Japan edges closer to lifting casino ban

October 24, 2013 4:50 am

Japan edges closer to lifting casino ban

By Jonathan Soble in Tokyo

A long-debated proposal to lift Japan’s ban on casino gambling could finally come to fruition this year after a multi-party group of lawmakers agreed to submit a legalisation bill to the current session of parliament. Iwaya Tsutomu, a member of the ruling Liberal Democratic party who is part of the pro-casino group, said Tokyo’s selection last month as host of the 2020 Olympic games had given fresh impetus to its push for legalisation. Read more of this post

FDI in Indonesia has fallen for the first time in two years as southeast Asia’s biggest economy faces growing challenges from a widening current account deficit to rising economic nationalism ahead of next year’s elections

October 23, 2013 11:49 am

Foreign direct investment falters in Indonesia

By Ben Bland in Jakarta

Foreign direct investment in Indonesia has fallen in US dollar terms for the first time in two years as southeast Asia’s biggest economy faces growing challenges from a widening current account deficit to rising economic nationalism ahead of next year’s elections. The government’s investment co-ordinating body (BKPM) said on Wednesday that realised FDI fell from $7.2bn in the second quarter to $7bn in the third quarter, the first quarter-on-quarter decline since 2011. That still represented a rise of more than 18 per cent compared with the third quarter of last year. Read more of this post

Electronic Retailer Courts Asia Breaks Ground for Its Megastore in Bekasi

Electronic Retailer Courts Asia Breaks Ground for Its Megastore in Bekasi

By Johan Mulyadi on 11:00 pm October 23, 2013.
Bekasi. Singapore-based Courts Asia, an electronics retailer, is hoping to tap the Indonesian market with its first store in Bekasi, West Java, on the outskirts of Jakarta. The ground-breaking ceremony at the site took place on Wednesday. The company plans to spend $20 million on the Bekasi megastore, expected to be operational by the second half of 2014. The store, to be located in Kota Harapan Indah, Bekasi, will occupy 13,000 square meters. It will stock a wide range of products from computer products and electronics, to home furnishings. “Big-box stores have lower rental cost per square meter and this should compensate for the lower shopping traffic as compared to shopping malls. A big-box store can also earn rent from food and beverage vendors located on the premises,” Courts Asia chief executive Terence Donald O’Connor said during the ceremony. Besides the Bekasi store, the company also plans to open another in Bumi Serpong Damai in Tangerang, Banten. It is expected to open some time in 2015. Courts Asia plans to open an additional 10 stores in Indonesia in the next five years, O’Connor said. The company raised S$44 million ($36 million) from an initial public offering early this month. It will use the bulk of the proceeds to finance its Indonesian expansion, which according to its website, will amount to about S$40 million. “Indonesia’s growth is driven by a burgeoning consumer market that is still under-penetrated. It is highly attractive. We plan to launch stores in urban areas to capture our target customers — the rising middle-class,” O’Connor said. Read more of this post

Failed malls in India point to soured retail boom

Failed malls in India point to soured retail boom

Agence France-Presse | Updated On: October 23, 2013 09:51 (IST)

Mumbai: The Centre One shopping mall on the outskirts of Mumbai is gloomy and bereft of customers, even during India’s annual festive and wedding season when retailers traditionally cash in. “Business is dull, usually weak,” said one bored-looking fashion salesman. The shopping centre’s empty look is no exception. In the past decade, supermarkets and malls have spread across India’s large cities and towns, fuelled by fast economic growth and excitement about middle-class buying power. Read more of this post

Oil traders hunger for lost years of volatility; “As long as oil remains rangebound, it’s like free money to write puts and calls, so a lot of people are coming into the market to do it. The problem is that if oil does move, you lose a money”

