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Chinese firms should prioritise regional political stability when they make overseas investment decisions, as mounting geopolitical tensions and currency fluctuations increase the risks of doing business abroad, a prominent Chinese entrepreneur has warned. “The current unrest in the Middle East, fluctuations of the US dollar and international complexities serve as a reminder for firms expanding abroad: we must go to locations that offer relative stability,” said Liu Yonghao, founder and chairman......

The escalating crisis around Iran is doing more than just shaking global energy markets. It is constricting the arteries of Asian growth. A massive share of the oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG) that powers Asian economies passes through the Strait of Hormuz. When tensions rise around this narrow waterway, economic shock waves travel quickly across the region, exposing a development model whose foundations remain dangerously outside Asia's strategic control. Japan and South Korea, both heavily......

Swire Properties reported stronger underlying earnings in 2025, as the Hong Kong developer stepped up asset disposals and expanded its mainland China retail portfolio, though weakness in the city's office market dragged the company into a headline loss. Underlying profit rose 27 per cent to HK$8.62 billion (US$1.1 billion), driven largely by gains from the disposal of noncore assets including the Brickell City Centre retail mall in Miami and several properties in Hong Kong, according to the......

China's OpenClaw craze has taken an ironic turn, with social media platforms now flooded with paid services offering to uninstall the artificial intelligence (AI) agent after users initially paid to have it installed. On Xianyu, the second-hand marketplace under Alibaba, the keyword “uninstall OpenClaw” was trending on Thursday, based on a search by the South China Morning Post. Records showed that a Shanghai-based seller named “mojito lime water” charged 299 yuan ($43.55) to uninstall the agent......

As innovations arise from the artificial intelligence, robotics and biotechnology sectors, holders of family capital from around the world will convene in Hong Kong to discuss such investment opportunities at the city's fourth annual Wealth for Good Summit on March 23 and 24. Secretary for Financial Services and the Treasury Christopher Hui Ching-yu said the summit would showcase Hong Kong's position as a premier hub for family capital seeking long-term growth and multigenerational......

Hong Kong's export credit insurer is keeping premiums low and expanding support for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), even as geopolitical tensions in the Middle East raise concerns about risks to global trade. Unlike the typical trade credit insurance model – where insurers raise premiums when geopolitical risks increase – the Hong Kong Export Credit Insurance Corporation (HKECIC) said it had continued offering concessions to exporters to help them weather uncertainty. “In the......

China's central bank has called for heightened cybersecurity awareness and caution in the use of artificial intelligence in the financial sector, adding to a chorus of warnings over security risks amid the nationwide buzz surrounding the OpenClaw AI agent. At its annual technology conference in Beijing on Wednesday, the People's Bank of China called for further efforts to “enhance the resilience of cybersecurity and data security”, according to a readout of the meeting posted on its website. The......

Sunshine 100 China Holdings, a mainland Chinese developer facing debts amid China's property sector downturn, said on Thursday that it plans to oppose a winding-up petition filed against it in Hong Kong. HTI Financial Solutions and Haitong International Financial Products filed the winding-up petition against the developer at the High Court of Hong Kong over an unpaid redemption sum of about US$205 million, including accrued interest, due on March 19, 2025, according to a Sunshine 100 filing......

China has issued public guidance on using OpenClaw, and reportedly restricted its use in government agencies, as regulators push back against surging use of the artificial intelligence (AI) agent. Best practices include minimising internet exposure and regularly checking for security updates, China's top software regulator said on Wednesday. The notice followed two earlier official warnings about OpenClaw, an autonomous AI agent used for tasks such as stock picking, sorting emails and creating......

HSBC and a joint venture led by Standard Chartered are expected to be among the first companies to obtain Hong Kong's stablecoin licences within two weeks, according to people familiar with the matter. The number of licences and timetable had yet to be finalised and remained subject to change, but sources said a possible date was March 24. The two banks declined to comment. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) last month revealed that a small number of stablecoin licences would be granted......

