SINGAPORE: Singapore’s non-oil domestic exports (NODX) contracted for the eighth consecutive month in May, falling by 14.7 per cent, with both electronics and non-electronics seeing a decline. The drop follows the 9.8 per cent decrease in April and an 8.3 per cent contraction in March. The latest figure is worse than aContinue Reading
In the digital age, convenience and cost-effectiveness have challenged retailers in Somerset and the wider Orchard area to reinvent themselves or risk irrelevance. Incoming tenants seem to understand that the old brick-and-mortar model no longer works, and that they need to offer experiences that cannot be replicated on a screen.
Besides Golden Village X The Projector, new tenants like Taiwan Night Markets and HaveFun Karaoke will inject fresh energy into Cineleisure, and provide opportunities for serendipitous experiences.
*SCAPE is also undergoing rejuvenation to provide spaces for young entrepreneurs and creatives to work in, as well as a refreshed line-up of retail and entertainment offerings.
Trifecta, Asia’s first facility for skating, surfing and snowboarding, will soon be completed near Somerset Skatepark too.
At the heart of the Somerset Belt revamp is the acknowledgement that dreams flourish when spaces are made available. “Youths can find their own space to do many things, nothing, or their own version of in-between,” according to the 50-page masterplan.
At this year’s Committee of Supply Debate, Minister of State for Culture, Community and Youth Alvin Tan said youths will “get to decide how (the Somerset Belt) will look like, operate, and also develop future programmes”.
The Realise Your Somerset Project gave youths the channel to propose programmes like art installations and workshops. It supported 24 projects and reached out to 18,000 youths in 2022.
China’s post-Covid economic recovery is slower than expected at a time when many consumers reportedly are suffering from pay cuts and growing child-raising and elderly care costs.
The year-on-year growth rate of total retail sales of consumer goods fell from 18.4% in April to 12.7% in May, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said Thursday.
In the first five months of this year, China’s total retail sales of consumer goods grew 9.3% to 18.76 trillion yuan ($2.63 trillion) from a year ago. However, the increase was mainly due to a low base when many Chinese cities were locked down in March-May last year. The figure’s growth rate was actually 7.6% from 2021 to 2023, compared with 8% from 2019 to 2021.
While the official statistical updates don’t highlight the problem, the internet is buzzing with claims that workers already are suffering or soon will be suffering wholesale pay-slashing.
A Henan-based columnist surnamed Wu published an article entitled, “An era of salary deduction may be coming soon. Keep your jobs. Cash is king.”
Wu says in the article that many people are not willing to spend money as they are either having their pay cut or at risk of redundancy.
“As the unemployment rate among the young people continues to grow, many job seekers may ask for lower pay,” he says. “Most people who are already at work will face a salary cut this year.”
He says people tend to save more money these days as it is likely that China’s inflation will keep growing in the rest of this year.
A columnist at Lanjinger.com, a financial news website, writes in an article published Thursday that many employees of investment banks and brokerages have recently been told that they will receive reduced salaries and bonuses this year.
A Hunan-based writer says many medical staff have faced pay cuts this year as hospitals are receiving fewer patients but bearing higher operational costs. A Chinese vlogger says some IT workers are also experiencing 30-50% pay cuts.
Official statistics lack industry-by-industry breakdowns on pay and don’t quantify the pay cut situations described by netizens.
According to the NBS, per capita disposable income in urban areas rose 4% to 14,388 yuan in nominal terms in the first quarter of 2023 from a year ago, or up 2.7% in real terms. Disposable income in rural areas surged 6.1% to 6,131 yuan, or up 4.8% in real terms.
Media reports said last year that civil servants and teachers could not get their year-end bonuses. But still, the NBS said China’s per capita disposable income gained 5% year-on-year to 36,883 yuan in 2022 in nominal terms, or up 2.9% in real terms.
