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Category: Electronics

Retail News Asia is committed to providing both local and global retailers with the latest Electronics news throughout the Asian market. This on a daily base.

  • Apple India opening online store early next week

    Apple India opening online store early next week

    Apple India will open its online store in India on September 23, representing the tech giant’s first formal step into direct retailing in the world’s second-most populous country.

    In a statement, the US company said the online Apple Store would offer a full product range and ship nationwide along with finance and a level of customer support similar to that offered in physical Apple stores elsewhere in the world.

    “We’re proud to be expanding in India and want to do all we can to support our customers and their communities,” said Deirdre O’Brien, Apple’s senior vice president of Retail + People. “We know our users are relying on technology to stay connected, engage in learning, and tap into their creativity, and by bringing the Apple Store online to India, we are offering our customers the very best of Apple at this important time.”

    Besides selling products, the store will offer customers technical support and training in using and setting up Apple products, in either English or Hindi.

    The company said all online orders will be shipped via a contactless delivery process to preserve the health of staff during the Covid-19 pandemic.

    While Apple has been selling products through retail partners and distributors in India for more than 20 years, it has long wanted to launch a direct-to-consumer presence there. Until recently it was hamstrung by foreign investment laws in the state which require a minimum proportion of locally sourced components in products sold in overseas-owned retail networks. The company has steadily increased its manufacturing in India and now claims to support almost 900,000 jobs nationwide.

    The company continues to plan the opening of its first physical store in the country, most likely in Mumbai, with CEO Tim Cook promising in February it would open next year.

    Apple has an App Design and Development Accelerator in Bengaluru which supports thousands of local developers.

  • The Fitbit Sense will match the Apple Watch’s ECG capabilities next month

    The Fitbit Sense will match the Apple Watch’s ECG capabilities next month

    While its name might be synonymous with low-cost fitness trackers for many consumers around the world, Fitbit has faced quite the uphill battle trying to gain a foothold in the fast-growing smartwatch market over the last few years.

    Although the company’s rookie Apple Watch-rivaling effort was released all the way back in 2017 (to tepid reviews and overall indifference even from its core fanbase), followed by the slightly better-received Versa the next year, Fitbit still failed to make the industry’s top five in terms of revenue for H1 2020, ranking behind everyone from Apple to Garmin, Huawei, Samsung, and even Imoo and Amazfit.

    As you can imagine, that’s a very poor result for a 2007-founded outfit with Fitbit’s brand recognition, but instead of waiting for Google to arrive on a white horse and miraculously right the ship, the US-based company stepped things up to unveil its “most advanced health smartwatch” last month.

    Much like 2019’s Samsung Galaxy Watch Active 2, the Fitbit Sense went official with a dormant ECG monitor. This is the same exact feature that made its debut on the Apple Watch Series 4 two years ago, saving countless lives between then and now in conjunction with fall detection capabilities and Cupertino’s all-around impressive heart rate sensor.

    While Fitbit needed a lot of time to catch up to the heavyweight champion of the wearable device world, it looks like the company will be able to miraculously beat Samsung to the commercial ECG punch. That’s because the potentially life-saving technology has already received clearance from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ahead of public October 2020 availability on the recently announced Sense.

    The aptly named Fitbit ECG App will be enabled stateside sometime next month, as well as in a host of European countries including Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. That’s right, Fitbit pulled a double, obtaining both FDA approval and Conformité Européenne (CE) marking in the European Union.

    Last but certainly not least, early Fitbit Sense adopters in Hong Kong and India are also slated to get access to the Apple-matching ECG app in October. That makes for a pretty remarkable list of supported countries straight off the bat, mind you, but in case you’re wondering, Apple’s list is unsurprisingly even longer.

    Meanwhile, Galaxy Watch Active 2 and Galaxy Watch 3 owners can still measure their ECG exclusively in South Korea, although for what it’s worth, Samsung has at least made a big step recently towards finally spreading the love to the US at some point by the end of the year. This time for real.

