24/11/2017 Asia Business Report

The Institute for Fiscal Studies has

been analysing Wednesday's budget

Now on BBC News all the latest

business news live from Singapore.

To all shoppers out there, it is

Black Friday, marking the official

start of the Christmas shopping

season in America. First there was

Sony, then Yahoo and now the latest

is a Uber, our company is doing

enough to protect themselves against

cyber hackers? Good morning, Asia,

hello, world. It's a Friday, the

weekend right around the corner,

glad you could join us for this

edition of Asia Business Report, I'm

Rico Hizon. It's going to be hard to

compete with the $25 billion Chinese

consumers spent on Singles Day on

the 11th of November but after

Thanksgiving Thursday, Black Friday

and Cyber Monday marks the start of

the US Christmas shopping season. In

America alone 164 million shoppers

are expected to go nation bending

spree this weekend, that's over half

of the US population -- to go on a

spending spree. In the UK shoppers

are expected to spend over 13

billion US dollars over the next

week and you can bet retailers are

doing whatever they can to keep the

cash register is going.

Samira Hussain reports from New York

on what this means for retailers

worldwide -- cash register is. --

registers.

It's 7am and workers have already

been here for a while, sorting box

after box after box. This is the

beginning of the busiest time of

year for shipping companies like

FedEx as the holiday shopping season

kicks off.

You probably see more

people in the stores on Black

Friday, but come Cyber Monday, Green

Monday and the Monday going into

Christmas, heavy online shipping

because they're being driven to shop

more online.

Everything that's happening here is

really great news for the US economy

given it depends so heavily on

consumer spending. But there is a

bit of a downside. The impact it's

actually having on bricks and mortar

stores. Scoring a deal used to mean

wading through a mass of crowds, but

as rents go up and people prefer

online, retailers have been closing

their doors, setting up a battle

between E commerce and physical

stores. However, there may be a

truce on the horizon.

In almost

every company today, every retail

and every brand has incorporated a

digital aspect to their physical

business and that combination

together is more powerful.

The

retail landscape in America is in a

period of transition, obvious at

this FedEx distribution centre,

e-commerce is it to stay but what is

changing is companies are no longer

choosing a side in the battle for

consumers. Having a combination of

both a physical store and an online

presence is much more powerful.

Samira Hussain, BBC News, New York.

Are you having trouble keeping up on

where your muggy is going?

Especially as the holiday season

approaches. A British start-up has

developed a budgeting app that uses

artificial intelligence -- Mo'Nique.

The idea started when the young

founder was looking to ways to help

himself stay out of debt -- money.

It was never meant to be a business

to start with until I wanted to know

where my money was going. Having a

tool that would tell me when I was

running out of money, that would

tell me when I was overspending on

certain things was incredibly

useful. It change my behaviour and

how I spend my money, they showed me

to friends and they loved it, it

really resonated with people and

this was obviously a problem people

needed to solve. Can I get a flat

white please? Thank you. Cleo is a

digital assistant and you connect

your bank accounts and it helps you

manage your money. You connect via

Facebook messenger and you would

text her like you would text a

friend, you can ask her questions,

how much am I spending on Uber,

groceries, have I got the best

credit card rate, she will help you

budget and you can send it to

friends and she can save money

automatically for you.

I've just come to my favourite

coffee shop and I've got a coffee,

I'm going to ask Cleo how much I've

spent on coffee this month. Cleo's

told me I'd spent £500 at Shoreditch

Grind, £42 in the last month. I'm

going to check now what that means

for my balance this month. It's

looking OK, it's looking relatively

healthy.

She connects your online banking, so

she only has access to the

transaction date, she's not moving

money backwards and forwards. It's

encrypted but she's scanning your

transactions and turning it into

useful actionable information.

The future of banking is within

software companies. It's not going

to be your traditional banks. It's

who owns the data and who owns the

experience. It's who you trust the

most to take financial products

from.

Artificial intelligence. In other

business news, shares in mature this

EU Root materials lower in afternoon

trade this hour after its business

business units falsified data --

shares in Mitsubishi Materials. In

China the stock markets are known

for their wild ups and downs, but

Thursday wasn't a good day with the

blue-chip index seeing its biggest

one-day drop in a year and a half so

how has it open this morning? For

more I'm joined by Monica Miller.

Are we seeing some volatility in

opening trade?

Right now it's about

15% down but yesterday it took a

nosedive, it went down 3%. This

impacts the people that are actually

purchasing, these are the regular

customers, not institutions, that

were making these trades yesterday

and this is what is pumping money

into the mainland. At this point it

actually impacted bond yields as

well, the interest they pay, and it

made investors rather skittish. What

this is caused by is a dealer

bridging that President Xi Jingping

says he wants to cut down on their

loans and debt -- and the

leveraging. It's sending ripples

through the mainland and Hong Kong.

The market has been up all year and

of course Wall Street closed

overnight due to the Thanksgiving

holiday. Thanks for that. Tomorrow

marks three years since the infamous

cyber attack on Sony Pictures when

alleged North Korean hackers exposed

embarrassing e-mails and stole five

unreleased feature films. Earlier

this week we learned Uber was hacked

and the company paid a ransom to the

cyber attackers, and the list goes

on. Some of the more notorious hacks

include linked in all the way back

in 2012, which affected 170 million

users. We had Yahoo in 2013,

initially it was thought 1 billion

accounts were affected but later it

revised that figure to 3 billion.

What can be done? I put that

question to Matt from CNS.

The top

job for the government is they have

to keep up with the technology. We

are seeing governments adapt. --

tough job. In Europe governments

introduced a new law that comes into

effect next year called GDP are,

general data protection regulation,

that is a new high in terms of the

standards that imposes on companies

to protect data and breaches of that

will carry a fine of 4% of global

turnover. -- GDPR. For some of these

huge companies that save billions of

dollars figure potentially.

Have you

ever wondered how a smart phone is

made? The BBC's Click got exclusive

access to a factory owned by one

plus in Shenzhen. -- OnePlus.

Being in Shenzhen we have access to

the entire ecosystem, all the

suppliers are here, we can have a

new idea on Tuesday and see a new

prototype on Thursday for a new

design.

Being a brand-new company, not

making such a complicated product as

a smart phone and being based in

there, we didn't release have the

opportunity to test the product in

all the countries where we sold it.

Adding to that, we didn't know how

many phones to make. If you end up

having to many phones in your

warehouse that you can't sell, it's

over.

Thanks for