Category: Finance

SAMA data show electronic payments at 85% of retail while POS value per terminal falls 9.4% in a quarter; the constraint is now unit economics. AsiaPresswire – Saudi Arabia won the argument it spent a decade having. Electronic payments reached 85% of retail transactions in 2025, against a Financial Sector Development Program target of 70% […]

A costed comparison of transshipment, overseas plants and equipment exports for Chinese manufacturers in 2026, and where each route fails. SeaPRwire – In March 2026, US Customs and Border Protection opened an enforcement case over Chinese golf carts that had been shipped to the United States as Vietnamese goods. The case number is 8282. Interim […]

Four widely repeated claims about Japan’s eldercare crisis in 2026, where each one came from, and what survives after the arithmetic. AsiaPresswire – Japan has been buying machines for its care homes for more than a decade, and it has been short of care workers for longer than that. Both facts are true at the […]

Why the binding constraint on Gulf energy and AI data centre buildout in 2026 is neither capital nor chips but the queue for an energised grid connection. AsiaPresswire – Two record buildouts are running across the Gulf at the same time in 2026, and they are colliding over the same scarce input. Saudi Arabia and […]

A tool-by-tool comparison of three Chinese-speaking school AI systems in 2026: Singapore’s SLS assistant, Hong Kong’s per-school grant, and Taiwan’s adaptive platform. SeaPRwire – Ask three education ministries in Chinese-speaking Asia what “AI in schools” means in 2026 and you will get three different answers, each of them internally coherent and each of them spending […]

A line-by-line audit of Thai central bank and NITMX PromptPay statistics: two calibers, five figures that do not reconcile, and the one that does. SeaPRwire – In May 2026, Thailand’s PromptPay handled 2.38 billion transactions worth 4.45 trillion baht. That is the number National ITMX published, and it travelled widely. In the same month, the […]

Platform GMV of $157.6 billion, total trade of $185.5 billion, an e-Conomy estimate of $191 billion: one year, three denominators, no reconciliation SeaPRwire – The number travels well. Southeast Asian ecommerce was worth $185.5 billion in 2025, according to Momentum Works, the Singapore-based venture builder whose annual report has become the region’s most quoted source […]

How importer standing and liquidation timing decide who gets part of the $166 billion IEEPA refund, and why 20,184 approved claims are still unpaid AsiaPresswire – The portal asks for one thing. Not a receipt, not a contract, not proof that you absorbed the cost. It asks for a list of entry numbers, in a […]

Jais, Falcon-H1 Arabic, K2 Think and Copilot, run against three Abu Dhabi government workflows and against the Arabic benchmarks that have to stand in for them AsiaPresswire – The task is a trade licence renewal. A Dubai distributor wants to add two activities to an existing licence, and the application arrives as a scanned Arabic […]

Sixty-one thousand units completing, 13,484 flats reaching minimum occupation period and a S$2 million floor only 1,016 sales cleared SeaPRwire – Singapore’s private housing market rose 0.5 percent in the second quarter of 2026. That is the weakest quarterly gain in seven quarters, and it is the number that gets reported. It is also the […]

Inside the Dien Bien drone sandbox, the Ca Mau rice pilots and the 60 regulatory exemptions that decide whether 6,000 aircraft change a 43-million-tonne harvest SeaPRwire – The number that decides whether Vietnam’s agricultural technology story is real is not 6,000. It is 20. Six thousand is the size of the country’s agricultural drone fleet, […]

From NT$728 billion in the Kaohsiung pilot zone to 23,000 high-asset banking clients island-wide, a channel-by-channel ranking of the figures each one publishes AsiaPresswire – A hundred and eighteen thousand people in Taiwan, China held investable assets above NT$100 million in 2025. Together they controlled NT$43.7 trillion. The 2026 forecast is 124,000 people and NT$46.1 […]

A myth-by-myth audit of the 4,000 MW solar plan, the 142 mtpa North Field build-out and the contracts that decide which number moves the grid AsiaPresswire – Drive west out of Doha on the Dukhan road and the landscape does one thing for about forty minutes: nothing. Then, near the Al Kharsaah turnoff, 1.8 million […]

A platform-by-platform ranking by traffic, fees and coverage, set against 28.8 million arrivals in eight months and a RM32.9 billion target AsiaPresswire – Malaysia welcomed 28.8 million international visitors between January and August 2026, up 1.8% from 28.2 million in the same period of 2025. The number is solid and it is also, arithmetically, the […]

MAS and ABS put QR interoperability, AI commerce and larger government payments into PayNow Generation 2 while scams still cost S$913.1 million SeaPRwire – PayNow turned nine in 2026 having processed 752.4 million transactions worth S$30.05 billion, with second-half growth of 26.3% year on year and roughly 11 million proxy registrations on the system. Those […]

An audit of Vision 2030’s 1.5 GW target against HUMAIN’s 6.6 GW pipeline, the SEC interconnection queue and the substations that decide delivery SeaPRwire – Saudi Arabia operated 467 megawatts of data center load in the first quarter of 2026. That number, published by the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, is the one that […]

The three-tier licence regime, the AI labelling mandate and the compliance cost facing studios serving 664 million viewers AsiaPresswire – China (Mainland) counts 664 million micro-drama viewers, 59.0% of its 1.125 billion internet users, according to the China Internet Network Information Center’s 57th statistical report. It counts 814 million livestreaming users, 72.3% of the same […]

Six variables, three markets, and the workloads each one actually suits AsiaPresswire – A regional headquarters needs a lease, a few racks, a legal entity, and people who can answer a regulator in English. A large training cluster needs a substation, a long-term power contract, water for cooling, and a construction workforce that will still […]

Seven claims about Indonesian online retail, and the definition each one depends on. AsiaPresswire – Two research houses published Indonesia’s 2025 e-commerce figure within five months of each other, and the two numbers do not fit together. Momentum Works, the Singapore firm that tracks platform GMV across Southeast Asia, put the market at $57.7 billion, […]