    In a nutshell, this is what separates the serious health-tracking smartwatches from the casual fashion-centric wearable devices. As explained by Fitbit, the main purpose is to detect atrial fibrillation (AFib), a condition that affects more than 33.5 million people (!!!) globally, increasing the risk of complications like stroke.

    A large chunk of those suffering from AFib is unlikely to become aware of their problem until it’s too late to keep it in check, which is where the Apple Watch lineup and now the Fitbit Sense comes in, assessing a user’s heart rhythm for early signs of atrial fibrillation so you can receive the necessary medical attention to live a long and normal life.

    Obviously, the ECG monitor built into a $330 commercial device also featuring a bunch of other sensors may not prove as reliable as a medical-grade system typically found in a hospital, but Fitbit claims the multi-site clinical trial is conducted as part of the submission process to regulatory agencies yielded a stellar 98.7 percent sensitivity score and a perfect 100 percent specificity rating.

    In other words, you should absolutely consider the Fitbit Sense as an alternative to the Apple Watch Series 5 or the soon-to-be-released Series 6 if you have heart problems, trouble sleeping, or even if you need help managing day-to-day stress. Keep in mind that the Android and iOS-compatible smartwatch is still up for pre-order ahead of an actual September 25 release. And no, we’re afraid Amazon’s early discount is no longer available.

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  • Tencent to Launch Regional Hub in Singapore

    Tencent to Launch Regional Hub in Singapore

    The Chinese technology conglomerate is pushing ahead with global expansion plans, despite recent app bans in India and the United States. Tencent is planning to open a new office in Singapore, which will be its regional hub for Southeast Asia, where it also has offices in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand, the company said in a statement on Tuesday.

    The Singapore office will also enable us to capture potential from the rapid pace of digitization and meet the demand for internet-based services and solutions in Singapore, Tencent said in a statement. Tencent’s cloud computing arm, which seeks to tap into the demand for remote IT services for home-based workers, as well as its financial cloud platform that provides digital banking services to small and medium enterprises, have been growing in the region amid the coronavirus pandemic.

    The company had been discussing Singapore as a potential regional hub and geopolitical tensions accelerated its plans, according to a Bloomberg report. The company is already hiring for software engineers, data analysts, business development, and compliance roles in the city-state, according to its careers portal.

    Singapore, with its business-friendly policies, is benefitting from the growing hostility towards Chinese tech firms in the U.S. and other markets. Chinese tech start-up ByteDance, the owner of video-sharing app TikTok, are among those which are shoring up its presence in the country, where it is looking to spend several billion dollars and add hundreds of jobs here over the next three years.

    U.S. President Donald Trump has banned U.S. entities from dealing with Tencent’s super-app WeChat from September 20, while the company’s hit games PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) Mobile and Arena of Valor are banned in India.

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  • NVIDIA rumored to pay $40 billion for ARM Holdings

    NVIDIA rumored to pay $40 billion for ARM Holdings

    Back in July, we told you that Japan’s SoftBank was talking to American GPU manufacturer NVIDIA about selling it ARM Holdings. The latter’s main business is the design of CPU cores such as the 64 bit Cortex-A78 CPU core. Both sides are closing in on a deal that would be valued at over $40 billion. The deal would give SoftBank a multi-billion dollar profit after it purchased the company for $32 billion. NVIDIA is the world’s third-largest GPU supplier and ARM is the third-largest in the world thanks to its Mali line of graphic chips.

    The Journal report noted that ARM and NVIDIA have been talking on an exclusive basis over the last few weeks and a deal could be announced as soon as early next week. NVIDIA’s shares have soared over 100% this year thanks to heavy demand for its GPUs which are used in video games, cloud computing, and in other devices that have taken off thanks to the coronavirus. If a deal can be agreed to not only would it be one of the biggest transactions of the year, it could also be the largest deal of all time involving the purchase of a semiconductor company.