A Chinese writer notes that people’s disposable income is squeezed by rising child-raising and elderly care expenses. Citing research published by the YuWa Population Research, he says in order to bring up a child in China, a family has to spend about 627,000 yuan, a very big amount. Besides, he says, due to China’s aging population, there’s one elderly person for every pair of other adults (2.3 people to be more precise) to support financially.
In its report Thursday the NBS said the jobless rate in urban areas remained unchanged at 5.2% in May from April. The unemployment rate of people aged between 16 and 24 was 20.8% while that of those aged between 25 and 59 was 4.1% last month.
Some commentators said the figures are seriously distorted as people are not considered as “jobless” if they work at least an hour per week, return to the rural areas or rely on financial support from parents.
They said some unemployed graduates have to pretend to have assured prospects in order to get their diplomas: Their schools require graduates to submit proof that they have job offers before school certificates are issued; some graduates ask friends and relatives to provide “offers” they can show to meet the requirement.
The NBS insisted that the official jobless figures have accurately reflected the job market situations.
“We have continuously improved and perfected our country’s labor force survey system since its establishment,” NBS spokesperson Fu Linghui said in a media briefing on Thursday. “The unemployment rates are scientific and standardized, in line with international standards, and can objectively reflect our country’s urban employment situation.”
Fu said anyone who works at least one hour per week, or who leaves a job temporarily due to holidays or suspension, is classified as “employed.” He said it is an international practice to exclude anyone who doesn’t have the intention to work from the labor force survey.
He said there are 96 million people aged between 16 and 24 in the country, but only 33 million of them have entered the labor market while the remaining are still studying. He said only about six million of these young people are still searching for jobs.
“Our country’s urban surveyed unemployment rate will not underestimate the nation’s jobless situation,” he said. “ From a historical perspective, the figure had objectively reflected changes in urban employment. For example, due to the epidemic in early 2020, the urban employment pressure had increased at that time.”
It is rare that the NBS feels the need to elaborate the methodology of its survey during the monthly media briefing.
Last December, the Chinese government announced that it would end all its Covid rules from January this year.
To avoid being confused by the low base in the January-May 2022 amid city lockdowns, one can compare the Jan-May figures in 2023 and 2021 to see the impact of the cancellation of Covid rules on the retail sales.
According to the NBS, catering revenue rose to 2 trillion yuan in the first five months of this year, up 22.6% from a year earlier but up only 12.2% from the same period of 2021.
In the first five months of this year, sales of jewelry were 13.2% above the 2021 level. Sales of cosmetics rose 4.2% while sales of telecommunication devices grew 2.4%. Sales of clothing, shoes, hats and textiles rose 1.4%.
Sales of automobiles were still down 2.8% while sales of electric appliances and audio and video equipment fell 5.9%. Sales of furniture dropped 15.4% while sales of building decoration materials slumped 18.4%.
In January, the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission said in a meeting that supporting China’s economic recovery and boosting domestic consumption are its top-priority among all tasks in 2023. Banks are expected to provide more loans to consumers and cut rates to encourage people to spend more.
Read: More US firms looking elsewhere: AmCham China
Follow Jeff Pao on Twitter at @jeffpao3
* Partnership will commercialise and accelerate growth of net zero technologies * Cambridge-based accelerator will facilitate entry of SEA startups into UK market
Sunway Group, one of Southeast Asia’s leading conglomerates, today announced a strategic partnership with Deeptech Labs, a venture capital fund and deeptech specific accelerator based in…Continue Reading
Recent decades have witnessed extraordinary economic progress owing to enormous innovations in technologies. Well known is the important role of private venture capital in financing early-stage companies that grew into many of giant corporations that dominate many new industries.
Less well known is the role of the much larger private equity funds that finance the growth and modernization of established companies in many industries.
From their beginning in the early 1980s, private equity (PE) funds now manage US$7.6 trillion in assets globally, of which US funds comprise two-thirds, according to a McKinsey and Company estimate.
They had $496 million available for investment in 1983. By 2021 that number rose to $242 billion. Private equity attracts investment because in most years during the past four decades, the mean return on investment in private equity funds exceeded that of money invested in publicly traded companies.
