China Customs said Thursday that the country’s overall trade with North Korea had grown 10 percent in the first half of the year. Imports from North Korea actually fell 13.2 percent to $880 million, it said, but exports to the pariah state jumped 29 percent to $1.67 billion. The announcement came amid a broader release […]

E-commerce player Lazada, which is now majority-owned by Alibaba, is confident that its expertise in Southeast Asian markets can counter the looming threat from Amazon’s much-anticipated entry into the region, a top executive told CNBC. Last year, TechCrunch reported that Amazon had planned to launch local e-commerce services in Singapore in the first quarter of […]

The United States notified South Korea on Wednesday it plans to start negotiating amendments to a five-year-old free trade agreement with Seoul and called a meeting to kick off the talks for next month. The announcement came months after U.S. President Donald Trump said he would either renegotiate or terminate what he called a “horrible” […]

Major Chinese conglomerate Dalian Wanda is selling a bunch of its theme parks and hotels for $9.3 billion to Sunac, a Chinese property developer. That is projected to be the one of the largest Chinese real estate deals ever, and it features an interesting quirk: Wanda is lending nearly half of the total sale figure […]

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s latest attempt to reform the Philippine economy is a major change for the energy industry there. The Philippines, one of the fastest growing economies in Asia, could see a host of new energy projects coming online after Duterte changed the approval system from a multi-year gantlet to a 30-day process. Speaking […]

The dollar weakened and funds flowed into gold on Wednesday on concerns spurred by emails showing President Donald Trump’s son met with a Kremlin-linked lawyer whose stated goal was to assist Moscow in influencing the U.S. election. Donald Trump Jr. on Tuesday released emails about a controversial meeting he attended with a Russian lawyer offering […]

Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida wants to leave his post in Prime Minister Shinzo Abe‘s cabinet reshuffle next month, domestic media said on Wednesday, a sign he may be planning to challenge the increasingly unpopular leader for the top job. Support for Abe has plunged to its lowest since the prime minister returned to office […]

The Philippines‘ central bank is watching financial risks in the country closely and is ready to act should the situation demand attention, its new governor told CNBC. One of the fastest growing economies in Asia, the Philippines posted GDP growth of 6.4 percent in the first quarter of 2017 from a year ago — even […]

The global economic outlook may be relatively sanguine, but market valuations were getting high. That was the message from Singapore’s massive state-owned investment firm Temasek at its annual review on Tuesday. “Where we saw increased market valuations, we took the opportunity to divest into the positive momentum in some of our holdings,” Michael Buchanan, head […]

Germany’s Trivago is benefiting from a “talent drain” in the U.S., as Europe now appears to be a viable competitor for tech talent, according to company co-founder Rolf Schromgens. Schromgens observed that perceptions of the U.S., including those potentially colored by President Donald Trump’s ban on immigrants from some predominantly-Muslim countries, have helped his Europe-based […]