    However, as with most tech-related deals these days, the purchase of ARM by NVIDIA could set off antitrust alerts. Regulatory agencies could put such a deal under intense scrutiny and ARM customers like Samsung and Apple could try and put the kibosh on the transaction. If the merger closes, NVIDIA would control the pricing on ARM’s CPU cores and Adreno GPU chips along with the pricing of the Mali GPU line.

    According to the Journal, SoftBank has been working with a small team on the final terms of the ARM deal. The team includes ARM CEO Simon Segars and Chief Financial Officer Yoshimitsu Goto.

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  • Apple’s patent application could fix a major problem with Siri

    Apple’s patent application could fix a major problem with Siri

    Some Apple iPhone users find themselves struggling with Siri. Besides some of the usual things that we’ve brought up in the past, such as Siri’s inability to understand the questions we’ve asked her, or the incorrect answers that she comes up with (especially when they are related to an inquiry about Apple devices-a category that she should know about), Siri also has a habit of activating accidentally. Last year, we told you that these accidental activations were more likely to occur on the Apple Watch and the HomePod smart speaker.

    According to a new patent application that Apple filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the company is working on technology that will keep accidental Siri activations to a minimum. The patent application, titled “Attention Aware Virtual Assistant Dismissal,” uses criteria to determine how interested you are in receiving a response from the digital assistant. To do this, Siri could use cameras to check your gaze when calling out for the digital assistant.

    For example, if you’re looking exactly at your iPhone when calling out for Siri, the iPhone will realize that you did indeed mean to activate the digital assistant by using the “Hey Siri” hotword. At the same time, it increases the odds that you did mean to say “Hey Siri” and not “Tom and Jerry,” or “Very Hairy.” Some claim that the sound of a zipper opening causes Siri to accidentally open, but we’re not sure that the technology expressed in the patent application can determine the motive of a zipper.

    Besides staring at the phone when activating Siri, the length of the stare also plays a part in determining whether an iPhone user really wants help from Siri. For example, let’s say that you’re staring at your phone, execute the “Hey Siri” hotword, and then get distracted by someone before you give Siri a question or task to do. If the iPhone can determine that your intention was indeed to give your digital assistant a task, Siri could be told by the system not to deactivate so that you can give the assistant the task you want her to handle.

    Besides being annoying, accidental Siri activations can also negatively affect the battery running an iPhone. Siri will be more efficient if it deactivates when the user is not engaged with it, if it doesn’t deactivate while being used, or if a task has to be repeated because Siri was accidentally deactivated. Apple notes that by using Siri more quickly and efficiently, power usage is reduced and battery life is improved.

    Apple expressed this in the patent by saying, “Determining, based on data obtained using one or more sensors of the electronic device, whether one or more criteria representing expressed user disinterest are satisfied (and/or whether one or more criteria representing expressed user engagement are satisfied) allows determination of whether a user is engaged with a virtual assistant session. Knowing whether a user is engaged allows intelligent decision making about whether to deactivate the virtual assistant session.

    For example, if the user is not engaged, a device can deactivate the virtual assistant session to save battery and processing power. As another example, if the user is engaged, the device can forgo deactivating the virtual assistant session so the user can continue interacting with the virtual assistant session (and so the virtual assistant session does not deactivate while the user is still interacting with it). In this manner, the user-device interface is made more efficient which additionally, reduces power usage and improves the battery life of the device by enabling the user to use the device more quickly and efficiently.”

    Some will say that Siri has many more issues to work on. In iOS 14, Siri will take up much less of the screen when employed by a user and the assistant will be able to send voice messages. If the patent is approved, at least one annoying and inefficient tendency of Safari could be ended.

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  • HCMC requests tax incentives for Samsung subsidiary

    HCMC requests tax incentives for Samsung subsidiary

    HCMC has proposed that a subsidiary of Samsung be defined as an export processing enterprise to enjoy zero import and export duties.

