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Mainstream metrics may understate the role of China's currency in global payments, as a growing share of transactions is now routed through Beijing's own cross-border payment system and not fully reflected in conventional data sets, analysts say. This could help explain the gap between Beijing's official narrative – which describes the yuan as the world's third-largest payment currency – and readings from tracking systems such as the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication......

Hong Kong developers are raising prices of new homes this week following sold-out launches in recent days, further testing the appetite of homebuyers amid geopolitical and interest rate uncertainties. Henderson Land Development put another 39 units at its Chester project in Hung Hom on sale on Monday, with 25 homes finding buyers as of 5pm, according to agents. With an average discounted price of HK$22,198 (US$2,831) per square foot, the units were priced 4.57 per cent higher than the 123 units......

A number of underperforming international car brands are likely to either exit the mainland Chinese market or scale down operations, as losses mount due to falling sales and shrinking market share. Carmakers delivering fewer than 1,000 units a month already faced a do-or-die situation in the world's largest automotive market because the weak sales were not enough to cover their manufacturing and operating costs, according to analysts. Some carmakers are likely to follow Skoda, Volkswagen's......

Chinese tech companies are engaged in a public war of words as they compete to capitalise on US start-up Anthropic's decision to pull its industry-leading Claude models from open-source AI agent tool OpenClaw. The development comes as AI agents have triggered a huge increase in demand for AI tokens – the core metric of AI usage – raising questions about the long-term ability of industry players to meet this demand amid a growing global crunch in computational power. On Sunday, Anthropic......

Initial public offerings (IPOs) on mainland Chinese markets surged 56 per cent in the first quarter from a year earlier, as the securities regulator relaxed curbs on equity financing to support the nation's push for technological innovation. Twenty-nine companies raised a combined 25.7 billion yuan (US$3.7 billion) from the Shanghai, Shenzhen and Beijing stock exchanges in the first three months, according to Bloomberg data. That compared with 16.5 billion yuan raised by 27 companies in the same......

Hong Kong's Mandatory Provident Fund (MPF) is poised to report a loss of over HK$100 billion (US$12.8 billion) for March this week, its worst monthly loss in dollar terms since its inception 25 years ago. The sharp fall in global stock markets last month hit the MPF hard, while the uncertainties ahead stemming from the Middle East conflict have led the pension regulator and analysts to urge the 4.8 million members to adopt a diversified approach. The 378 MPF investment funds suffered a HK$103.3......

China's hunt for semiconductor talent has intensified as Beijing aims to achieve artificial intelligence breakthroughs amid deepening tech rivalry with the US, but the plans have triggered fresh probes by Taiwanese authorities into talent poaching by mainland Chinese firms in what analysts describe as a “quiet tech war” over the human capital. A total of 11 new mainland Chinese firms were put under investigation for allegedly poaching semiconductor and other hi-tech talent, according to Taiwan's......

Gold is likely to stabilise and resume its record-setting uptrend once Middle East tensions recede and new leadership at the US Federal Reserve adopts a policy of monetary easing, according to global financial institutions. The yellow metal would quickly rebound above US$5,000 an ounce as long as crude oil slipped back to between US$80 and US$85 a barrel, according to a report by William Blair, the US investment banking and wealth-management company. Lombard Odier, the Swiss private banking and......

Rents in Hong Kong's luxury housing market are rising as supply tightens, with returning overseas professionals heating up the competition to secure prime homes. The rebound is most evident in traditional upscale districts such as The Peak and Southside, where leasing activity has picked up sharply this year. Transactions reached 108 in the first quarter, with more than 40 per cent involving monthly rents above HK$100,000 (US$12,760), according to Midland Realty. At the centre of the surge is......

Traditional corporate culture and hierarchies are slowing down artificial intelligence adoption in Chinese enterprises, leaving them trailing their US peers, even as China's savvy consumers embrace AI agents at a breakneck pace, says Zack Kass, former head of go-to-market at OpenAI. China has a very “techno-centric consumer”, while the US has a very “techno-centric enterprise”, Kass told the South China Morning Post in a recent interview. Highlighting this contrast, Kass said typical Chinese......

