The quaint cobblestone streets of the historic Gastown district of Vancouver belie its status as a fast-growing technology hub. Drawing on links with nearby Seattle, and San Francisco further south, a tech boom in Canada’s third-largest city has pulled in tens of thousands of skilled workers and start-up entrepreneurs in recent years, sparking a fierce fight for the limited supply of office space. Now the commercial centre […]
As the world’s oil traders descend on London this week, the hot subject will be how to keep North Sea Brent, the benchmark for the global oil price, fit for purpose. S&P Global Platts , the oil pricing agency, is trying to execute the biggest overhaul of North Sea oil trading in a decade, with plans to rejig how prices in the region are set ahead of […]
Some of the world’s biggest sovereign wealth funds are increasingly striking their own private equity deals rather than relying on external fund managers, in a drive to cut costs and gain more control. With some $6.5 trillion in assets, sovereign investors already account for 19 percent of capital committed to private equity, according to data from research firm Preqin. But mega-funds such as the Abu Dhabi Investment […]
KUALA LUMPUR The son of Kim Jong Nam, the estranged half-brother of the North Korean leader who was murdered in Kuala Lumpur last week, will arrive in the Malaysian capital late on Monday, according to an airline source and a media report. An airline source said Kim Han Sol was arriving in Kuala Lumpur on an AirAsia flight from Macau. Malaysian authorities have said they will release […]
By Rozanna Latiff | KUALA LUMPUR KUALA LUMPUR Footage from airport cameras purportedly showing the assault on the half-brother of the North Korean leader emerged on Monday as a row between Malaysia and North Korea escalated over the handling of the investigation into the killing of Kim Jong Nam. Malaysia recalled its envoy from Pyongyang and summoned North Korea’s ambassador in Kuala Lumpur, who again cast doubt […]
Key to enhancing and diversifying its service offering in the domestic maritime industry 20 February 2017 Riyadh – Saudi Arabia – Bahri, a global leader in logistics and transportation, has opened a new office in Mumbai to strengthen its presence in the fast-growing Indian maritime industry and lay the foundation to offer diverse shipping services to domestic customers. The new office, located in the central suburb of […]
By Alexandra Ulmer and Alexandra Valencia | QUITO QUITO Leftist government candidate Lenin Moreno was within striking distance of winning the first round of Ecuador’s presidential election on Monday, as the Andean country’s electoral body counted ballots late into the night. In a nail-biter vote with eight candidates, Moreno was close to the threshold needed to avoid an April runoff and continue a decade-long period of leftist […]
SINGAPORE The U.S. economy is on “sound footing,” a hawkish Federal Reserve official said on Monday in a speech that cautioned against asking the central bank to solve problems beyond its control such as low productivity growth. Cleveland Fed President Loretta Mester, at a forum in Singapore, did not comment specifically on interest rates. However she has dissented in the past in favor of quicker rate hikes […]
Stock markets in the Middle East were mixed in modest trading volumes on Sunday with Saudi Arabia and Qatar outperforming because of support from the banking sector, while Egypt fell as the currency hit a three-month high. Two-thirds of the 12 listed banks on Saudi Arabia’s bourse gained, lifting the index 0.1 percent. Alawwal Bank added 2.7 percent, with most activity occurring in the last hour of […]
By Feisal Omar | MOGADISHU MOGADISHU A car bomb ripped through a market in Mogadishu on Sunday, killing 39 people and injuring around 50, a local official said, days after Somalia elected a new president. The car was driven by a suicide bomber, said Ahmed Abdulle Afrax, the mayor of Wadajir district where the bombing happened. “We carried 39 dead bodies and there were many others injured,” […]
By Carl O’Donnell | NEW YORK NEW YORK U.S. food company Kraft Heinz Co (KHC.O) withdrew its proposal for a $143-billion merger with larger rival Unilever Plc (ULVR.L), the companies said on Sunday, raising questions about whether Kraft could turn its focus to another target. Kraft had made a surprise offer for Unilever to build a global consumer goods behemoth that was flatly rejected on Friday by […]
Kraft Heinz, the Warren Buffett-backed US food group, dropped its $143bn pursuit of consumer products rival Unilever on Sunday, only two days after publicly confirming its interest in acquiring the Anglo-Dutch rival. Kraft Heinz said in a joint statement with Unilever that it had “amicably agreed to withdraw its proposal for a combination of the two companies”. A takeover would have created the world’s second-largest consumer goods […]
