Japan, U.S., EU win rare earth dispute with China

The World Trade Organization said Wednesday that China's curbs on rare earth exports violate global trade rules.

A WTO dispute settlement panel fully backed a joint complaint from Japan, the United States and the European Union, urging China to take corrective measures.In its report, the panel said that China's restrictions on exports of rare earths, tungsten and molybdenum violate its pledge to abolish export duties, made when the country joined the WTO in 2001

Source: Jiji News

China-EU to forge bilateral investment agreement

China and the European Union will finish two days of talks on Tuesday to forge a bilateral investment agreement. The negotiations are expected to clarify each side’s approach to key elements of the agreement.

The EU says the pending visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping on March 31 will add dynamism to the talks. The EU also says securing an investment agreement will be vital for improving market access, investor protection, and overall trade relations. China and the EU agreed to launch talks for an investment deal in February 2012.

Source: CCTV

Snowstorm payments to reach Y100 billion

Nonlife insurance payments related to February's snowstorms, which mainly hit the Kanto and Koshin regions, are expected to top ¥100 billion, according to industry sources.

Payments by Tokio Marine & Nichido Fire Insurance Co. total ¥31.7 billion, based on data available as of Tuesday, its parent, Tokio Marine Holdings Inc., said Monday.

Source: The Japan News

Japan lifts offshore wind tariff, cuts solar prices

Japan will lift the amount utilities must pay for electricity from offshore wind farms while cutting prices for power fed in from solar projects, as the country looks to diversify its use of renewable energy.

The decision by Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) follows a recommendation made by a government panel earlier this month and aims at boosting business for companies connected to the wind sector both at home and abroad such as Hitachi Ltd and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.Japan, hoping to boost alternative energy in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, introduced a feed-in tariff scheme in 2012, under which utilities must buy all power generated from renewable sources such as wind, solar or geothermal.
But wind projects accounted for only 3 percent of development approvals under the programme as of November, with solar making up 94 percent.

Source: Reuters

China's COFCO buys 51% stake in Dutch trading firm Nidera

China National Cereals, Oils and Foodstuffs Corp--the country’s largest food trader, has acquired a 51 percent stake in the Dutch trading group Nidera. This is part of agreements signed during Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to the Netherlands.

COFCO says the stake buy is the largest global acquisition in China’s agricultural industry, the deal is estimated at 1.2 billion US dollars. The share purchase helps COFCO gain a bigger voice in global grain pricing, as well as secure more supplies from major grain growing regions. Nidera is seen as benefiting from COFCO’s logistics, processing and sales network in China.

Source: CCTV

China's first large-scale shale gas field found in Chongqing

China’s growth and reforms will have a major impact on neighboring Asian economies. Michelle Xing sat down with Takehiko Nakao, President of the Asian Development Bank, to talk about the growth outlook for Asia’s economies and the risks ahead.

State-owned Chinese oil and gas giant, Sinopec, announced Monday that its discovered a major shale gas field near Southwest China’s Chongqing. The Fu-Ling field has estimated reserves of 2.1 trillion cubic meters. It's also the first large-scale discovery of its kind in China.

The discovery in Chongqing’s Fuling district means that China can enter into large-scale commercial development of shale gas much earlier than anticipated. Sinopec’s Chairman -- Fu Chengyu -- says 10 years can now be cut off from China’s planned development time for shale gas energy.

"Our Fuling project, which will ultimately produce 10 billion cubic meters a year by 2017, will build shale gas capacity to 5 billion cubic meters a year by 2015." Fu Chenyu said.

The discovery of the Fuling field means China’s official target for annual shale gas production, 6.5 billion cubic meters a year, will be easily surpassed. But Sinopec may be faced with a cash squeeze as it looks to develop the field. That’s because SinoPec’s major competitor, PetroChina, reportedly will seek private investment in order to help it get into shale gas production.