    The city said in a recent proposal to Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc that switching the label of TV screen producer Samsung Electronics HCMC CE Complex (SEHC) from a manufacturing enterprise to an export processing one will fulfill the city’s commitment to creating a favorable investment environment for the South Korean conglomerate.

    This will place Vietnam as an export base for Samsung to the global market and in turn benefit local suppliers to the South Korean giant, it said.

    Vietnam allows export processing enterprises to enjoy zero import and export duties and other tax incentives, but a company needs to have 90 percent of its revenue coming from exports to be able to achieve this status.

    SEHC forecasts its revenue from exports to reach $4.4 billion this year out of the total $4.9 billion, a ratio of 90 percent.

    In 2018, the management board of the Saigon Hi-Tech Park in District 9, where SEHC is based, had made the same proposal. However, this was denied by the Ministry of Finance because the export revenue ratio of SEHC between January 2016 and June 2018 was 75 percent.

    Another reason for the rejection was that SEHC operated in a hi-tech industrial park, not an export processing zone or an industrial or economic zone.

    SEHC, which began operations in June 2016, produces and assembles smart TVs and LED screens.

    Samsung is a major foreign direct investment company in Vietnam. About half of its smartphones are produced in the country, where it has invested over $17 billion so far. Its first plant in the country was built in 2008.

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  • Vietnam electronics tycoon sets up new investment group

    Vietnam electronics tycoon sets up new investment group

    Pham Van Tam, the founder of electronics firm Asanzo, has set up the Winsan Group, a $43 million enterprise to invest in electronics, dental, and food ventures.

    Tam recently announced a new role as chairman of the Winsan Group Investment Joint Stock Company, which will function as a financial investment company for small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

    Winsan is like a ‘power pump’ for businesses that have great potential for scaling but lack financial resources and management experience, he said.

    Unlike the model launched by Asanzo last year with a focus on electronics and hardware startups, Winsan expands the portfolio to other areas including dentistry, consumables, and food and beverages.

    In addition to funding, the group will also support SMEs to recruit talented employees and leading experts for senior positions, facilitating breakthroughs and reducing the failure rate in a competitive market.

    Tam said that Winsan was a step towards expanding the ecosystem out of household electronics. The name Winsan is inspired by the term win-win concept in modern business, hoping to bring victory for both sides when cooperating, he explained.

    The company’s initial capital is estimated at VND1 trillion ($43 million), 70 percent of which will be invested in technology – electronics businesses.

    In the first phase, we will select SMEs with products serving the majority of average consumers, low-income employees. This tight criterion will help optimize capital investments, Tam said.

    Industrial real estate and logistics are also important investment portfolios that Winsan will promote in the near future, he added.

    E-commerce presents great opportunities amid the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, creating added momentum for industrial real estate and logistics to meet the need to lease factories and warehouses. The shift by multinationals to produce in Vietnam is another positive sign, he said.

    The Asanzo founder said that he’d been covering the investment group model for about three years as he witnessed the increase in business efficiency when empowering young directors to manage production.

    Many of these people are trained abroad in the corporate governance of developed industries with the capacity to formulate medium and long-term strategies. In addition to capable personnel, market data analysis helps accurately forecast business situations, reduce inventory lines, and cut costs while ensuring a proactive supply of goods corresponding to market demand.

    At first traditional distributors complained about challenging import regulations when applying new quality and processes. But after a while, they found that these adjustments bring positive effects. The goods are shipped quickly and meet customers’ taste, creating satisfaction on both sides, Tam said.

    Tam also appreciated young talents when interacting with them through start-up projects, like the Startup Viet competition organized by VnExpress, which urged him to establish this investment model instead of concentrating on just one enterprise.

    Tam also aims to draw in foreign partners who have worked with Asanzo for several years, thereby creating a large-scale investment fund, accessing and supporting a variety of business models.

    With a strong capital base, we will enhance the search for suitable products with local elements, understanding local consumers, then create new brands that make a real mark on the market.