October 23, 2013 10:35 am

Oil traders hunger for lost years of volatility

By Gregory Meyer in New York and Ajay Makan in London

Clive Capital has thrown in the towel. Deep into its third year of losses, what was onceone of the world’s largest commodity hedge funds shut down late last month. The closure is symptomatic of a broader trend – or more accurately, the lack of one. Hedge funds once feasted on wild action in oil. Now, volatility has fallen to historic lows. Plodding prices have forced traders to experiment with new ways to make money. Read more of this post

S. Korea fashion industry reshaping under way

S. Korea fashion industry reshaping under way

Kim Ji-mi

2013.10.23 17:52:37

South Korea’s fashion industry dynamics are changing. For start, Cheil Industries, a leading player in the industry since 1970s, agreed to sell its fashion unit to Samsung Everland.
Cheil Industries, LG Fashion and Kolon Industries had dominated the fashion market, but their grip has dismantled since 2010. Now, Kolon Industries’ fashion operations generate 1.3 trillion won ($1.2 billion) in sales, only one third of the company’s total sales of over four trillion won. The fashion operations are no longer a flagship business of Kolon Industries. In contrast, E-Land has launched low and mid-priced brands and sold them in standalone stores and earned two trillion won in sales last year, surpassing Cheil Industries to take the top position. The sales figure excludes another two trillion won it brought in from abroad. Cheil Industries garnered 1.5 trillion won in sales in the local fashion market. The dominance of the three fashion conglomerates is giving way to an emergence of multiple companies, as large retailers including Lotte Department Store, Shinsegae Group and Hyundai Department Store are aggressively pushing into the industry. Shinsegae Group’s fashion arm Shinsegae International imports and sells luxurious brands such as Armani, Marni, and Dolce & Gabbana. Shinsegae International is also promoting domestic brands including Vov, G-Cut and Vidivici. Lotte Department Store’s global fashion business division has unveiled Niceclaup, Thyren, J-Press and Furla. Hyundai Department Store Group’s affiliate Hyundai Home Shopping, meanwhile, acquired local women’s clothes company Handsome, and opened new brand Iro.

Using tech playbook, oil drillers shower employees with stock

Using tech playbook, oil drillers shower employees with stock

1:24am EDT

By Ernest Scheyder

NEW YORK (Reuters) – U.S. energy exploration companies leading a domestic oil boom increasingly are using stock options to find and maintain employees, evoking comparisons to the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. Some compensation experts and investment analysts worry that employees of small- and medium-sized firms that are still searching for sizeable profits could be lulled by a false sense of financial security. Read more of this post

A combination of an influx of people from overseas and persistent land and building shortages has pushed rates for prime office space in Myanmar/Yangon towards $100 per square metre – significantly higher than costs than in much more developed countries in the region such as Singapore

October 23, 2013 4:26 pm

Myanmar property prices surge as country opens up to investment

By Michael Peel in Yangon

Myanmar’s emergence as one of the world’s great new commercial frontiers has sent property values soaring and triggered fears that all but the largest investors could be priced out of the market. A combination of an influx of people from overseas and persistent land and building shortages has pushed rates for prime office space towards $100 per square metre – significantly higher than costs than in much more developed countries in the region such as Singapore, business people and others say. Read more of this post

Pullback of funds from emerging markets likely to begin in earnest next year

Updated: Thursday October 24, 2013 MYT 9:36:51 AM

Pullback of funds from emerging markets likely to begin in earnest next year

KUALA LUMPUR: A fund manager based in the United States said he sees “headwinds” for emerging markets as the Federal Reserve unwinds its five-year-old monetary stimulus, amid a slow but sure recovery in the world’s largest economy. Grant Bowers, portfolio manager of Franklin Templeton Investments’ US Opportunities Fund, told newsmen in a briefing that what had been dubbed the “great rotation” of funds out of emerging markets was “still playing out”, triggered by the planned tapering of the Federal Reserve’s US$85bil a month bond-buying programme and easy money policies. Read more of this post

