Chad Bray

Digital financial services giant Ant Group is on the cusp of pulling off the world’s biggest initial public offering and could be worth over $500 billion in the near future, riding on the digitization of financial services in the world’s second-largest economy. Ant’s coming out parade illustrates China’s lead in digital finance. Its super-slick mobile payment app, Alipay, has over 1 billion users, who can click on the Alipay app for services ranging from food deliveries to garbage collection. It is the world’s most popular app outside social-media networks. Ant plans to plough the $34.5 billion it is raising from dual listings in Hong Kong and Shanghai into future revenue drivers, such as bl

The United States could lose its edge in developing treatments for illnesses ranging from Aids and the Ebola virus to malaria and Parkinson’s disease, due to the latest products hit by the US-China trade war: monkeys.  The Trump administration is set to add a 10% tariff on September 1 on more than $100 billion of Chinese imports. One item is of particular concern to researchers: live primates – 80% of the monkeys imported by America’s research laboratories are bred in China. The new duty could force researchers, who are already facing difficulty in procuring live animals from abroad for testing, to reconsider their US operations, said Matthew R. Bailey, executive director of the National Ass

You might think the fireworks that go boom in the US every Independence Day are as American as apple pie.  But it turns out that they’re almost all imported from China – 99% of consumer fireworks and 75% of professional fireworks, such as those used in displays at the Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular and on the Mall in Washington, are. And with Donald Trump’s administration about to place tariffs on about $300 billion worth of Chinese-made goods, next Fourth of July is looking more expensive. The 25% tariffs could go into effect as soon as July, but that would be after this year’s celebrations, which should be safe.   Most fireworks for sale have already been imported to the US, and some l

This year’s Thanksgiving or Christmas shopping season may be a more expensive one for Americans, as toymakers who are struggling to move their manufacturing bases out of China may have to pass some of the costs from higher US tariffs on to customers. Toymakers from Hong Kong to Rhode Island are already reconsidering their manufacturing base in mainland China and asking their Chinese partners to share the higher costs to cope with President Donald Trump administration’s threat to slap more tariffs on nearly all goods made in China. It is a dramatic re-evaluation of a relationship that has spanned decades and spawned a highly specialized industry that accounted for about $27 billion in US sale

When China levied additional tariffs on pork from the United States last year, Zhu Mengzhou, a manager of an imported food distributor in Guangzhou, was one of many traders who stopped buying it. “Unless the tariffs are adjusted, the cost is too high for us,” Zhu said. Even as an outbreak of African swine fever threatens to decimate China’s most important meat market, Zhu cannot afford to resume US purchases due to two rounds of trade war tariffs which added a total of 50% to import duties. For some US pork products, Chinese buyers have to pay duties up to 70% just to get them past customs. Zhu and many other pork traders in China – as well as the US – are watching anxiously as negotiators f

After being behind bars for more than a week and placed under international scrutiny following her arrest in Canada earlier this month, Sabrina Meng has finally been granted a breather. Accused of fraud tied to American sanctions on Iran, the 46-year-old chief financial officer of Chinese telecoms giant Huawei was released on bail on Tuesday night. But while she has since found home comforts in her six-bedroom house in a leafy Vancouver neighborhood, Meng faces possible extradition to the United States and a jail sentence of more than 30 years if convicted. The accusations against Meng have filled her supporters with indignation and mushroomed into a diplomatic crisis between Canada and Chi

A Singapore-based wealth manager catering to China’s ultra-rich has been requested by Chinese officials to stay in the country, triggering concerns about doing business in the increasingly affluent but risky market. The consultancy McKinsey estimates about $6 trillion in assets could become available in China for investment by 2022, as the market opens further, making it a highly lucrative market for wealth managers. The country now has 3.5 million millionaires and more residents with wealth above $50 million than any country in the world, expect for the US. Over the weekend, a Singapore-based banker working for Swiss bank UBS’s wealth management business was asked to delay her trip back fro