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Hong Kong's battered office sector showed cautious signs of life in 2025, supported by improved take-up in core districts and a slower pace of rental declines and –. while analysts said that trend was set to continue into 2026 – rents were unlikely to rise over the next six months. The coming year was expected to build on the market's momentum, with stabilisation emerging as the dominant theme, analysts said. Vacancy rates in prime assets in core districts were likely to steady further, but......

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) expects to work with other financial regulators to promote artificial intelligence adoption in various sectors over the next five years and further advance fintech development, according to the head of the city's de facto central bank. Under the five-year plan called Fintech 2030 that starts this year, the HKMA would expand the scope of the city's generative AI sandbox to include more industries as a step towards enhancing risk management, fraud detection......

Digital finance has moved into the mainstream as regulated stablecoins and tokenised assets scale up, but industry experts say 2026 will be defined by success in developing interoperable, regulated, use-case-driven rails rather than more digital silos. As more than 130 jurisdictions explore central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), alongside dozens of stablecoin initiatives and a growing array of tokenisation platforms, day-to-day payments and finance are undergoing a rapid structural......

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly shaping educational practices across Hong Kong, mainland China and beyond, yet the rapid integration of AI into learning environments reveals significant risks that cannot be overlooked. Protecting young users requires coordinated action: parents, policymakers and AI developers must work together to strengthen safety standards and ensure responsible deployment. AI is no longer merely a virtual tutor that supports students' learning. It is increasingly......

A new user on the prediction market Polymarket has attracted attention after winning hundreds of thousands of dollars on bets that appeared to predict the United States' seizure of Venezuela's leader, Nicolas Maduro. The anonymous user set up an account on the platform eight days ago and then placed a series of wagers worth nearly US$34,000 before the assault, which had raked in profits of more than US$409,000 by Sunday afternoon, Polymarket data showed. The wagers included predictions that......

The slumbering property sector remains a threat to China's economic growth because of its huge impact on the employment rate and consumer demand, according to industry officials and analysts. Amid sharp declines in property investment, housing sales and home prices last year, a further downturn of the significant sector may put more developers, workers, homebuyers and banks at risk. In the first 11 months of 2025, new properties worth 7.5 trillion yuan (US$1.07 trillion), comprising units for......

Initial public offerings (IPOs) in mainland China nearly doubled in 2025 from a year earlier after the securities regulator rolled back curbs on new listings and resumed approvals for pre-profit technology companies, in line with Beijing's drive to replace imported tech products with home-grown alternatives. A total of 115 companies raised a combined 128 billion yuan (US$18.3 billion) from IPOs on the Shanghai, Shenzhen and Beijing exchanges this year, according to Bloomberg data. That eclipsed......

Hangzhou-based biotech start-up MindRank has progressed to Phase 3 clinical trials for its weight-loss drug, making it China's first artificial intelligence-assisted Category 1 new drug to reach this stage. MindRank announced last month that it had initiated a Phase 3 clinical trial in China for MDR-001, a small molecule GLP-1 receptor agonists designed with the help of AI. GLP-1 receptor agonists mimic natural hormones to regulate blood sugar and appetite. According to Niu Zhangming, MindRank's......

Lacklustre sales at the end of 2025 will bode ill for the Chinese electric vehicle (EV) market this year, with low-priced carmakers under pressure to offer further price cuts amid an adjusted trade-in subsidy mechanism. A bleak outlook could also prompt authorities to rein in a discount war as few assemblers are able to post profits. “As deliveries failed to live up to expectations, all major players would have to slash prices of their vehicles to reduce their inventories at the beginning of......

The more than US$2 billion acquisition of agentic AI start-up Manus by US social media giant Meta Platforms could face scrutiny from Beijing over technology export controls, experts warn. The sale of Manus, a Singapore-based but Chinese-founded AI agent developer, could raise compliance questions around Beijing's technology export regime, and expectations that the company can fully decouple from China may be “oversimplified”, said Cui Fan, a professor at the University of International Business......