Sinopec and state-owned PetroChina both cut their capital expenditures for 2014 from a year ago but analysts say Sinopec may have less flexibility on spending than its competitor. The reason for that is that PetroChina has a stronger balance sheet while Sinopec faces rising refining costs and weaker income from oil and gas production.

Source: CCTV

China's No.1 online travel firm Ctrip hit by security scare

Ctrip.com is China's No.1 travel booking website in terms of market share but it gave its users a good scare this weekend. More than 10 million Ctrip users and their personal and financial information were apparently exposed to two security flaws. The bugs were discovered Saturday by Wooyun.org, an independent web security monitor.

"A server, if run normally, usually hides logs and sensitive records in the background. No one can see that data. But some security breakdowns may give hackers an opportunity to download that information," said Fang Xiaodun from Wooyun.org.

Wooyun says that the security flaws were so obvious that even a greenhorn hacker could have easily obtained all of the stored credit card numbers, passwords and CVV codes of Ctrip's users.

Ctrip responded to the report by immediately correcting the security issue and announcing that it would provide full compensation to anyone suffering a loss because of the problem.

"If any losses are incurred by our users because of the loopholes we will provide compensation. We will also reward discoverers of any security flaws in the future. We've set up a 5 million yuan fund to encourage people to help us improve our web security," said He Jing, Public Affairs Manager at Ctrip.com.

Some Ctrip users have reported that money was stolen from their credit cards that were linked with their Ctrip accounts. Legal experts say it's illegal to store consumers' sensitive credit card information such as CVV numbers without advance notification, and that Ctrip is likely to face administrative punishment.

Many users have already unlinked their credit cards and bank accounts with Ctrip and analysts say that will be a huge blow to Ctrip's financial performance this year.

Source:CCTV

King Digital debut hit by ‘extremely fast money

 “Candy Crush” got crushed.

That was the popular way to describe the social game maker’s public trading debut, as King Digital’s stock tumbled from the opening trade.

King shed 15.6% to close at $19, the worst trading debut this year, according to data from Renaissance Capital. The company priced its initial public offering at $22.50.

The drop was so steep that analyst Scott Sweet, senior managing partner at IPO Boutique, said the IPO was hit by “extremely fast money,” as investors appeared to make a quick exit.

“It almost stood no chance,” he told MarketWatch. “It wasn’t surprising. It’s getting pounded.” He said there appeared to be “a hope for a pop that never materialized” as “traders immediately pulled the trigger.”

King saw strong demand in the days leading up to the IPO, even as doubts lingered over the company’s growth potential. Some analysts said the company was too dependent on one hit and called King a one-trick pony.

Sweet compared the King IPO to that of another social gaming company, Zynga,  whose shares also fell when it went public in 2011. Zynga shares are still down more than 50% from its IPO price.

King’s disappointing debut follows what has been a strong quarter for IPOs.

According to Renaissance Capital, the average IPO pop on the first day of trading has been 22% this year, “far above the 13% to 15% norm.”

