BEIJING, Oct. 7 — During the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-2025), China’s light industry expanded steadily, with output continuing to grow, according to the China National Light Industry Council.
In 2024, China had 140,000 light-industry enterprises exceeding the designated size, which provided 17.92 million jobs.
The sector’s exports reached 925.4 billion U.S. dollars, accounting for 25.9 percent of the country’s total export value and ranking first among all industries for the fifth consecutive year.
The structure of China’s light industry is being steadily upgraded, with smart appliances, new-energy batteries, electric bicycles and other emerging segments expanding rapidly, said Zhang Chonghe, head of the council.
China aims to increase the operating revenue of its light industry to over 30 trillion yuan (about 4.22 trillion U.S. dollars) by 2030, representing an average annual growth rate of at least 5 percent.
The number of key national laboratories and engineering research centers in the sector is expected to exceed 300 by 2030, while valid invention patents are anticipated to grow by an average of 15 percent annually, according to Zhang.
The letter of indemnity would be a familiar instrument to those involved in the shipping and commodities trade. These are typically used to procure the discharge and delivery of cargo from a vessel when the bills of lading are unavailable for presentation at the discharge port. Through the letter of indemnity, the risks of a claim for misdelivery are transferred from the carrier to the party issuing the letter of indemnity (typically the shipper/charterer), provided the letter of indemnity is properly worded and valid. Such letters of indemnity are often referred to as discharge letters of indemnity.
A less familiar use of the letter of indemnity would be in commodity finance where the letter of indemnity is issued by a beneficiary of a letter of credit (“LOC”) and tendered in lieu of original bills of lading in order to draw on the LOC. Such letters of indemnity, known as payment letters of indemnity (“Payment LOIs”), are not a recent innovation. They are commonplace in the oil trade and were mentioned in the UK Law Commission Report on Rights of Suit in Respect of Carriage of Goods by Sea issued in 1991.
However, it is only in recent years that Payment LOIs have received attention from the Singapore courts. This has come about in cases brought by trade financiers to recover their loans following the insolvencies of major oil traders. The judgment by the Singapore Court of Appeal in The Maersk Katalin [2025] SGCA 42 is the most recent of these cases.
This article discusses the High Court and Court of Appeal decisions in The Maersk Katalin – decisions which go a long way towards restoring faith in the bill of lading and the presentation rule in Singapore.
Allen & Gledhill Partners Corina Song and Daniel Liang represented the successful bank in The Maersk Katalin.
Chinese car making giant BYD says the UK has become its biggest market outside China, after its sales there surged by 880% in September compared to a year earlier.
The company says it sold 11,271 cars in the UK last month, with the plug-in hybrid version of its Seal U sports utility vehicle (SUV) accounting for the majority of those sales.
It comes after figures from the car industry body the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) showed that sales of electric vehicles (EVs) jumped to a record high in September.
The UK is particularly attractive to firms like BYD as the country has not imposed tariffs on Chinese EVs, unlike other major markets such as the European Union and the US.
BYD, which offers cheaper models than many of its Western rivals, said its share of the UK market jumped to 3.6% in September.
The company will launch more new hybrid and electric cars in the months ahead, said the BYD’s UK manager Bono Ge. He added that the brand’s future in Britain looks “hugely exciting”, having just opened its 100th retail outlet.
UK EV sales hit a record high last month, with sales of pure battery electric vehicles rising to almost 73,000, according to the SMMT.
Sales of plug-in hybrid cars grew even faster, it said.
The Kia Sportage, Ford Puma and Nissan Qashqai were the best-selling cars in September. Chinese models – the Jaecoo 7 and BYD Seal U – were also in the top 10.
But despite the surge in overall EV sales in the UK, petrol and diesel vehicles still made up more than half of new car sales last month, according to the SMMT.
In October last year, the EU announced it would hit imports of Chinese EVs with levies of up to 45%.
The measure is aimed to protect European car makers from being undermined by what the EU believes are unfair Chinese-state subsidies.
Chinese car makers like BYD have been effectively shut out of the US by high tariffs, which were backed by both President Donald Trump and his predecessor Joe Biden.
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“We know dopamine works really well, but beyond that, we don’t really fully understand how Parkinson works. There are many, what I call ‘pathway abnormalities’—things that are different in cells of somebody with Parkinson from somebody who doesn’t have Parkinson. Those pathway abnormalities may be things that you can target [with disease-modifying therapies].”
At the 2025 International Congress of Parkinson’s Disease and Movement Disorders (MDS), held October 5-9, in Honolulu, Hawaii, interim data were presented by Jonas Hannestad, MD, PhD, which detail the open-label, phase 1b findings to-date of a small trial of 21 participants with Parkinson disease (PD) in Australia. The study’s primary goal is to determine the therapy’s safety and tolerability, but secondarily, it is seeking to assess results from mechanistic biomarker readings to confirm target engagement and efficacy signals.