Hong Kong's property market rallied to a four-year high in 2025 following the city government's easing measures and lower interest rates, according to Centaline Property Agency. In the past 12 months, the number of registered sales agreements for residential units, carparking spaces and commercial and industrial properties increased 18.7 per cent year on year to 80,700, while the amount involved rose 15.4 per cent to HK$616.4 billion, data from Centaline showed. The realtor noted that 2025......

On the last day of 2025, DeepSeek published a new technical paper, with founder and CEO Liang Wenfeng among the 19 co-authors, about “manifold-constrained hyper-connections” – a general framework for training artificial intelligence systems at scale, which suggested “promising directions for the evolution of foundational models”. That release was a fitting reminder to the world, especially during the peak of the Christmas holiday season, about Chinese AI companies' sharpened focus on innovation......

More Chinese and local issuers could tap Dubai to list debt and equity securities, signalling confidence in the Chinese economy and the deepening economic corridor between China and the Middle East, according to the CEO of Dubai Financial Services Authority (DFSA). The momentum would build on Emirates NBD Bank's recent offshore yuan bond of 1 billion yuan (US$143 million), listed on Nasdaq Dubai, marking the lender's return to the dim sum bond market and enabling global investors to access......

Hua Hong Semiconductor, China's No 2 contract chipmaker, on Wednesday announced the acquisition of its sister foundry in Shanghai, days after market leader Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC) said it would take full control of a subsidiary. Those big-ticket transactions – 8.27 billion yuan (US$1.2 billion) for Hua Hong and 40.6 billion yuan for SMIC – signalled a fresh round of consolidation in the country's semiconductor industry, as Beijing's tech self-sufficiency drive......

China's top party journal has called for a stronger package of policies implemented in one go – rather than through “piecemeal-style steps” – to stabilise the country's struggling property sector, as the market remains vital to the domestic economy and consumer demand. The article published by Qiushi, the Communist Party's leading theoretical journal, said policymakers should take concrete steps to stabilise the property market, urging them to implement measures that are “aligned with market......

Hong Kong's mortgage market lost some momentum in November, official data showed, though activity over the first 11 months of 2025 still points to a full-year recovery from the previous year's slump as borrowing costs eased, home prices stabilised and sentiment improved. Mortgage applications – a gauge of buyer interest – fell 2.9 per cent from October to 8,019, according to the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA). Mortgage approvals, representing loans banks agreed to provide, declined 7 per......

DeepSeek's latest technical paper, co-authored by the firm's founder and CEO Liang Wenfeng, has been cited as a potential game changer in developing artificial intelligence models, as it could translate into improvements in the fundamental architecture of machine learning. The paper's theme of Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections (mHC) marks an improvement to conventional hyper-connections in residual networks (ResNet), a fundamental mechanism underlying large language models (LLMs),......

Electric vehicle makers have kicked off a fresh round of price cuts in mainland China at the start of 2026, despite Beijing's repeated calls to curb “involution”, as pressure on margins and survival prospects persists. German luxury carmaker BMW has cut the mainland China price of its all-electric i7 M70L to below 1.6 million yuan (US$225,000) – a reduction of more than 300,000 yuan, or 16 per cent – and lowered prices on other EVs and petrol-powered models by at least 10 per cent, according to......

Hong Kong's momentum as an initial public offering (IPO) venue is set to hurtle onwards in 2026 after funds raised from share sales more than tripled in 2025, placing the city's exchange atop the global rankings for the first time since 2019. A total of 114 companies raised US$37.22 billion on the Hong Kong stock exchange's main board in 2025, according to data released on Friday by the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG). That translates to a 229 per cent increase from US$11.3 billion in......

City University of Hong Kong has bought an office property in Kowloon for HK$1.96 billion (US$252 million), joining a growing list of educational institutions buying office assets amid depressed prices as the city's office market shows early signs of stabilising. CityU Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of the university, acquired the low-rise office block at Festival Walk in Kowloon Tong from Singapore-based Mapletree Pan Asia Commercial Trust. The agreement was signed on December 10, and the......