Facebook owner Meta Platforms has recruited a Chinese industry veteran with experience across artificial intelligence, humanoid robots and extended reality to lead a new hardware team in its superintelligence unit. Xu Rui, a former product manager at Tencent Holdings and TikTok owner ByteDance, would lead a team developing AI devices separately from Meta's Reality Labs division, which was responsible for the company's popular smart glasses and virtual reality headsets, US outlet Business Insider......

A proposed cap on the ground rents paid by leasehold homeowners in England and Wales is seen as favouring foreign property investors, including those from Hong Kong and mainland China, but another measure tightening rules in setting rents is dampening demand ahead of its implementation, according to analysts. An estimated 203,000 homes in England and Wales are registered to owners with an overseas address. Hongkongers hold 14 per cent, making them the largest group of foreign investors in the......

Chinese ride-hailing company CaoCao, backed by Geely, is betting on a heavy-asset strategy to emerge as a leading robotaxi operator, with plans to deploy 100,000 autonomous vehicles by 2030 as competition intensifies and self-driving technology matures. In an interview with the South China Morning Post, CEO Gong Xin said the future of robotaxis hinged on an asset-management model built around a closed-loop “trinity” of vehicle manufacturing, autonomous driving technology and fleet......

China is undergoing a profound demographic shift, with its population ageing at a pace and scale unprecedented globally, and the trend has opened up significant opportunities for elderly care and insurance sectors. “This massive and rapidly expanding elderly population should be a major consumer of healthcare services and therapeutics,” Citi Research analyst John Yung said in a report in late March. “The healthcare demands are rigid, long-term and diverse.” Age-friendly products are rapidly......

Japanese retailers are scaling back in north China as fierce competition and weak pricing power erode profitability, forcing store closures in major cities and prompting calls for a sharper localisation strategy. Groups such as Aeon and Ito-Yokado have closed outlets in Beijing and Tianjin in recent years, highlighting mounting pressure from domestic rivals and shifting consumer habits in the region. Aeon said it closed three supermarkets in Tianjin and one in neighbouring Hebei province after......

A century on, T.S. Eliot's poem The Hollow Men strikes a disturbingly ominous note: This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper. With the way things are going at present, we could be about to find out which of these endings it will be. The hope is that the Iran-centred conflagration in the Middle East will not turn into a nuclear apocalypse and that the “whimper” will be merely a cry from the depths of global economic recession. But either scenario is possible while the Trump......

Taiwan's dominance in semiconductors is no longer just reshaping global technology supply chains – it is also redrawing the island's financial landscape, as international banks move to capture the wealth being created across the chip ecosystem. From first-generation chip entrepreneurs setting up family offices to retail investors pouring money into exchange-traded funds (ETFs), the capital generated by Taiwan's technology boom is spreading across multiple layers of the economy. Global lenders......

There was a surprise guest speaker at Nvidia's widely watched GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in San Jose, California, last month: Yang Zhilin, the founder of Beijing-based Moonshot AI, the developer behind the Kimi family of foundational artificial intelligence models. Amid heated rhetoric about US-China AI competition, which some have likened to an “arms race”, the participation of a Chinese AI start-up's CEO at the flagship event of American chipmaking giant Nvidia might have struck some as......

Chinese companies engaging in artificial intelligence activities are required to set up internal “AI ethics review committees” under new rules released by Beijing on Thursday, effective immediately. The notice comes as policymakers look to ensure that fast-paced AI progress can continue in a “healthy” manner amid growing consumer and enterprise adoption. Jointly released by 10 government bodies and institutions including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, National Development......

Tencent Holdings has launched a new OpenClaw tool for enterprises that promises easy deployment of the artificial intelligence agent as part of the Chinese internet giant's efforts to capitalise on the “lobster” frenzy in the country. ClawPro, launched in public beta by Tencent's cloud unit on Thursday, works as an AI agent management platform for enterprises, allowing them to deploy OpenClaw templates, select models and agents, track token consumption and manage security settings. Tencent said......