Source: Marketwatch

6 awesomely bold companies you’ll meet at Startup Asia Singapore

For every Samsung, Amazon, or YouTube, there are dozens of scrappy startups trying to trip up the web giants. It’s a tough task. Each young company will have a different strategy that fits their market. When these smaller companies start succeeding, it’s time for entrepreneurs to sit up, take notice, and learn lessons. Asia already has a good number of highly disruptive and well-established companies that are challenging the leading tech companies in a number of sectors. These set a great example to all startup entrepreneurs across the region. At our Startup Asia Singapore conference on May 7 and 8, we’ll be looking at six of them: Xiaomi, Redmart, Viki, Gumi, Razer, and MyRepublic. China’s Xiaomi started out with just an Android ROM that any avid tweaker could flash onto their own Android phone, then in 2011 Xiaomi unveiled its first phone. Growth came fast as Xiaomi undercut phones from HTC and Samsung with price-tags half the size, yet the phones didn’t feel low-grade, boosted by its good-looking and super slick Android skin. In 2014, Xiaomi is aiming to sell 40 million phones, and it’ll likely hit that target. The phone-maker recently expanded to Singapore. Lessons worth learning Because these companies are doing so well and have so many lessons to teach young entrepreneurs, we’ll be hearing directly from all six during the upcoming Startup Asia Singapore event. Aside from Xiaomi, here’s why the other five are important: Singapore’s Redmart is shaking up grocery shopping by bringing it online. Singapore might be small, but it’s a shopping niche worth US$5.2 billion. Regional expansion is a possibility, but that’s not yet been laid out. Redmart got $5.4 million in bridge funding in January. Viki is a sprawling mix of Youtube and Hulu, focusing on TV series, movies, and news – particularly ones that will be popular in Asian markets. In a novel twist to the difficult business of online content, Viki features crowdsourced subtitles for many of its videos. Ecommerce titan Rakuten acquired Viki last year for US$200 million, but the video site still runs independently. Japanese mobile game developer Gumi is avoiding the travail of fellow Japanese gaming companies such as Nintendo or DeNA by making social games that are tuned into what smartphone gamers want. It raised $19 million in funding late last year. Battling telcos and ISPs sounds nuts, but that’s what MyRepublic is doing in Singapore. At the start of this year, MyRepublic has reached 15,000 residential households and businesses with its ISP business so far, and is looking for a big boost in numbers with its insanely cheap 1Gbps broadband package. Razer, like Xiaomi, is doing hardware. The Singapore-based company makes hardcore gaming laptops and tablets, as well as a plethora of gaming-related accessories. Live onstage These are the sessions where those companies will spill the beans on growth and future plans: How Xiaomi Became A $10 Billion Startup In 4 Years – Hugo Barra, VP for Xiaomi global, will sit down for a fireside chat with Tech in Asia’s’ Willis Wee. With Xiaomi starting to expand across the region, Xiaomi is proving to be the first Chinese brand that people are passionate about. Redmart’s Reinvention Of Grocery Shopping In Singapore – Redmart co-founders Roger Egan and Vikram Rupani will be interviewed onstage at Startup Asia Singapore about the site’s growth, getting funding, and expansion plans. Viki’s Backstory And Its Rakuten Sequel – Razmig Hovaghimian, co-founder and CEO of Viki, will be quizzed about its growth and life under the Rakuten umbrella. How Gumi Plans To Dominate The Mobile Gaming World – Hironao Kunimitsu, founder and CEO of Gumi, will be discussing with us about mobile gaming, and his company’s growth to becoming one of Japan’s largest game developers with over 35 titles. How MyRepublic Is Fighting Against The Giants – Malcolm Rodrigues, co-founder and CEO of MyRepublic, will be dishing out lessons about battling tech giants in this fireside chat session. It’s Razer’s Game – Min-Liang Tan is the founder and CEO of Razer. The Singapore-born, San Francisco-based entrepreneur will talk about sharpening his craft to bring high quality devices to grateful gamers across the world.

Source: TECHINASIA

Japan’s smartphone games market now worth $5.4 billion, half of total gaming industry

Source: TECHINASIA

According to a new report, Japan’s domestic smartphone gaming market was worth JPY 546.8 billion (US$5.4 billion) in 2013, up a staggering 178 percent from 2012. The report comes from CyberZ, a subsidiary of Tokyo-based internet conglomerate CyberAgent (TYO:4751). What’s interesting about the new figures is that the smartphone gaming sector has now reached roughly half the value of the overall Japanese gaming industry, which is sized at JPY 1.1 trillion yen (US$10.8 billion) in 2013. Observe how that ratio increased from less than 30 percent a year earlier:
The reason why CyberZ focuses on smartphones in particular is that Japan is the only country in the world that still has a big feature phone game industry: Japan’s Mobile Content Forum (MCF) last year said that the feature phone gaming industry by itself was still worth US$2.4 billion in 2012. By way of comparison, MCF estimated a size of US$2.7 billion for Japan’s smartphone game market in 2012, while the chart above, at roughly US$3 billion, lands in the same ballpark for that year.