Heineken’s profit warning: all about EM

Heineken’s profit warning: all about EM

Oct 23, 2013 10:28am by Jonathan Wheatley

Is Russia the world’s toughest beer market? It’s beginning to look that way, after Heineken said on Tuesday it would see a 10 per cent decline in volumes sales in the country this year. That’s even worse than a recent gloomy assessment by Carlsberg, which said volume had slumped by 7 per cent in the first half. “Russia is a very, very difficult market,” René Hooft Graafland, Heineken’s chief financial officer, said on a conference call, warning that profits were likely to fall this year “in the low single digits”, sending the brewer’s shares down 5 per cent by mid morning in Amsterdam. Read more of this post

Europe’s Flawed Growth Strategy; Reliance on Exports Isn’t a Sustainable Approach

Europe’s Flawed Growth Strategy

Reliance on Exports Isn’t a Sustainable Approach

DAVID WESSEL

Updated Oct. 23, 2013 1:40 p.m. ET

Now that Washington has reopened the government and averted potential default, the global spotlight will shift back to the euro zone. Europe has a way of making the U.S. economy look good. In the U.S., the unemployment rate is a still-high 7.2%. In the 17 countries that share the euro, it’s 12%, ranging from 5.2% in Germany to 26.2% in Spain. Neither the U.S. nor Europe has a compelling strategy to boost the slow pace of economic growth. But Europe in particular has stumbled onto a short-term approach that can’t last: Make the rest of Europe more like frugal Germany, relying heavily on exports rather than on domestic consumer spending and business investment. Read more of this post

Crime in Mexico: Out of sight, not out of mind; Having decided to play down the fight against drug kingpins, Enrique Peña Nieto has yet to come up with a serious alternative

Crime in Mexico: Out of sight, not out of mind; Having decided to play down the fight against drug kingpins, Enrique Peña Nieto has yet to come up with a serious alternative

Oct 19th 2013 | TIJUANA |From the print edition

A HUMAN hellhole lies under the noses of American tourists driving from California into Mexico. Below the bridge leading into Tijuana is a dry canal strewn with heroin syringes that is home to countless migrants and vagrants, most of them thrown out of the United States for not having the right papers. Jesús Alberto Capella, Tijuana’s chief of police, says their numbers have included about 10,000 ex-convicts turfed out of American jails this year. They live under tarpaulins and in foxholes dug into the side of the canal. The place is a cauldron of violence. It is also a focal point for President Enrique Peña Nieto’s strategy of applying what officials call “social acupuncture” to some of the most dangerous parts of Mexico. Read more of this post

Active assault on low-volatility trackers

October 21, 2013 12:26 pm

Active assault on low-volatility trackers

By Jackie Noblett

Several firms are looking to take a slice of the growth of assets that have flooded into low-volatility index exchange traded funds by rolling out actively managed funds. While prevalent among institutions for years, these retail funds are increasingly going head-to-head with the popular index-based ETFs in the market. Fund executives and analysts say the decision to go active versus passive is a matter of philosophy and intent rather than of one being better than the other. Read more of this post

Sotheby’s Investor Marcato Pushes to Sell New York, London Properties; Hedge Fund Believes Moves Could Free Up $1.3 Billion in Cash

Sotheby’s Investor Marcato Pushes to Sell New York, London Properties

Hedge Fund Believes Moves Could Free Up $1.3 Billion in Cash

DAVID BENOIT

CONNECT

Updated Oct. 23, 2013 8:59 p.m. ET

Sotheby’s BID +0.21% doesn’t just have an activist problem. It has a two-activists problem. The auction house faces one hedge fund manager— Daniel Loeb of Third Point LLC—loudly banging down the doors over its performance. Meanwhile, another hedge fund is working behind the doors to get the company to sell its physical home. That second hedge fund, Marcato Capital Management LLC, spelled out its arguments for the first time in a presentation to investors Wednesday evening. According to the presentation, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, Marcato wants Sotheby’s to sell its New York and London properties and unlock the capital it uses in its smaller art financing and art dealing operations. Read more of this post