04/09/2014 Asia Business Report

his parents last week. Now on BBC News all the latest

business news live from Singapore. Connecting the smartphone to a game

console. We bring you the latest technology from a trade show in

Berlin. Dependent on milk. How the rise and

fall of global dairy prices are impacting the New Zealand economy.

Thank you for joining us. Japan's Sony was one of the first technology

companies to release a Bluetooth enabled notification transmitting

watch back in 2006. These days, it is still trying to popularise the

idea and has just released its latest smartwatch at the technology

show in Berlin. It is the first device to run on the new Android

wearable operating system and will compete with devices from Samsung

among others. In an interview, the Sony chief executive has

acknowledged the limitations of the current generation of watches,

recognising they are not powerful enough to replace the smartphone.

From my perspective, I think that the user experience that will be

generally accepted is a combination of a wearable device together with

what I would call the mothership. Whether that is a smartphone or not

is a different story but I think that to try and incorporate

everything into a wearable device by itself, again, looking at battery

life, that is another limitation. Unless there are revolutionary

advancements in technology, you will have to have a larger device with a

larger battery that is going to do the bulk of the computing, the bulk

of the communication, perhaps. I think it will be a combination. And,

obviously, as technology moves on, we will be offloading a lot of the

music onto the smartwatch three so that you won't need the smartphone

when you go jogging. But still, the music is relayed. The library still

resides in the smartphone. Eventually, we will be able to

shrink a computer to something as small as your fingernail. It strikes

me that then, the smartwatch will be redundant because it will be bigger

than you need. I think that is an evolution we will see just as we saw

in an evolution from what we used to call feature phones. Feature phones

to smartphones and now combinations between smartphones and wearables.

And as technology moves on, we might go from wearables to something that

is beyond that. It is an evolutionary process we will see

over the years. Let's talk about the new PlayStation Remote Play. This is

a controller that you connect a phone to and you can stream a

PlayStation game to your screen. It must be a Sony phone, is that

correct? For the time being, it has to be an exterior smartphone. Are

there any plans to expand this to the Nexus smartphone? We want to

make this an experience exclusive to Sony smartphones. It is part of the

one Sony philosophy we have, where we are leveraging other businesses

to bring an exciting experience to the customers. At some point in the

future, we may look at expanding that, but we do not have any plans

for such an announcement right now. And for more information, you can

visit our website. Philips, Samsung and others have

been fined a total of more than $180 million by the European Commission

for fixing prices of chips used in smartphones. The electronic giants

were found guilty of colluding on prices, contracts and capacity

between 2003 and 2005. Phillips has rejected the charge. They have said

they will appeal. Meanwhile, a joint venture between Hitachi and

Mitsubishi avoided a fine for revealing the existence of the

cartel. Between stolen nude celebrity

pictures, payment fraud and hacker attacks, cybersecurity is something

that concerns an increasing number of people. Can security companies

learn anything from the spy agencies? One person who knows is

the former chief officer for the CIA. He now works in the private

sector and is in town for a cybersecurity conference. I asked

him earlier what the key would be to keeping things safe in the cyber

world. It is all about your data and you have to classify it into

different categories. Some of your data is absolutely vital to your

corporation or your government agency, whatever you happen to be.

That data has to be protected very differently to the rest of your

data. How safe and secure is the Cloud? It depends on how it is

implemented. There is not one Cloud provider that is any more secure

than another. The important thing is that the consumer of the Cloud,

whether it is a country, a bank, individual people or whatever, they

have to take measures to protect their individual data as they put it

in the cloud. `` Cloud. Encryption becomes vital and with encryption

comes key management. You have to have a robust key management system

and you have to make sure that you have the keys in your own

corporation, rather than giving the keys to the Cloud. What are your

concerns about cybersecurity going forward? It is a never ending issue.

It is not like you can do ten things It is not like you can do ten things

and be finished forever. There will always be people circumventing the

back stops that people put in place from a security standpoint.

Competing power increases daily, so very poor encryption algorithms get

broken easily. For individual users like you and me, what should we be

aware of? That there are people out there who want to steal your data

and who will do almost anything they can to be able to do that so they

can exploit your identity or your friends or use your purchasing power

and things like that. Fewer economies are as dependent on

milk, cheese and butter as New Zealand's and that could be bad news

because dairy prices fell 6% in August. In fact, they are now 40%

lower than they were at the same time last year. Global prices have

been falling since February and now sits near two year low levels.

Our reporter reports how this decline is impacting the New Zealand

economy. When dairy accounts for nearly one third of exports, spilt

milk might be cause for a few tears. New Zealand has roughly as many cows

as people and its exports nearly 90% of its dairy products. When prices

slump, it is bad news. If low prices persist, the money that the

country's dairy cooperative Fonterra returns to its members could be

lower and that takes money straight out of the economy. Russian

sanctions are partly to blame. They have begun to affect the global

supply and that has had a knock`on effect even on the far side of the

world. In particular, skimmed milk powder has dropped in price by more

than 25% since sanctions were announced. Even though beef and

aluminium prices partially offset the slump in dairy prices, the ANZ

Bank's commodity price index fell by 3.3% month on month in August.

Prices for New Zealand's exports now sit at a 17 month low.

Malaysia has a growing economy and is trying to foster an investor

friendly environment. The capital has to compete with business hubs

like Singapore. How is Singapore doing? The city's investment body

wants to attract 100 major multinational companies to set up

shop in the capital and they have met 40% of that target. Earlier, I

spoke with the chief executive of the investment body, who explained

more about the organisation. Attracting regional headquarters to

Kuala Lumpur is very important because it is at the heart of

economic activity in the region. When these multinational companies

invest in Kuala Lumpur and in other cities around the region, is it a

level playing field? Or are multinationals only allowed to open

businesses that will not compete directly with Malaysian

conglomerates? The multinationals are very good with engaging with the

whole ecosystem. They do partnerships with local companies as

they set up their regional headquarters. They do partnerships

with our universities, for example. They engage very well. And they take

advantage of our ecosystem as they set up their headquarters in Kuala

Lumpur. You have business finance, oil and gas companies setting up

their regional hubs in Malaysia. Any particular sectors or skill sets the

government is looking to bring in but has not had much success with?

We are moving up the value chain. These initiatives create more

high`value jobs, so we are constantly building the talent pool.

The engineering space, the technology sector, the finance

sector. We already have a large talent pool anyway, so this is a

constant initiative from our government to build on that. We have

10,000 graduates annually. Thank you. Let's have a look at the Asian

markets. Stocks slipped overnight. Thank you for investing more time

with us. Goodbye for now. This is BBC News, I'm Mike Embley.

The headlines: The family of the American journalist Steven Sotloff

have given their first public reaction since a video, appearing to

show his murder, was released by Islamic State militants. They said

Mr Sotloff was "no hero" ` just someone who wanted