Category: Finance

Output, orders, power prices, payrolls and insolvencies all point at the same split, with one exception  – SeaPRwire – The ifo business climate index reached 89.9 points in September 2026, its third consecutive monthly increase and 4.2 points above the June reading of 85.7. The federal government’s autumn projection, presented on 8 October, puts GDP […]

A build-and-licence sequence for foreign capital, with the costs that are published, the ones that are not, and the order that keeps you out of a stranded asset. SeaPRwire – Foreign capital can hold the whole equity of a Philippine hospital. It cannot hold a stethoscope. That asymmetry decides more projects in this market than […]

From Beijing’s Stabilization Rhetoric to Singapore’s Cooling: What ‘Steady’ Actually Means in 2026 AsiaPresswire – On Tuesday, a government in Beijing announced that it was striving to stabilize the real estate market. On Wednesday, a wealth manager in Singapore sent me a chart showing that the city-state’s public housing resale index had fallen for two […]

A field report from inside Vietnam’s AI curriculum: 35,000 teachers, 170 pilot schools, and the free app students actually use AsiaPresswire – The room smelled of chalk dust and overheating laptops. It was the last period on a Tuesday at a lower-secondary school in District 12, Ho Chi Minh City, and the Grade 8 English […]

From ’30 by 30′ to 2035: Reckoning with Singapore’s Agritech Ambitions and the Vertical Farming Reality Check SeaPRwire – Singapore’s relationship with food has always been a negotiation between vulnerability and ingenuity. When the British founded a trading post on this island in 1819, they did so on a piece of land that produced almost […]

How Bangkok’s 21.9% Office Vacancy Meets 12.5% US Tariffs and a 2.3% Growth Forecast in 2026 SeaPRwire – Thailand in 2026 is a country caught in a vise. From Washington, a 12.5% Section 301 tariff sits on its exports like a permanent surcharge. From within, a digital economy transformation agenda promises to rewire the economy […]

Aani’s 12.5 million users, sarie’s 784 million transactions and Buna’s 100 institutions: what the GCC built first, and why 2027 slipped AsiaPresswire – In Riyadh, two payment systems share a name that differs only in capitalisation, and the confusion they generate is not a translation problem. SARIE, in capitals, is the real-time gross settlement system: […]

HKGAI V1, a DeepSeek 671B fine-tune, now carries HKChat’s 700,000 users and 100-plus government pilots; the 2026 test is workflow, not weights SeaPRwire – In November 1998 the Hong Kong government published a document called Digital 21, a strategy for making the territory a leading digital city. Four months later the Financial Secretary stood up […]

AsiaPresswire 17.5 against 40.7 Start with the ratio, because it is the one that does not get quoted. In the first quarter of 2025, non-oil and gas manufacturing accounted for 17.50% of Indonesian GDP — Rp 991,785.2 billion of output at current prices, according to Statistics Indonesia. In the twelve months to the second quarter […]

AsiaPresswire Muhaisnah 4, before the shift The cabinet is about waist height, beige, and mostly unremarkable until you look at the plate. Then it says 360 kW, and it stops being furniture. Three hundred and sixty kilowatts is not a home wallbox. It is a piece of industrial equipment that happens to be standing in […]

SeaPRwire How the story usually gets told The version that circulates goes like this. Malaysia decided that big social platforms had been operating in the country without permission for long enough, set a threshold of eight million local users, told anyone above it to apply for an Applications Service Provider Class licence — ASP(C), in […]

SeaPRwire A hydrant in Chengdu has a SIM card Somewhere in Chengdu there is a fire hydrant that reports for duty every morning. It sends a short packet through a carrier’s network, several times a day, saying in effect that it is still a hydrant, still upright, still where the map says it is. The […]

AsiaPresswire – The numbers tell one story and the streets tell another. In the first full year after the borders reopened, Thailand welcomed visitors in the tens of millions again, a figure that travels well in headlines and government press releases. Walk the strip near a Bangkok transit hub and the composition of that number […]

AsiaPresswire – A single number explains why the world keeps mistaking Saudi Arabia’s construction market for a certainty. In one recent year the kingdom awarded construction and infrastructure contracts worth well over a hundred billion dollars, a sum larger than the entire annual building output of most countries in the region. That figure, repeated in […]

SeaPRwire – A sourcing director I worked with spent the first half of last year moving part of his assembly line out of southern China. The arithmetic was convincing. Vietnamese factory wages sat around a third of what he paid in Dongguan. The workforce was young and large. A free trade agreement with the European […]

SeaPRwire – A founder I know sat in a co-working space near Tanjong Pagar last spring, staring at a spreadsheet that would decide where his company’s regional headquarters would live for the next five years. His startup sold inventory software to mid-sized retailers across Asia. The spreadsheet had three columns: Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and Jakarta. […]

– AsiaPresswire – In May 2026, a Boston Consulting Group report carried a line that the city’s financial establishment had been working toward for three years: Hong Kong had overtaken Switzerland as the world’s largest cross-border wealth management centre. Cross-boundary wealth booked there rose 10.7 percent in 2025 to roughly USD 2.9 trillion, and the […]

  – SeaPRwire – Johor Bahru spent most of its modern history as Singapore’s industrial periphery — a place where palm oil estates and light manufacturing absorbed overflow labour from across the strait without ever becoming anything like a destination. Commuters knew it as a traffic jam and a weekend shopping trip. Nobody called it […]

  – SeaPRwire – A hotel in Cebu lost a booking last March because of a QR code. Not a broken one — a missing one. A guest from Singapore stood at the front desk with her banking app open, ready to pay, and there was nothing to scan. She paid in cash from an […]