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  • Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 2 5G is proving even more popular than expected

    Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 2 5G is proving even more popular than expected

    Priced at $2,000 in the US, the 5G-enabled Galaxy Z Fold 2 is not what we’d call widely accessible to the masses. But even though 2020 has been a tough year for high-end, high-priced smartphones in general and Samsung flagships in particular, this foldable beaut is sure shaping up to be a smash hit, at least by early foldable market standards.

    Forecasted ahead of its official announcement to rack up around 500,000 unit sales by the end of 2020 and tipped to cross 800,000 units manufactured in that same timeframe just last week, the Galaxy Z Fold 2 5G is today estimated to reach an “initial volume” of 10,000 copies or so in South Korea.

    That may not sound like an impressive number by itself, not to mention when you compare it to the other two figures above, but apparently, it’s triple the initial regional volume of the original Galaxy Fold last year. It’s also important to keep in mind that while Samsung cares a lot about its domestic market, this is only one of many major countries where the Galaxy Z Fold 2 5G could sell like hotcakes compared to its predecessor.

    In other markets, starting with the US, show a similarly “positive reaction” as the one reported in the tech giant’s homeland, the foldable device may well exceed 500,000 or even 800,000 shipments this year. More importantly, Samsung is proving by allotting three times as many second-gen Z Folds than OG Galaxy Folds to major South Korean carriers and independent stores that it can produce a significantly higher number of foldable smartphones during these challenging times for the mobile industry, contrary to rampant speculation from a few months back.

    At least for now, there are no reasons to expect substantial delays or particularly long shipping times for early adopters. That is, as long as you’re not looking to buy the luxury Thom Browne Edition.

    Believe it or not, around 230,000 people in Samsung’s homeland applied for a bank-breaking purchase in just two days, which means a lot of potential buyers will end up feeling terribly disappointed at missing their chance to spend the rough equivalent of $3,330 on, well, a phone.

    There are only 5,000 copies of this thing prepared to be distributed worldwide, mind you, including a measly 1,000 in South Korea. The Galaxy Z Fold 2 Thom Browne Edition is not up for grabs stateside yet, but as far as the standard version is concerned, you still have until September 18 to pre-order your copy in a Mystic Black or Mystic Bronze color.

  • Apple Singapore’s floating store opens this week

    Apple Singapore’s floating store opens this week

    Apple’s most ambitious store project yet will open its doors to the public this Thursday, a round structure that appears to float on Singapore’s harbor.

    The spherical shaped store features an all-glass dome structure above the waterline, with 114 panes of glass, affording 360-degree panoramic views of the city.

    Inspired by the Pantheon in Rome, an oculus is built at the apex of the dome, letting a ray of light flood the interior. Custom baffles, which are uniquely shaped, helps counter sun angles and create a nighttime lighting effect, according to Apple.

    Indoor trees are placed in a circular line, “providing additional shading and soft shadows through the foliage”.

    “We couldn’t be more excited to open the breathtaking Apple Marina Bay Sands in Singapore, building on our commitment to this special place that began more than 40 years ago,” said Deirdre O’Brien, senior VP of Retail + People at Apple.

    “Our passionate and talented team is ready to welcome this community to our new store and deliver the care and support that our customers around the world love.”

    Apple Marina Bay Sands houses The Forum meeting pace and a giant video wall, where Today at Apple sessions featuring Singapore’s artists and creators will be held. Apple’s first underground ‘Boardroom’ located on the lower level beneath the waterline is where entrepreneurs and developers can receive training and advice from the Apple team.

    On the opening date, store capacity will be limited and access will be by appointment only. Temperature checks will be taken, masks required and social distancing enforced.

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  • Japan Display to sell LCD factory to Sharp and use the cash to pay back Apple

    Japan Display to sell LCD factory to Sharp and use the cash to pay back Apple

    Back in 2014-2015, Japan Display (JDI) was considered to be Apple’s major smartphone display supplier. At that time, the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus were bringing larger-sized LCD screens to iPhone users. The original 3.5-inch display found on the first iPhone models rose to 4-inches with the iPhone 5 and to 4.7-inches on the iPhone 6. The iPhone 6 Plus carries a screen size of 5.5-inches and those sizes remained the same until 2017’s iPhone X weighed in with a 5.8-inch OLED screen.

