is still ...

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• 19 March

  Merkel-Trump first meet speaks volume

    It was their first face-to-face meeting at the White House. And they were not goody-goody about each other. US President Donald Trump and German Chancellor Angela Merkel tried utmost to sidestep the issues that could be a spoiler in their first public appearance. Their inability to shake hands in the Oval Office spoke volume about the meet. During presidential ...

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• 19 March

  Shorting the euro is an outdated strategy

  

    Michael Hasenstab, the star bond investor, says he’s betting against the euro as a “hedge against populism.” This, however, is a narrative that’s going out of fashion; it won’t define the euro’s performance this year. In the summer of 2014, Hasenstab defended his Templeton Global Bond Fund’s investment in Ukrainian bonds by saying, “What we liked was that everyone ...

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• 19 March

  Death of the shoe salesman, finally

  

    Another storied occupation is on its way out and the replacement is neither robots nor foreign workers. We’re witnessing the death of the shoe salesman. Macy’s recently said it would convert more shoe departments to an “open sell” format, where customers serve themselves from stacks of boxes. J.C. Penney is experimenting with the format. It’s the way sales have ...

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• 19 March

  The dystopian future of price discrimination

  

    Have you ever been to a bazaar, where a hawker offers something at a special price, “just for you?” The world of online retail is getting ready to take the practice to a whole new level — and it doesn’t take much speculation to see how things could go terribly wrong. Let’s start offline. There are tons of rules ...

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• 19 March

  Real estate sector dominates Abu Dhabi foreign investment

  

    Abu Dhabi / Emirates Business Foreign investors continue to pour billions into the Abu Dhabi real estate market, as new international standards and property regulations increase investor confidence in the sector. According to Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange (ADX) investors outside of the UAE pumped $40.3m last month into the UAE capital, with the real estate market taking the lion’s ...

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