Tausi Insider

An advertisement promoting Alibaba's Singles Day shopping festival, in Shanghai, China, on Oct. 22. ALY SONG/Reuters As Alibaba Group BABA-N wraps up the world’s biggest online shopping festival on Friday, the operative word seems to be flat – potentially flat sales and flat in tone with the Chinese e-commerce giant not even holding its usual gala show. The Singles Day shopping festival, which despite its name has evolved into a multi-week event, is a key barometer of Chinese retail demand. Consumer sentiment is, however, at a low ebb – hit hard by China’s stringent COVID curbs and a sharply slowing economy. Alibaba has also sought for more than a year to play down hype surrounding the event as President Xi Jinping increasingly emphasizes “common prosperity” – a push that seeks to eliminate growing wealth inequities and clamp down on what the Communist Party sees as excessive behaviours. While Alibaba has said its Tmall marketplace would offer more than 17 million products, 3 mil...

An advertisement promoting Alibaba's Singles Day shopping festival, in Shanghai, China, on Oct. 22. ALY SONG/Reuters As Alibaba Group BABA-N wraps up the world’s biggest online shopping festival on Friday, the operative word seems to be flat – potentially flat sales and flat in tone with the Chinese e-commerce giant not even holding its usual gala show. The Singles Day shopping festival, which despite its name has evolved into a multi-week event, is a key barometer of Chinese retail demand. Consumer sentiment is, however, at a low ebb – hit hard by China’s stringent COVID curbs and a sharply slowing economy. Alibaba has also sought for more than a year to play down hype surrounding the event as President Xi Jinping increasingly emphasizes “common prosperity” – a push that seeks to eliminate growing wealth inequities and clamp down on what the Communist Party sees as excessive behaviours. While Alibaba has said its Tmall marketplace would offer more than 17 million products, 3 mil...

Executives at companies across 20 major economies see the Ukraine conflict speeding up the pace of the transition to cleaner energy, rather than slowing it down, a survey by Britain-based law firm Ashurst found. The findings counter fears that bans on Russian natural gas following its invasion of Ukraine, which Moscow calls a special operation, are driving up demand for coal for heat and power generation and hampering investment in wind and solar power. “The need to ensure greater energy security made evident by the crisis is likely to lead to a quicker energy transition, not a slowdown,” Ashurst said in a report released on Wednesday. More than 75 per cent of 1,999 senior executives surveyed across Group of 20 (G20) countries expected the Ukraine conflict would speed up energy transition in their country, while 12 per cent predicted it would slow transition, Ashurst said. Companies and banks were driving investment in renewable power, particularly in such countries as Brazil, India ...

Airfares on key corporate travel routes are expected to rise by as much as 25 per cent in 2023 amid high fuel prices, a stronger U.S. dollar and labour and aircraft shortages, a forecast from American Express Global Business Travel (Amex GBT) showed. The biggest gains are expected in economy class on routes between Australia and Asia, in business class on Australian domestic flights and those to New Zealand, as well as in economy class on Asia-Europe flights. The cost of economy class flights within North America will rise by a more muted 3 per cent and within Europe by 5.5 per cent as capacity cuts during the pandemic are restored. “Following significant price increases in 2022, fare rises in the competitive North America air sector are likely to be of a smaller degree than those forecast for Europe and Asia Pacific,” Amex GBT said on Thursday. Flights from Asia to Europe are being forced to take longer routes in many cases as airlines avoid Russian airspace because of its war with ...

Twitter Inc. made further staff cuts in the trust and safety team handling global content moderation and in the unit related to hate speech and harassment, Bloomberg news reported on Saturday. At least a dozen more cuts on Friday night affected workers in the company’s Dublin and Singapore offices, the report said, citing people familiar with the matter. Those laid off at the social-media platform owned by Elon Musk include Nur Azhar Bin Ayob, a relatively recent hire as head of site integrity for the Asia-Pacific region, and Analuisa Dominguez, Twitter’s senior director of revenue policy, Bloomberg reported. Workers on teams handling policy on misinformation, global appeals and state media on the platform were also eliminated, the report added. Twitter’s vice-president of trust and safety, Ella Irwin, confirmed to Reuters that Twitter made some cuts in the trust and safety team on Friday night but did not give details. “We have thousands of people within Trust and Safety who work co...

The OPEC Fund for International Development, a development institution established by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries’ member governments nearly 50 years ago, has raised $1-billion by selling its first ever bond. With the money earmarked for food security, health care, infrastructure, education, employment and renewable energy projects, the three-year bond which will pay investors an interest rate of 4.5 per cent, will also be classed as a ‘sustainable development’ bond. It is a label that has a growing appeal for investors increasingly looking to use their resources in more environmentally and socially-beneficial ways. The OPEC Fund’s Head of Funding, Martine Mills Jansen, said that central banks from the Middle East, Europe and Asia and other types of “official” institutions, including from the United States, accounted for 62 per cent of the bond’s buyers. Commercial banks made up another 19 per cent, asset managers and insurance and pension funds accounted fo...

Microsoft MSFT-Q said on Wednesday it had recovered all of its cloud services after a networking outage took down its cloud platform Azure along with services such as Teams and Outlook used by millions around the globe. Azure’s status page showed services were impacted in Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa. Only services in China and its platform for governments were not hit. By late morning Azure said most customers should have seen services resume after a full recovery of the Microsoft Wide Area Network (WAN). An outage of Azure, which has 15 million corporate customers and over 500 million active users, according to Microsoft data, can impact multiple services and create a domino effect as almost all of the world’s largest companies use the platform. Businesses have become increasingly dependent on online platforms after the pandemic caused a shift to more employees working from home. Earlier, Microsoft said it had determined a network connectivity issue was oc...