    The iPhone X was the beginning of the end of Japan Display’s importance to the iPhone since the supplier was late to embrace OLED. JDI borrowed $1.5 billion from Apple to build a new LCD plant. With smartphone manufacturers-including Apple-turning away from LCD, JDI’s new factory was running at only 50% of capacity. Friday Japan Display announced that it will sell a smartphone display factory and the land it sits on to Sharp for 41.2 billion yen (the equivalent of $386 million). The Hakusan LCD factory along with equipment that will be sold to a customer believed to be Apple, will bring Japan Display $668 million while at the same time cutting excess capacity that has negatively impacted its earnings. This specific factory has been idle since 2019.

    The facility was supposed to have been sold by the end of this past March but the global pandemic caused the plans to change. When the factory was built, Apple covered most of the 170 billion yen cost ($1.61 billion USD) of the facility. Production started in late 2016 with up to seven million smartphone panels manufactured each month. As time went on, the number of panels churned out by the factory declined on a monthly basis. Japan Display will use the funds it receives from the sale of the plant to pay back Apple for the prepayment it made toward the facility.

    Sharp, which is owned by iPhone assembler Foxconn, will rent the necessary equipment from Apple that will allow it to produce LCD displays for older iPhone models. Sharp also expects to use the facility for developing and producing the next generation of displays including microLED screens which use millions of tiny light-emitting-diodes to produce a sharp display (no pun intended). Sharp does plan to spin-off its LCD panel business in October.

    Japan Display has lost money in 11 consecutive quarters and the company does produce the AMOLED displays that grace the Apple Watch.

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  • Apple to opens online sales in India

    Apple to opens online sales in India

    Tech giant Apple will launch an e-commerce store in India next month, according to a report by Bloomberg News.

    The firm will be timing its launch to begin trading in time for India’s busiest spending season, the Diwali festival. It follows CEO Tim Cook’s statement several months ago that Apple will start retailing within the territory next year.

    The firm’s smartphones are currently retailed via third parties within India, including existing online channels under Amazon and Walmart-owned Flipkart.

    Roughly a third of India’s 1 billion wireless subscribers do not use smartphones, representing a huge potential market for industry players in a region offering low pay rates to workers in manufacturing.

    A raft of Apple products are already being produced in southern India.

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  • Samsung phone sales down

    Samsung phone sales down

    Samsung Electronics remained the top smartphone vendor in the second quarter of the year despite suffering a sharp decline in sales.

    Samsung sold 54.75 million smartphones in the April-June period to take an 18.6-per-cent market share, according to market researcher Gartner.

    Its second-quarter sales suffered a 27.1-per-cent year-on-year decline, the largest drop among the top five smartphone brands, Gartner added.

    “The Covid-19 pandemic continued to negatively affect Samsung’s performance in the second quarter of 2020,” said Anshul Gupta, senior research director at Gartner. “Demand for its flagship S Series smartphones did little to revive its smartphone sales globally.”

    China’s Huawei Technologies came a close second with an 18.4-per-cent market share after it sold 54.12 million smartphones in the second quarter, down 6.8 percent from a year ago.

    “Huawei’s performance in China helped it avoid a worse quarterly performance,” Gartner said.

    US tech titan Apple was third with a 13-per-cent market share after it sold 38 million iPhones in the second quarter, down 0.4 percent from a year earlier.

    Chinese brands Xiaomi and Oppo took the fourth and fifth spots in the global smartphone sales rankings, respectively, Gartner said.

    The global smartphone sales in the second quarter dropped 20.4 percent year-on-year to 295 million units, according to Gartner, as the Covid-19 pandemic continued to undermine the mobile phone industry.

