Posts by Mark Darwin
US: Stocks rise as market weighs tariff ruling
Published Fri, May 30, 2025 · 06:22 AM [NEW YORK] Wall Street stocks finished modestly higher on Thursday following strong earnings from Nvidia as a judicial ruling added to uncertainty about President Donald Trump’s tariffs. Nvidia jumped 3.3 per cent after reporting a mammoth US$18.8 billion in quarterly profits, even with a multi-billion dollar hit from US…
Read MoreThe Myth of the Young Entrepreneur: Why Experience Matters
We’ve all heard the romanticized tales of teenage dropouts who build tech empires from their garages and become billionaires before they’re old enough to rent a car. This narrative has become so pervasive that it’s created a harmful bias in the entrepreneurial ecosystem – one that I believe is holding back innovation and investment. The…
Read MoreIndependent financial adviser appointed for partial offer for Cordlife
[SINGAPORE] Cordlife has appointed Novus Corporate Finance as the independent financial adviser for a voluntary conditional cash partial offer it has received from a Thai company, said the private cord-blood bank on Thursday (May 29) in a bourse filing. Medeze Treasury, a wholly owned subsidiary of Thai-listed stem cell company Medeze Group, had offered to…
Read MoreIHH Healthcare Q1 profit falls 33% to RM514 million on exceptional items
[SINGAPORE] Integrated healthcare operator IHH Healthcare on Thursday (May 29) posted a 33 per cent fall in net profit to RM514 million (S$156.3 million) for its first quarter ended Mar 31, from RM768 million the year before. The drop came mainly from a lower net monetary gain from the application of MFRS 129, and the…
Read MoreNTT Docomo to buy SBI’s net bank for 420 billion yen in cutthroat market
The move is part of a capital alliance between the state-backed telecom group and SBI Holdings Published Thu, May 29, 2025 · 05:35 PM [TOKYO] NTT Docomo is buying SBI Holdings’ online bank in a 420 billion yen (S$3.7 billion) deal to shore up the Japanese mobile carrier’s financial offerings in a hyper-competitive market. Nippon…
Read MoreNikkei ends at two-week high on US tariff relief, chip rally
Published Thu, May 29, 2025 · 03:17 PM [TOKYO] Japan’s Nikkei ended trade on Thursday (May 29) at the highest point in more than two weeks after a US court blocked President Donald Trump’s tariffs from going into effect, while a weaker yen and a rally in chip-related stocks also supported the benchmark index. The…
Read MoreToyota sales hit second monthly record on US demand, tariff rush
Japanese carmakers are heavily reliant on the US auto market and could suffer as much as a US$19 billion impact from the levies Published Thu, May 29, 2025 · 02:11 PM [TOKYO] Toyota Motor’s sales hit a record for the second month in a row as a strong showing in the US and Japan was…
Read MoreAramco CEO will keep borrowing even as oil slump cuts cashflow
[DUBAI] Saudi Aramco is targeting more borrowings to finance growth and better leverage its balance sheet, chief executive officer Amin Nasser said, as the world’s biggest oil exporter raised US$5 billion in bonds this week. The Saudi state oil producer needs funds to plug a gap in finances as declining free cash flow amid weaker…
Read MoreVietnam’s AI ambitions hinge on one US$6.8 billion tech company
[HANOI] Four decades ago, Truong Gia Binh set up a technology company using a single computer in a room loaned by his then-father-in-law, general Vo Nguyen Giap, revered for leading Vietnamese troops in defeating the French and US militaries. That company, FPT, is now Vietnam’s biggest listed tech firm. It’s central to the government’s push…
Read MoreMeta AI bot used a billion times monthly: Mark Zuckerberg
[SAN FRANCISCO] Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg touted the tech firm’s generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) assistant on Wednesday, telling shareholders it is used by a billion people each month across its platforms. Zuckerberg noted the milestone anew at Meta’s annual gathering of shareholders and as the social media behemoth vies with Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and…
Read More