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  ALKESH SHARMA / Emirates Business In a bid to tackle the crisis situation hovering over the Middle East’s mobile phone industry, vendors have strategically shifted their focus to low to mid-range devices. To beat the market plummet, they are offering consumers mid-range mobiles, falling in the price bracket of AED500 to AED800. Market reports say that most of the ...

  DUBAI / Emirates Business Emirates Green Building Council (EmiratesGBC), an independent forum aimed at conserving the environment by strengthening and promoting green building practices, underlined the measures that can be adopted to improve air quality and the role of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) in adversely impacting green building design at its recent Networking Seminar. The discussion on ‘What’s in ...

  Sharjah/ Emirates Business Sharjah Asset Management (SAM), the investment arm of the Government of Sharjah, has announced that just days after announcing their availability for sale, land plots for the Stage 2 area of Al Saja’a Industrial Oasis have been eagerly snapped up by UAE, GCC, Arab residents and foreign nationals. All buyers being keen to take advantage of ...

    Emirates Business The Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) launched the initiative, ‘In The Presence of a Book,’ which includes quarterly discussion sessions. Each session will highlight one book published locally and to be discussed in the presence of the book’s author, intellectuals and TRA employees, where attendees will have an open forum with the author. The initiative will be ...

  Beijing / AFP China’s total borrowings were more than double its gross domestic product (GDP) last year, a government economist said, warning that debt linkages between the state and industry could be “fatal” for the world’s second largest economy. The country’s debt has ballooned as Beijing has made getting credit cheap and easy in an effort to stimulate slowing growth, ...

  Seoul / AFP Samsung Electronics said on Thursday it had agreed to buy US cloud computing company Joyent — the latest in a series of start-up acquisitions aimed at strengthening the South Korean giant’s software capacity. The purchase of the San Francisco-based firm would provide Samsung with its own cloud platform to support its main mobile business and connect ...

  Beijing / AFP Chinese ride-hailing app Didi Chuxing, a bitter rival of US-based Uber, has raised $7.3 billion in one of the world’s largest private equity financing rounds, the company said on Thursday. Didi is locked in a war of attrition with Uber over drivers and riders but claims almost 90 percent of the market in the world’s most ...

  Colombo / AFP Sri Lanka’s cabinet approved the introduction of a capital gains tax for the first time in 14 years, as the island battles a revenue crisis that has forced an IMF bailout. Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe’s tax plans come after the International Monetary Fund (IMF) this month released the first tranche of a $1.5 billion loan in ...

  Tokyo/ Bloomberg Toshiba Corp., the world’s biggest supplier of turbines used to produce electricity from the heat trapped underground, will expand its geothermal power business into operation and maintenance services as it aims to extend its lead in a global market dominated by a handful of competitors. “We are just doing turbines now but we want to take full ...

  Basel / AFP Hundreds of suitcases hang eerily from the ceiling, old publications depict colonial scenes of dark “savages” committing horrific acts of violence, and an anti-protestor gun blasts into life… with rounds of birdsong. A common theme — of angst at a world in political turmoil, beset by a migration crisis and dread of terrorism — unites many ...