  • Xiaomi Hires From Credit Suisse for CFO Role

    Xiaomi Hires From Credit Suisse for CFO Role

    The banker replaces Chew Show Zi, who will become president of Xiaomi’s international operations. Chinese consumer electronics company Xiaomi has hired Alain Lam as its new chief financial officer, according to people familiar with the matter.

    Lam was previously the head of technology for Credit Suisse’s investment banking and capital markets group in Asia Pacific. He has over two decades of experience at Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, with stints in New York, London, Silicon Valley, and Hong Kong. He worked on more than 140 transactions with an aggregate value of more than $60 billion, including the public listings of Alibaba Group, Google, and Pinduoduo.

    With his appointment, Xiaomi is expected to create new revenue streams from companies in its vast ecosystem and portfolio of startups.

    Founded in 2010, Xiaomi is currently the world’s fourth-largest smartphone brand, and has an established consumer IoT platform, with products ranging from smart air filters to rice cookers.

    Xiaomi has recently been growing its consumer finance unit to compete with other Chinese technology players that have entered the space. Its financial product portfolio includes consumer loans, supply chain finance, fintech, third-party payments, online insurance, and digital banking. Earlier this year, Chinese regulators gave the firm the green light to establish a consumer finance company in Chongqing, from where it is expected to roll out services across the country.

    The company has also been eyeing fintech markets abroad: in December, the smart-device maker also launched consumer lending services in India, currently, it’s the biggest market outside China. The same month, it also announced that it partnered with AMTD Group, SP Group and Funding Societies to apply for a digital wholesale banking license in Singapore. In April, Airstar – the virtual bank it runs with AMTD – rolled out pilot operations in Hong Kong.

    According to the source who leaked the news, Credit Suisse named Allan Chu as a replacement for Lam. An internal note said he will report to Zeth Hung and Edwin Low, co-heads of Credit Suisse’s investment banking and capital markets group in Asia Pacific.

    Chu is a managing director in Credit Suisse’s APAC Investment Banking & Capital Markets Department and the co-head of Corporate Finance, Greater China, responsible for originating and executing corporate finance transactions in the Greater China region.

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  • Anonymous sources say that more U.S. Apple Stores will reopen this month

    Anonymous sources say that more U.S. Apple Stores will reopen this month

    Besides delaying the release of the 5G Apple iPhone 12 family, COVID-19 has also interfered with Apple’s retail stores. Back in January, Apple started closing retail locations in China.  By the following month, all 42 Apple Stores in the country were closed only to reopen a month later. But as the virus made it’s way west, Apple shut all of its stores outside of China by the middle of March. Quite optimistically, the tech giant at first hoped to reopen them on March 27th. But it wasn’t until May that Apple started turning the lights back on inside its U.S. retail locations.

    But this is 2020 so of course, that wasn’t the end of the story. As May was coming to a close, protesters looted several state-side Apple Stores following the police-related death of George Floyd. What the looters didn’t know was those iPhone units snatched from an Apple Store won’t work. One store in Minneapolis was looted, boarded up, looted again, and boarded up again. Another store in Portland had tall windows smashed on all sides just two days after reopening from the COVID-19 shutdown. At that point, of the 271 U.S. Apple Stores, 140 had reopened.

    Apple plans on reopening a small number of U.S. Apple Stores late this month. These locations had closed due to the uptrend of coronavirus cases in certain markets. People with knowledge of the situation say that for the immediate future, the stores will operate on an appointment-only basis. The sources say that employees have been informed by Apple of its plans; the company says that the stores will each follow local guidelines to determine the maximum number of shoppers allowed inside at one time and the social distancing required. During the peak of the pandemic with most U.S. stores shuttered, some Apple Store employees ended up handling technical support calls from home while others continued to get paid while waiting around for the store they worked at to reopen.

    Apple would surely like to have most of its retail store infrastructure at full strength as it prepares to introduce some new devices for the fall including the first 5G iPhone models, a new tablet, and the next Apple Watch.