Line Game hits 300 million downloads as social gaming takes off

Source:   TECHINASIA

Last week, chat app Line announced that it passed the 300 million download milestone for its gaming platform Line Game. That’s a huge achievement considering it is under two years old, launching just in July 2012. Currently Line has 50 game titles which include Line Pokopang (30 million downloads since February 2014), Line Cookie Run (18 million downloads since March 2014), and Line Rangers (6 million downloads since March 2014). All of those hefty downloads and gaming activities contribute significantly to Line’s $338.4 million in revenue in 2013.

Line’s 390 registered users all over the world apparently love playing games. Check out our graph below where we chart the growth of Line and the games that collectively make up its Line Game series:

How does Alibaba respond when China cracks down on investment products? It launches another investment product.

Chinese tech giant Alibaba rolled out its second investment-themed offering today, and it’s probably not what followers of the company expected. Inside the Taobao mobile app, Alibaba has introduced a new section called “Yule Bao” (rough translation: “entertainment treasure”). Yule Bao lets users “invest” money in a range of high-profile and development-phase games, movies, and TV shows, in exchange for “expected annualized returns” of 7 percent. Users who help crowdfund these projects will be eligible to receive certain perks. For example, an “investor” might earn the chance to visit the set of the movie he or she supported, or receive an autographed poster from the film’s director. Investments in film and TV projects are set at a minimum of RMB 100 (about US$ 16), while investments in gaming projects can’t go lower than RMB 50 (about US$ 8). Each user can make a maximum of two investments in each project. According to Alibaba, management will be carried out by Guohua Life Insurance, which will place the money in its own set of wealth and insurance funds, and subsequently will be invested in the entertainment industry. Alibaba adds that it also hopes to increase fan interaction with creators, and allow fans to contribute directly to the development of each project. Liu Chunning, president of Alibaba’s digital entertainment business group, provided the following statement:

“The influence of Internet innovation on the cultural industry is no longer restricted to movie ticket sales but has expanded to investment and content production. Yu Le Bao aims to provide a grassroots investment platform to bring the public closer to the cultural industry. In the future, public investors will even be able to select the directors, heroes and heroines of a movie or TV show.” In short, it’s like Kickstarter-meets-Yu’ebao, Alibaba’s consumer investment fund. Launched in June 2013, that product went on to become China’s single largest fund of its kind, with total assets of over $41 billion as of last January.

Yet, as is often the case with Chinese tech developments (and political ones as well), the timing of this announcement is more important than the announcement itself. Alibaba’s introduction of Yulebao – a not-so-serious investment product, but an investment product nonetheless – comes right in the thick of the company’s kerfuffle with the People’s Bank of China. The state’s central bank recently proposed a set of regulations that will impose ceilings on online monetary purchases – with single purchases capped at RMB 5,000 (US$815), and monthly purchases capped RMB 10,000 (US$1,630). Those caps include money transfers into investment funds like Yu’ebao.

Alibaba chairman Jack Ma has always been outspoken about his desire to provoke reform for China’s consumer banking regulations, and he’s been just as vocal now that the People’s Bank of China hinted at an upcoming clampdown on financial products offered up by the tech giants. Last week Ma issued a posted a message on Laiwang, Alibaba’s messaging app, in which he wrote “Let the users decide who wins the game, not monopoly and power.” As a result, despite how Yulebao’s rooted in entertainment moreso than finance, don’t write it off entirely. By launching an investment-themed product just as the People’s Bank of China hinted at an upcoming crackdown on investment product, Ma is telling the People’s Bank of China – “Yes, I know about your crackdown, and I don’t care.”

Source: TECHINASIA

Tencent pays $500 million for big stake in Korean mobile gaming company

Chinese web and game company Tencent  is boosting its mobile gaming prowess today by paying US$500 million for a stake in South Korea’s CJ Games. CJ Games makes a mix of casual and more in-depth mobile RPG titles like Taiming Monsters, Every Vroom Vroom Vroom, and Special Force 2. Many of the casual games are created to integrate with Korean messaging app KakaoTalk and its social gaming features.

