29/01/2018 Asia Business Report

with causing death by dangerous

driving after a crash that killed

three teenagers in West London.

Now on BBC News, all the latest

business news live from Singapore.

The chief Janet Yellen's swansong as

she chairs the last meeting this

week. What can we expect on US

interest rates? And young tech

entrepreneurs in Taipei are ditching

the traditional culture of playing

it safe. Welcome to Asia Business

Report, I'm Sharanjit Leyl. Now, it

is the key week for the Federal

Reserve. Janet Yellen will chair the

last meeting of the Federal open

market committee, or the FOMC,

before handing over the reins to

Jerome Powell, and the two day

meeting will end on Wednesday where

it is expected to keep rates

unchanged. Other items on the

calendar this week include the

United States and South Korea

entering into their second round of

talks to try to salvage their

troubled bilateral trade agreement.

That also happens on Wednesday. And

on Thursday we will see the Titans

of the tech world, the likes of

Alibaba, Alphabet, and Amazon,

posting their earnings that day. I

spoke earlier to the chief

investment officer for the

Asia-Pacific at Deutsche bank.

We

don't really think there will be any

material announcement, because as we

said, it is the last meeting as

chairwoman, so hence they will keep

the interest rate unchanged until of

course she hands over to Jerome

Powell, and then we would expect the

first rate hike to happen in March.

And we know that in the interim we

have the low interest rate

environment. Yes, there have been

small hikes, but we have also had US

tax cuts which have been helping

corporate sentiment a great deal,

driving up those stock markets, for

instance. When do you think these

will start to have an impact?

So we

think the risk is more on the

upside, especially on inflation. So

if tax reform comes through much

better than expected, we have seen

and heard already the example of

Apple announcing they will move much

of their money back to the US, and

hence this can cause inflation may

be to move even higher than the Fed

would expect, and hence then they

might be a little bit more

expressive than the three rate hikes

the markets have priced in now.

Now,

if you don't own any IKEA furniture

yourself, you probably know someone

who has struggled to put together an

IKEA bookshelf with an Allen key,

for instance. We know the furniture

is pretty much everywhere, and that

is why tributes have been flowing in

for the founder of the Swedish

furniture giant, Ingvar Kamprad, who

has died over the weekend. We are

joined by our business reporter in

the studio to tell us more about

him.

He has been described as one of

the world's greatest entrepreneurs

and as the man who democratised

furniture, making it accessible. He

was born in 1926 on a small farm,

struggling with dyslexia but having

a very canny business sense. He

started selling mattresses, before

launching a mail order business

called IKEA, which has since grown

to become the world's biggest

furniture retailer. There are more

than 400 stores in 49 countries now

and it rakes in 40 billion US

dollars a year. But his life was not

without controversy, he was forced

to apologise for supporting fascist

groups when he was younger. He has

called that the greatest mistake of

his life. He also suffered from

alcoholism and lived much of his

life outside Sweden, settling in

Switzerland because he did not want

to pay Sweden's income taxes.

Sounds

like he had a colourful life indeed,

but what kind of corporate legacy

does he leave? What happens to IKEA

now?

There are a couple of things,

he made sure that IKEA could not be

broken up. He wanted it to remain a

private company and not be listed on

the stock market so he created a

complicated business structure. The

other thing is his corporate

philosophy lives on, he thinks

simplicity is great and waste is

sinful, so he was a very frugal man,

one of the world's richest man with

a fortune estimated at $60 billion

but he flew economy class, stayed in

budget hotels, he recycled his tea

bags, so he took that ethos and he

has applied it so that everything is

kept low cost and people are not

wasteful.

Thank you for that on

Ingvar Kamprad, who has died at 91.

The city of Taipei is stepping up

efforts to turn itself into a hub

for start-up technology companies.

One major challenge has been

encouraging people to try to strike

out on their own, and so officials

in Taipei are working hard to tackle

a culture of playing it safe. We

will take a look at whether that is

working in our next instalment of

Asia's Silicon Valley's.

-- Valleys.

So basically you are

stepping into another world, where

you can see sound. You can move it

around, change the actual pitch. You

are inside a song. It is going to

really disrupt everything, so I

pretty much just focus everything I

do, and pretty much dropped all of

my clients and started working in

PR. -- VR.

People have to be more optimistic,

more willing to hear about

start-ups, helping them to do the

right things. We have to find a way

to help them, to support them.

It is the general approach of being

too reserved and not rewarding

people who take risks.

And staying with tech, Microsoft

says not all US firms were

necessarily benefit from Donald

Trump's tax reforms, which have

slashed the corporate rate to 21%.

Many tech giants are worried about

the impact of immigration

restrictions. The BBC's Sally

Gunnell. -- Sally Bundock asked the

company's president about it.

The

lifeblood of technology is always

people. You always have to do a

great job of hiring locally, but you

are going to succeed on a global

basis only if you have a world-class

team which has team members from

around the world. So immigration is

fundamental to all of us in the tech

sector, and that is why we have been

so vocal on immigration issues.

You

were impacted it is accompanied by

the Intel chip security breach, as

it were. Many people worldwide, not

just Microsoft users, but other

Apple users, were left hanging for

weeks. That was handled rather

badly, do you think?

First of all,

there is a lot of opportunity to

learn, as there always is. It is a

security issue which affect all of

the chips, most of the devices and

operating systems in the world. The

challenge with these kinds of

questions is that you don't want to

publish the news about a

vulnerability immediately because

you don't want the news about it to

be out before it is fixed. That is

like putting a big flashing light

and asking every cyber criminal to

attack here. That is the worst thing

we can do in terms of public safety.

At the same time we are all having

to learn how we work together across

the industry, how do we move as fast

as we can to fix the problem, which

requires collaboration, and still

think about these questions you are

quite rightly raising as well.

Those

who want to commit these cyber

crimes are there, fast, and wanting

to commit these crimes all the time.

I think in terms of cyber security

the industry doesn't good job most

days in terms of putting public

safety and consumer security at

first. We have lots of other areas

where we can compete, we need to fix

these problems and protect people,

and that I find each day, most

times, is the overriding focus.

And

Australia's Commonwealth Bank has

named its new chief executive, who

will take over from the current boss

in April. He comes in at a

challenging time for Australia's top

lender, which has been accused of a

series of scandals including

allegedly breaching money laundering

laws. And Coincheck will use its own

funds to refund customers after they

lost millions of dollars in digital

assets. The hackers stole NEM, which

is the biggest currency by market

cap.

is the biggest currency by market

cap. And on the markets, we can tell

you that they are all pretty much

higher. The Nikkei, which has opened

as well, is higher. They are taking

their cues from Wall Street which

closed at another record high. We

know that the yen is actually

strengthening, taking a toll on

exporters. That is it for this

edition of Asia Business