The answer is that these funds have successfully provided growth capital to many established companies while actively working with management to use this capital effectively to increase the value of the business. The emergence of new technologies and markets creates demand for capital which cannot be funded out of operating profit cash flow. That’s where PE steps in.
For the management of many private companies, PE funding is a good alternative to raising capital through an initial public offering (IPO) on the stock markets, which requires public disclosure of corporate activities, and subjects the firm to fluctuations in publicly traded share prices.
Major private equity funds that started in the 1980s were dubbed “buy-out funds” because an early strategy involved buying public companies and selling the component divisions to increase the firm’s value. Such transactions were financed by a combination of debt and private equity. But buy-out strategies now represent a minority of PE investments.
Over time, PE funds have expanded to investments in private companies aimed at providing capital to finance acquisitions, technology roll-out, marketing expansion, or improved manufacturing.
As their investment strategies broadened, PE funds expanded their staff to include experienced operating experts. In effect, the PE firms went from being a source of financing to a multi-tiered, transformational capital partner, with staffs of experts able to help portfolio companies.
In general, an acquired company will remain in a private equity portfolio for a few years during which it is expected to grow in value to allow a profitable sale to a corporate acquirer, or to the public through a stock-market listing.
The private equity industry has its share of critics. A recent example is Brendan Ballou’s book Plunder: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America. But Ballou’s tirades miss the point. Private equity on the whole has done so well because it has made businesses more efficient and better able to meet the needs of their customers.
A common complaint is that the transformation of portfolio companies under PE investment is sometimes unsuccessful, leaving a damaged company with substantial job losses. This sometimes happens. But transforming businesses is never easy or predictable. Poorly managed businesses fail sooner or later, and it is unlikely that the laggards would have succeeded without PE involvement.
With many years of experience in the industry, I believe that the PE industry enhances industrial productivity through the beneficial transformation of companies that need to evolve to meet new technological or competitive situations that threaten their future. Some examples from my experience may be helpful.
Zilog was a unit of Exxon Enterprises that designed and manufactured semiconductor chips but proved unable to grow, as it competed with large companies with obsolete products and production plant. We bought the company and, with fresh capital, its capable chief executive officer transformed the company into the world’s leading supplier of low-cost controller chips for consumer products such as appliances and TV remote controllers.
Production was modernized and marketing expanded globally. Employment grew, as did revenues and profitability. The company had an IPO on Nasdaq.
A second example of transformation is a spun-out unit of AT&T, Telcordia, that had developed much of the software used to operate American telephony. We acquired the company in partnership with another private equity firm.
The business had to be transformed from its roots in the old AT&T monopoly into a free-standing, competitive, and profitable business. This transformation took some years and involved some acquisitions, staff reductions in unproductive areas, and management changes. The company was eventually acquired by Ericsson, one of the three leading suppliers of telecommunications technology in the world.
A third example involves the leading information-technology service company in Israel. Working with a local investment banker, Raviv Zoller, we became aware that while Israel was emerging as a leading venue for IT development, it lacked a company scaled up to exploit that capability globally. We funded the acquisition of several small but excellent Israeli software companies that became the foundation of Ness Technologies.
Under the leadership of Zoller, the firm acquired several companies in Europe and India and grew to the point that Ness became the largest IT service company in Israel along with IBM. The company had an IPO on Nasdaq and was profitable.
These examples from three industries were chosen from many that illustrate what can be accomplished with focused private equity operating in open markets. In all cases, a combination of factors explained the success of the investments, but the selection of exceptional management was uppermost. All success stories start there.
Henry Kressel is a technologist, inventor, author, and long-term private equity investor at Warburg Pincus.