Photo The Iranian city of Ahvaz during a sandstorm on Saturday. Rain has turned the dust there into mud, which caused power stations to stop working. Credit Morteza Jaberian/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images TEHRAN — Days of protests against dust storms, power outages and government mismanagement in one of Iran’s most oil-rich cities subsided on Sunday after security forces declared all demonstrations illegal. Residents of Ahvaz, a […]
By Helen Murphy and Nelson Bocanegra | BOGOTA BOGOTA An explosion near Bogota’s bullring killed one and injured at least 30 people, most of them police officers as they prepared for anti-bullfighting protests in Colombia’s capital on Sunday, the mayor’s office said. Details of the cause of the blast were not immediately available, but media images showed a police officer in a shredded uniform walking with support […]
AMMAN Syrian rebel groups who have participated in peace talks said on Sunday that an upsurge in Syrian army shelling and bombing was wrecking the prospects of maintaining a Russian-Turkish-brokered ceasefire. The rebel groups, mostly backed by Turkey, who attended two rounds of talks in the Kazakh capital Astana said they had supported a political solution to end the bloodshed, but that war had been “imposed” on […]
Yesterday´s Future is Today´s Reality. In the area of Business applications, cloud seems to be all over the place. But it has many facets which all have its right to exist, though it´s a fatal misunderstanding to see cloud simply as an alternative technical deployment option. From the new millennium SaaS models that have been adopted, initially with huge appetite in dedicated Line of Business areas. We […]
Theresa May has ordered her top officials to examine Kraft Heinz’s proposed takeover of Unilever to see if it raises concerns for the wider British economy and merits government intervention. The $143bn takeover approach is a big test for Mrs May’s industrial policy: last year she criticised Kraft’s 2010 takeover of the British chocolate maker Cadbury — the US company reneged on a promise to retain factories […]
Here are the questions the FT Markets team will be pondering this week: What do retail flows mean? Money flows are widely watched but, like anything in markets, there is signal and then there is noise. Investors poured money into global stock funds last week, one when US stock markets set fresh records, and US long-only equity funds received the first net inflow of cash ($0.5bn) in […]
By Maher Chmaytelli and Isabel Coles | BAGHDAD/SOUTH OF MOSUL, Iraq BAGHDAD/SOUTH OF MOSUL, Iraq U.S.-backed Iraqi forces on Sunday launched a ground offensive to dislodge Islamic State militants from their remaining stronghold in Mosul, in the western part of the city, and put an end to their ambitions for territorial rule in Iraq. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi announced the start of the offensive, asking Iraqi […]
Capitalizing on previous studies in self-powered chemo-mechanical movement, researchers have developed a novel method of transporting particles that utilizes chemical reactions to drive fluid flow within microfluidic devices. (via WSJ)
Photo The American Freestyle Wrestling team on Saturday in Tehran before returning to the United States. Credit Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times IMAM KHOMEINI AIRPORT, Iran — When the United States wrestling team arrived at 3 a.m. on Saturday at an airport hotel outside Iran’s capital, Tehran, staff members ordered out for pizza. “We were all over the lobby, eating out of the boxes,” said […]
Saudi Arabia officials and executives of around 14 companies plan to embark on a marketing tour of Singapore and Hong Kong next month to attract Asian investors in the $430 billion stock exchange, banking sources told Reuters on Thursday. The HSBC Saudi Arabia Investment Forum will include stops in Singapore on March 1-2 and Hong Kong on March 3, the sources said. The trip reflects the rising […]
Emerging market equity funds attracted the most money from investors in six months, as resilience in commodity prices and signs of improvement across the world’s major economies sharpened investors’ appetite. The EM funds secured $2.7bn this week, with exchange traded funds pulling in $1.8bn of the total, according to data from EPFR. Interest in EM equities was mirrored by bond investors, who handed EM debt funds $1.3bn. […]
By Michelle Price / ReutersHONG KONG — Hong Kong is beefing up its anti-money laundering and corporate disclosure laws in a move that some financial crime specialists say could lead to the exodus of billions of dollars in assets from the territory as people seek to avoid increased scrutiny. The Chinese territory’s government has been rattled by last year’s Panama Papers scandal, which showed that Hong Kong […]
