Shenzhen Looks To Singapore's HDB For Housing-Scheme Model
Shenzhen said it plans a large resettlement of residents - moving 60 percent of its citizens to government-provided leased or owned accommodation over the next five to eight years. This plan, governors said, is adopted from Singapore's 1960s housing scheme to better house "less better-off residents" in the high-priced city, Yicai Global reported.
The plan will see 1.1 million commercial and public units built - with 100,000 homes becoming available each year. It will also increase the average living space per person to 30 square meters from 27.8 square meters by 2025, Zhang Xuefan, director of Shenzhen Housing and Construction Bureau, said.
Following its designation as a Special Economic Zone in 1980, Shenzhen has grown into a city of more than 13 million. Only 22.6 percent of Shenzhen's available land is used for residential purposes, an area lower than national minimum standards of between 25 percent and 40 percent, according to a report released by Shenzhen Housing and Construction Bureau this year.
Analysts said the move would make a big change to Shenzhen's property market which has experienced rapidly rising house prices over the past decade.
Set against a somewhat different economic backdrop, Singapore's Housing and Development Board (HDB) provided housing at prices affordable for most of the city's residents, starting from 1960, by issuing 99-year leases. It was regarded as a successful longer-term approach to meeting housing needs.
Singapore residents were able to fund the purchase of a development-board flat with a bank loan, a loan from the HDB, with cash, or with funds drawn from the social security system Central Provident Fund. Meanwhile, HDB prohibited Singaporeans from owning more than two residential units at any time. Today, more than 80 percent of residents in Singapore, or about 5.4 million people, live in government-provided houses.
Huawei Blows Whistle On Australia Rugby League Club Sponsorship
With the recent worsening of diplomatic relations between China and Australia, Huawei announced Monday it would end its long-term sports sponsorship of the Canberra Raiders, an Australian professional rugby league football club, by the end of the 2020 season.
Huawei had signed its latest Raiders deal in June in agreement to sponsor the club for two seasons, through the end of NRL in 2021, with a reportedly A$1 million ($725,700) in sponsorship each season.
Canberra Raiders CEO Don Furner said during an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corp. he was dissapointed at Huawei's action. He said Huawei was the longest sponsorship deal the club had had and their relationship had lasted 10 years.
Australia-China relations began to deteriorate in 2018. The Australian government said in September that year that it would remove Huawei from its 5G wireless network partner list saying it regarded Huawei and ZTE as "high-risk vendors." Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton said on the Today Show in June that it was not in the best interests of Australia to have its telecom networks compromised.
The COVID-19 pandemic has created even more tension between the countries when Australia called for an international inquiry into the original outbreak of the coronavirus in Wuhan, China.
TikTok Taking Gaming To The Next Level - The Cloud
While Tencent is testing broadcast technology on its WeChat messaging app, TikTok is adding a new entertainment function - cloud gaming - on its platform. Users can now directly enter a game-play interface after clicking embedded links in short videos viewed on TikTok, Shanghai Securities News reported.
The games currently available on TikTok are casual games including Snake and Speedy Bubbles. A TikTok spokesman said the company has attempted to make explorations in the game field but wasn't currently disclosing details.
Cloud gaming is a kind of online game that runs on remote servers. It can be streamed directly on player's devices via client software. It is emerging as one of the top uses for 5G.
China's domestic cloud gaming market gained 403 million yuan ($59.12 million) in revenues in the first half of 2020 - a year-on-year increase of 79.35 percent, according to a report released by the China Audio-video and Digital Publishing Association.
German online portal for statistics, Statista, reported the global cloud gaming market topped $97 million in 2019 and forecast it will reach $450 million by 2023.
Former Software Star Faces Delisting Storm
Storm Group, a company that has had great success based on a popular software, Storm Codec, is now facing delisting from the market, according to a statement released Friday by the Shenzhen Stock Exchange.
The authority said in July that Storm Group had been given notice that it was required to hand in its 2019 fiscal report within two months or be suspended. In response to the delisting, Storm Group said the company will enter a rectification period.
In stark contrast to its peak valuation of 327 yuan a share and a 40-billion-yuan market valuation in 2015, Storm Group's current stock price is 1.48 yuan a share with a market valuation of less than 500 million yuan.
The software the company had risen on is its premier product, Storm Codec - a package that deploys a large variety of media codecs and acts as an add-on for Windows Media Player. It requires downloading and installation on users' computers and has faced increasing challenges from the development of video streaming websites over the past decade.
Around 2010, when major video streaming website giants iQiyi, Youku, Tencent were in competition to acquire IP rights for online content, Storm Group stayed away and its CEO Feng Xin said that the company would not "burn money" for IP battles.
As of 2018, the company had reported up to 1 billion yuan in losses for that year and its CEO was arrested by the police in 2019 - reportedly for bribery during negotiations to acquire a British sports IP company.
So-Young's Fountain Of Youth Shot Unmasked As A Dangerous Scam
Nasdaq-listed, Beijing-based So-Young International Inc., a company that provides services in the medical aesthetics industry, was exposed for using illegal medicines disguised as an expensive product imported from Switzerland, China Business Network reported.
For its Yiwei anti-aging aesthetic product, the company was charging 13,800 yuan ($2,023) per injection and it was listed as one of the top selling products on the So-Young app.
A source at a Hubei-based biological technology company, the producer of the So-Young product, said that the medicine used in this injection was usually for application on cuts and wounds to provide protection to healing skin. It is not allowed to be directly sold to customers without registering under national-level supervision regulations. Exploiting a gray area, the injection's original formula originates from the Swiss but the product is now produced in China, the source told CBN.
Analysts said that, technically, such products should be banned from injection use because of its side-effect risks, including inflammation. But there are many similar products on the market despite the authority's efforts to restrict them.
The wholesale price of the Yiwei anti-aging aesthetic product is about 400 yuan for 5 milliliters, according to the source at the Hubei biological technology company. This means So-Young has made big profits from its treatment marketed as a "Swiss imported product."
So-Young reported 328.2 million yuan in revenues in the second quarter - a year-on-year increase of 15.2 percent. In 2019, China's medical aesthetic market reached 176.9 billion yuan - a rise of 22.2 percent year-on-year.
Of similar injections available on the market 33.3 percent are legal and approved by China's Drug Administration, according to data from iResearch.