JAKARTA: Short video app TikTok plans to invest billions of dollars in Southeast Asia over the next few years, its CEO Shou Zi Chew said on Thursday (Jun 15). Chew said at an event held in Indonesia that TikTok’s content is becoming more diversified as it adds more users andContinue Reading
JAKARTA: Short video app TikTok, owned by China’s ByteDance, said on Thursday (Jun 15) it would invest billions of dollars in Southeast Asia over the next few years, as it doubles down on the region amid intensifying global scrutiny over its data security. Southeast Asia, a region with a collectiveContinue Reading
People in North Korea have told the BBC food is so scarce their neighbours have starved to death.
Exclusive interviews gathered inside the world’s most isolated state suggest the situation is the worst it has been since the 1990s, experts say.
The government sealed its borders in 2020, cutting off vital supplies. It has also tightened control over people’s lives, our interviewees say.
Pyongyang told the BBC it has always prioritised its citizens’ interests.
The BBC has secretly interviewed three ordinary people in North Korea, with the help of the organisation Daily NK which operates a network of sources in the country. They told us that since the border closure, they are afraid they will either starve to death or be executed for flouting the rules. It is extremely rare to hear from people living in North Korea.
The interviews reveal a “devastating tragedy is unfolding” in the country, said Sokeel Park from Liberty in North Korea (LiNK), which supports North Korean escapees.
One woman living in the capital Pyongyang told us she knew a family of three who had starved to death at home. “We knocked on their door to give them water, but nobody answered,” Ji Yeon said. When the authorities went inside, they found them dead, she said. Ji Yeon’s name has been changed to protect her, along with those of the others we interviewed.
A construction worker who lives near the Chinese border, whom we have called Chan Ho, told us food supplies were so low that five people in his village had already died from starvation.
“At first, I was afraid of dying from Covid, but then I began to worry about starving to death,” he said.
North Korea has never been able to produce enough food for its 26 million people. When it shut its border in January 2020, authorities stopped importing grain from China, as well as the fertilisers and machinery needed to grow food.
Meanwhile, they have fortified the border with fences, while reportedly ordering guards to shoot anyone trying to cross. This has made it nearly impossible for people to smuggle in food to sell at the unofficial markets, where most North Koreans shop.
A market trader from the north of the country, whom we have named Myong Suk, told us that almost three quarters of the products in her local market used to come from China, but that it was “empty now”.
She, like others who make their living selling goods smuggled across the border, has seen most of her income disappear. She told us her family has never had so little to eat, and that recently people had been knocking on her door asking for food because they were so hungry.
From Pyongyang, Ji Yeon told us she had heard of people who had killed themselves at home or disappeared into the mountains to die, because they could no longer make a living.
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She was struggling to feed her children, she said. Once, she went two days without eating and thought she was going to die in her sleep.
In the late 1990s, North Korea experienced a devastating famine which killed as many as three million people. Recent rumours of starvation, which these interviews corroborate, have prompted fears the country could be on the brink of another catastrophe.
“That normal, middle-class people are seeing starvation in their neighbourhoods, is very concerning,” said the North Korea economist Peter Ward. “We are not talking about full-scale societal collapse and mass starvation yet, but this does not look good.”
Hanna Song, the director of NKDB, which documents human rights violations in North Korea, agreed. “For the past 10-15 years we have rarely heard of cases of starvation. This takes us back to the most difficult time in North Korean history.”
Even the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has hinted at the seriousness of the situation – at one point referring openly to a “food crisis”, while making various attempts to boost agricultural production. Despite this, he has prioritised funding his nuclear weapons programme, testing a record 63 ballistic missiles in 2022. One estimate puts the total cost of these tests at more than $500m (£398m) – more than the amount needed to make up for North Korea’s annual grain shortfall.
Our interviewees also revealed how the government has used the past three years to increase its control over people’s lives, by strengthening punishments and passing new laws.
Before the pandemic, more than 1,000 people would flee the country each year, crossing the Yalu River into China, according to numbers released by the South Korean government. The market trader Myong Suk told us it had become impossible to escape. “If you even approach the river now you will be given a harsh punishment, so almost nobody is crossing,” she said.