A wave of caution is sweeping through China's financial and state institutions over OpenClaw, the open-source artificial intelligence (AI) agent that has recently gone viral. Several brokerages, banks and government bodies have moved to restrict staff access. At one of China's leading brokerages, an employee, who asked not to be named, said the firm had issued an explicit risk warning earlier this week, banning OpenClaw from company computers. Staff who had already installed it were told to......

OpenClaw has sparked euphoria on mainland China's stock markets, defying the broader gloom stemming from Middle East hostilities, as investors chase companies compatible with the open-source artificial intelligence tool. OpenClaw's meteoric rise has lifted stocks of compatible companies, with Hangzhou Shunwang Technology, a provider of online entertainment networking platforms, soaring 22 per cent in Shenzhen over the past week. Talkweb Information System, a telecoms software developer also......

Hong Kong stocks fell on Thursday as the Middle East conflict showed no signs of ending and oil prices rose again. The Hang Seng Index traded 0.1 per cent lower at 25,848 as of 9.40am. The Hang Seng Tech Index added 0.1 per cent. On the mainland, the CSI 300 Index eased 0.2 per cent and the Shanghai Composite Index barely changed. Iraq announced the closure of oil ports after two tankers were attacked, outweighing the impact of a record release of emergency oil reserves by wealthy nations. Oil......

Hong Kong's anti-corruption agency, Independent Commission Against Corruption, has detained an employee of Chinese-backed brokerage Guotai Junan International Holdings, the company said in a filing to the Hong Kong stock exchange on Thursday morning. Guotai Junan International, a subsidiary of Guotai Junan Securities, did not identify the staff, but said that the person was not a member of the board. The company suspended the employee on Tuesday. The Hong Kong-based brokerage also said that the......

In late February, Hong Kong's Office of the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data co-signed, alongside 60 overseas organisations, a statement to bring attention to the rising misuse of deepfakes. With rapid technological developments, growing AI integration and lower barriers to access, swift action is needed to safeguard women and girls against growing forms of technology-facilitated violence. Technology-facilitated violence is not new; it has simply evolved. What began as pre-internet......

Overseas expansion and a commodity boom have put Chinese companies trading on the mainland in a position to beat their offshore-listed peers in earnings, cementing the outperformance of yuan-denominated stocks since the outbreak of Middle East hostility. The 300 largest mainland-traded companies may post average 2025 profit growth of 6.3 per cent during the coming earnings season, while the growth rate for the firms in the Hong Kong exchange's benchmark Hang Seng Index would be a mere 2 per......

A unit of China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) has issued guidelines on best practices and prohibitions for adopting and using OpenClaw, the popular artificial intelligence agent that continues to dominate the market. The advisory, developed in collaboration with AI agent providers, vulnerability platform operators and cybersecurity firms, aims to address risks in typical use cases of “lobster”, OpenClaw's mascot, according to a Wednesday statement from the MIIT-run......

Midea Group, the owner of industrial robot giant Kuka, is the latest Chinese company to pledge heavy investment in AI and robotics – another 60 billion yuan (US$8.7 billion) over the next three years – as traditional industries embrace futuristic technologies. The planned expenditure on research and development, with a focus on “AI, embodied intelligence and other cutting-edge areas”, matched its total spending over the past five years, the company announced in Shanghai on Tuesday. The strategic......

Eli Lilly has pledged an additional US$3 billion investment in China over the next decade to strengthen its local supply chain and manufacturing capabilities, deepening the footprint of foreign pharmaceutical giants in the world's second-largest healthcare market. The move would bring the total cumulative investment of Eli Lilly, the world's largest pharmaceutical company by market capitalisation, in China to nearly US$6 billion, according to a statement released on its WeChat account on......

China's spring hiring season is revealing a sharp surge in demand for artificial intelligence talent as companies speed up the deployment of related technologies, turning it into one of the country's hottest professional fields. The number of AI-related job postings in China in the first two months of the year grew about 12-fold year on year, far outpacing growth in other “new-economy” industries such as healthcare, renewable energy and semiconductors, People's Daily reported on Tuesday, citing......