Politics
- America’s secretary of state visited Saudi Arabia – King Salman and his son
- Prince is under scrutiny for death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul
- Murdered by team of Saudis with link to Prince
- A house in southern Israel was hit by a rocket fired from Gaza Strip
- Israel jet countered it by striking 20 targets at Gaza Strip
- Public health emergency over Ebola outbreak in Congo
- Claimed lives of 140 people out of 181 confirmed cases
- America killed 60 jihadists in an air strike in Somalia
- #MeToo campaign in India
- M.J. Akbar resigns as junior foreign minister
- French President reshuffled his cabinet after a struggle with PM
M&A / Strategy
- IBM is chasing Amazon in the Cloud with a US$33 billion purchase of Red Hat
- following the trend of Cloud
- playing catch up with Amazon and Microsoft on Cloud
- declining revenues in hardware, software
- Ibibo founder launches INDwealth – an AI powered wealth management company
- Xiaomi and Huawei CEOs argue over best camera
- Sears filed for bankruptcy – the company that revolutionised shopping with its mail order catalogue and pioneered shopping malls
- Big banks report bumper earnings – JP Morgan rose 24%, BoA and Wells Fargo grew 33%
- Asset manager Blackrock saw decline in stock – institutional investors pulled money amid pricing war in investment industry
- Denmark’s Danske Bank was rejected CEO by the regulator. The bank is embroiled in a money-laundering scandal which led to resignation of previous CEO
- America’s federal budget deficit amounted to US$779 billion for FY ending Sep 30th, increase of 17% from previous year – 3.9% of GDP
- Britain – wages grew 3.1% – fastest since financial crises – last year growth of consumer prices outstripped wages
- China’s producer of vaccines – Changsheng Biotech was fined US$1.3 billion by government in relation to faulty data on vaccines for rabies
- Facebook to tackled spread of fake news by removing c.800 politics-related pages and accounts from its network
- Uber is firming up plans for an IPO within next six months that could see a valuation of US$120 billion
- Netflix grew its subscriber base to 137 million, by adding 5.9 million international customers and 1.1 million US subscribers in Q3 (July-Sep) – plans to spend US$8 billion on original content
- Google fined US$5 billion by European Commission for abusing the market dominance of Android, comply by allowing smartphone makers to install all of its apps separately, rather than as a bundle
- Google withdrew from US$10 billion contract to provide Department of Defence with cloud computing services, citing ethical concerns on how Pentagon may use its technology. Amazon said it must make right decision even when its unpopular
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