The construction worker Chan Ho said his friend’s son had recently witnessed several closed-door executions. In each one, three to four people had been killed for attempting to escape. “Every day it gets harder to live,” he told us. “One wrong move and you are facing execution.”
“We are stuck here waiting to die.”
For more than three years, North Korea has sealed its borders. People are banned from leaving or entering the country. Almost every foreigner who was inside has packed up and left. The world’s most secretive and tyrannical state is now an information black hole. For months, three people inside North Korea have risked their lives to tell the BBC what is happening.
Watch now on BBC iPlayer (UK only) or at 19:00 BST on BBC Two in the UK
We put our findings to the North Korean government, which told us it “has always prioritised the interests of the people, even at difficult times”.
“The people’s well-being is our foremost priority, even in the face of trials and challenges,” said a representative from the North Korean embassy in London.
They also said the information was “not entirely factual”, claiming it had been “derived from fabricated testimonies from anti-DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] forces”.
But Sokeel Park, from LiNK, said these interviews reveal a “triple whammy” of hardship. “The food situation has become more difficult, people have less freedom to fend for themselves, and it has become pretty much impossible to escape.” They support the theory, he said, that “North Korea is now more repressive than it has ever been before.”
In Pyongyang, Ji Yeon said the surveillance and crackdowns were now so ruthless that people did not trust each other. She was taken in for questioning under a new law, passed in December 2020, which bans people from sharing and consuming foreign films, TV shows and songs. Under this Reactionary Ideology and Culture Rejection Act, aimed at rooting out foreign information, those caught distributing South Korean content can be executed.
A former North Korean diplomat, who defected in 2019, said he was shocked by how extreme the crackdown on foreign influence had become. “Kim Jong Un is afraid that if people understand the situation they are in, and how wealthy South Korea is, they will start hating him and rise up,” explained Ryu Hyun Woo.
Our interviews suggest that some people’s loyalty has waned over the past three years.
“Before Covid, people viewed Kim Jong Un positively,” Myong Suk said. “Now almost everyone is full of discontent.”
More findings from the BBC’s investigation into daily life in North Korea will be published on Thursday 15 June
On the other hand, findings also showed that trust in news across global markets fell to 40 per cent from 42 per cent, reversing the gains made in many countries at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Finland remains the country with the highest levels of overall trust with 69 per cent, while Greece has the lowest at 19 per cent following arguments about press freedom and the independence of the media, the report showed.
Alternative news site Mothership became the most used online news source for the first time, although the Reuters report noted that it “still lags” in brand trust with a score of 52 per cent.
CNA’s website came in second in terms of weekly use, followed by The Straits Times online.
Online and social media continue to be the most common ways of accessing news in Singapore, while both TV and print have declined significantly over the last few years.
On social media apps, the report said: “Facebook continues to face a decline (36 per cent), while YouTube (30 per cent), Instagram (19 per cent) and TikTok (12 per cent) were able to grow as platforms for news. WhatsApp remains the most used social app for news (38 per cent).”
Associate Professor Edson Tandoc Jr and Matthew Chew from the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University, who wrote Singapore’s portion of the digital news report, noted TikTok’s growing popularity in the country and elsewhere.
“It reaches 49 per cent of 18 to 24 (year olds) every week, and 22 per cent for news according to our survey,” they said, adding though that this is not without controversy.
“Public officials have been reminded they are not permitted to install the app on official devices, and it has been added to the list of social media companies that are required to have formal processes and systems for dealing with misinformation, under the country’s Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA).
“This includes transparency over political advertising.”
The Singapore government announced in March that public officers are allowed to use TikTok on government-issued devices only on a “need-to basis” under existing policy, such as for communication officers.
E-payment use in M’sia has surged to 291 transactions per capita, targeting 400 by 2026
Bank-fintech collaboration crucial, combining trust and security with fintech’s innovation
“What Malaysia has is the benefit of having a real-time payment system that is second to none.” Farhan Ahmad, Group CEO of PayNet who was speaking at the Sasana Symposium 2023 (SS2023)…Continue Reading
