1 For ninth straight year, Singapore ‘best place to
do business’ (BBC) Singapore has been ranked the best country to do business
for a ninth consecutive year, according to an annual survey by the World Bank. New
Zealand came second and Hong Kong third in the lender's "Doing
Business" report which rates 189 nations by the ease in which firms can
operate there.
The UK moved up one position to eighth while the US
stayed at number seven. Eritrea was at the bottom of the table, along with
Libya, the Central African Republic and South Sudan. The World Bank ranking
uses metrics such as the time taken to launch and close a business, gain
construction permits and pay taxes in a country's largest business city.
The survey, which was first published in 2004, was
expanded this year to include the second-largest business city in countries
that have more than 100 million people. There were 11 countries that were
affected by this change, including China, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh and
Pakistan. China advanced three places to 90th while Japan fell two spots to
29th.
2 Terminal decline for UK superstores (Joanna
Blythman in The Guardian) The supermarket sector is in meltdown. An
overstatement? Hardly. In the cool-headed assessment of the Grocer magazine,
the most authoritative voice on UK food retail, “consumers are abandoning
supermarkets in their droves”. Tesco, once the darling of the stock market, the
government’s pet performing British company, is in the most acute distress.
From January to June this year, its profits crashed by 92%.
Morrisons is also in a bad way – its pre-tax profit
for the six months to August was halved.
Sainsbury’s share price has dropped.
Even the supposedly trend-bucking Waitrose cannot be complacent: its profits
for the first half of this year slumped by 9.4%. Overall, sales at the “big four”
supermarkets – Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons – have been stagnant, or
in decline, since last May, according to new figures from the Office for
National Statistics. Rating agency Moody’s predicts that their profit margins
and sales will shrink further.
Two German discount chains, Aldi and Lidl, acted as
the immediate nemesis of the fat, smug, greedy status quo of British food
retail. They dealt a deadly blow to our familiar chains by exposing just how
expensive they really are. Before the discounters appeared, most British
consumers swallowed the attractive proposition that UK supermarkets offer
unbeatable value for money.
Supersize supermarket formats, “extra”-type stores
are now written off by analysts as white elephants, an over-enthusiastic last
century blunder. Traditional markets, small shops, farmers markets, box
schemes, bread clubs, food co-ops and online enterprises are all holding their
own or doing better than before. The alternatives to supermarkets not only look
more attractive, but increasingly shrewd and practical.
Britain’s longstanding exclusive relationship with
the supermarkets is in terminal decline as more people conclude that they have
had quite enough of devoting a morning to driving to a soul-crushing store,
buying the same things and paying ever more for them each week. This is no mere
passing argument, but an irretrievable relationship breakdown, one built on
slow-burning resentment, from which there is no way back.
3 China property loans fall 23% in Q3 (Straits
Times) Banks' lending to China's property sector fell 23.3 per cent in the
third quarter from the previous three months, Reuters calculations from central
bank data have showed, another sign of cooling momentum in the housing market.
Chinese banks lent 570 billion yuan to home buyers
and property developers between July and September this year, easing from the
second quarter's 743 billion yuan and down 5 per cent from a year ago. Reduced
demand for property loans reflects sluggish sales as developers struggled with
high inventories and banks became more cautious about lending to developers and
investors.
For the first nine months, total property loans
issued hit 2.1 trillion yuan, up 213 billion yuan from a year ago, the central
bank said. Outstanding mortgages by the end of September were up 17.5 per cent
from a year ago, but down a shade from end June's 18.4 per cent rise, it said.
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