Once the deal is completed, Tencent will have a 28 percent in CJ Games, which is a part of parent company CJ E&M , a major player in Korea’s film industry. Tencent – which makes the popular WeChat messaging app – is also China’s biggest gaming company. It has its own casual mobile games, some of which tie in to WeChat’s social gaming platform. Note that Tencent also has a stake in KakaoTalk. Tencent’s stake in CJ Games looks like a push to boost the breadth of its mobile social games. The deal could bring some of the Korea-made games to a Chinese audience – and even a global audience – via WeChat. WeChat now has 355 million active users, though most of them are likely in China.

Source: TECHINASIA

Dow Jones Newswires: Western sanctions to Russia, may accelerate a planned move into asian markets

WSJ: After ECB Signals, Stars Are Aligning For Stronger Dollar

        The Wall Street Journal reports,"Contrasts in monetary policy signals around the world are accentuating a future rebalancing of monetary conditions that will favor the dollar. After the Fed indicated a subtle expediting in its expected timetable for raising interest rates last week, officials from the European Central Bank on Tuesday offered their strongest hints yet that they will take monetary easing steps to ward off deflation in the euro zone. Meanwhile, the People’s Bank of China has significantly softened the yuan as it fights a slowdown in its domestic economy and moves to subject the currency to more market forces, while there is no sign that the Bank of Japan is abandoning its monthly purchases of bonds.

Combine this with the constant decline in the U.S. trade deficit, as American oil and gas production reduces the need for imported energy products, and you get what some see as a perfect storm for a stronger dollar. That’s how it should be – other than perhaps the U.K., the U.S. economy is looking the healthiest of the world’s major economies. The problem is that the relative outperformance doesn’t say much. Millions are still unemployed and manufacturers continue to struggle. The danger here is that U.S. producers up the ante and lobby Washington for responses to mitigate competitive pressures from overseas.  Already, U.S. officials are quietly complaining to Beijing about the weaker yuan. Let’s hope it doesn’t go beyond rhetoric and the rebalancing is allowed to occur naturally". 

U.S. Ex-Transportation Durable Goods Orders slowed to 0.2% in February

Source: Bloomberg

Durable Goods Orders

Released On 3/26/2014 8:30:00 AM For Feb, 2014 Prior Prior Revised Consensus Consensus Range Actual New Orders - M/M change -1.0 % -1.3 % 1.0 % -1.5 % to 2.5 % 2.2 % New Orders - Yr/Yr Change 4.6 % 4.3 % 0.2 % Ex-transportation - M/M 1.1 % 0.9 % 0.3 % -1.7 % to 1.5 % 0.2 % Ex-transportation - Yr/Yr 1.2 % 1.1 % 1.5 %

Highlights The latest durables orders report was mixed with the headline strong and the core slowing. New factory orders for durables in February rebounded 2.2 percent, following a decrease of 1.3 percent in January. Analysts projected a 1.0 percent rise. Excluding transportation, durables orders slowed to a 0.2 percent rise in February, following a 0.9 percent boost the prior month. The transportation component jumped a monthly 6.9 percent after dropping 6.2 percent the month before. Within transportation, the gain was led by increases in orders for defense aircraft although nondefense aircraft and motor vehicles also were strong.  Outside of transportation, orders were up slightly but very mixed by subcomponents. Gains were seen in primary metals, fabricated metals, computers & electronics, and "other." Notably offsetting were declines in machinery and electrical equipment. There was slippage in investment plans. Nondefense capital goods orders excluding aircraft decreased 1.3 percent in February, following a rebound of 0.8 percent the month before. Shipments for this series advanced 0.5 percent, following a 1.4 percent drop in January. The latest durables report suggests that manufacturing is not as strong as indicated by recent manufacturing surveys.