The therapy, GT-02287, is an investigational small-molecule designed to attempt to act as a disease-modifier for PD. All told, it is showing promising early safety and tolerability results in the ongoing phase 1b trial. Although Hannestad, who is the the chief medical officer at Gain, expressed that the results must be taken with “a grain of salt” as they are early phase and the trial is not powered for efficacy, the positive signals on the MDS Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale Parts I and II do offer some momentum for the treatment’s future development.
While on-site at the congress, NeurologyLive spoke with Hannestad further to discuss the results, but also to glean his perspective on the state of therapuetic availability for patients with PD. He offered his thoughts on the current model of therapy, often beginning with dopeminergic targeting treatments—such as the gold standard in PD, levodopa—which offers great symptomatic relief to patients, particularly early on. However, long-term, these approaches have some limitations, with patients experiencing wearing off effects and lessened efficacy. Additionally, he noted, these treatments do not offer disease-modifying effects—simply put, they do not slow disease progression. Many therapies in the pipeline are being evaluated for their ability to potentially do this, and Hannestad provided some context on the targets that GT-02287 acts on in its attempt to modify disease progression in PD.
Click here to read more from MDS 2025.
REFERENCES 1. Pozzi R, Ignoni T, Bosetti M, et al. GT-02287 in Parkinson’s Disease: Interim Data from a Phase 1b Study. Presented at: International Congress of Parkinson’s Disease and Movement Disorders; October 5-9, 2025; Honolulu, HI.
Echizen City in Fukui Prefecture anticipates a significant increase in tourism, including international visitors, due to improved accessibility such as the extension of the Hokuriku Shinkansen. This initiative aims to revitalize the region by enhancing the quality of tourism experiences and expanding the visitor base and the number of supporters who actively engage with the region.
Toda Corporation signed a public-private partnership agreement with Echizen City in 2021, promoting the smart city concept around the Hokuriku Shinkansen Echizen-Takefu Station. The company has focused on urban development and enhanced marketing driven by tourism, and has been engaged in demonstration experiments, such as investigating tourist behavior and transportation issues during local events [1].
JTB launched its “GLOCAL Sustainability Project (GSP)” [2] in 2021 with the aim of solving regional challenges and creating new businesses. In 2024, JTB implemented a program set in Echizen City where Fujitsu employees proposed new tourism experiences leveraging NFTs after learning about local resources and challenges.
Since 2023, Fujitsu and JTB have been jointly researching tourism DX services for affluent international visitors. As part of this collaboration, they have explored applying a digital currency leveraging NFT technology [3] for regional revitalization.
With these activities converging around the same period, the three companies decided to collaborate and launch ECHIZEN Quest as a joint project to promote the region’s appeal to the world.
Executives share vision of turning ChatGPT into operating system
Newly announced partners like Spotify, Mattel saw stock bump
OpenAI’s ambitions have drawn investor concerns about AI bubble
SAN FRANCISCO, Oct 6 (Reuters) – OpenAI touted new partnerships to incorporate its AI products across diverse industries at its developer conference on Monday, aiming to drive the strong momentum it has enjoyed among consumers to its enterprise business.
“You should expect a huge focus from us on really leaning into enterprise,” CEO Sam Altman told journalists at a press conference following his keynote at San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center.
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The company revealed a flurry of collaborations with companies including Spotify (SPOT.N), opens new tab, Zillow and Mattel (MAT.O), opens new tab while debuting a set of fresh tools to help developers build new applications.
That included a way for other apps to plug into ChatGPT and allow a user to ask questions or perform tasks in the app. One engineer gave a live demo showing how someone could use ChatGPT to generate a readymade playlist in Spotify, or ask Zillow to narrow down a list of properties to just show those with three bedrooms and three bathrooms.
Executives said this was the start of a broader vision of transforming ChatGPT into a central portal where users can access a broader range of services.
“What you’re going to see over the next six months is an evolution of ChatGPT from an app that is really, really useful into something that feels a little bit more like an operating system,” ChatGPT head Nick Turley said.
Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, underscored that OpenAI was “committed to building the best enterprise platform.”
News of OpenAI’s partnerships led shares of some of its partners like Zillow and Figma (FIG.N), opens new tab to climb initially, a sign of how the ChatGPT maker’s imprimatur has become a way to legitimize companies’ positioning in AI. Earlier on Monday, shares of AMD (AMD.O), opens new tab surged more than 34% after it signed a deal supplying chips to OpenAI.
Spotify said in a press release about its partnership that it would not share user data with OpenAI to train models. Asked if the same policy applied to the other deals, Turley said it would abide by the preferences users selected in their data settings.
OpenAI had always planned to target the enterprise market, but its AI models were not previously ready for the higher demands of business-use cases, Altman said.
“We needed to let the models get better. The models are there now,” he said, adding that the company had selected “a few active early partnerships.”
Brockman said the work that went into its models’ self-claimed gold medal performance at the International Mathematical Olympiad would generate benefits for enterprises in other ways.
OpenAI and other tech giants such as Alphabet (GOOGL.O), opens new tab and Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab have courted enterprise AI deals to help justify massive spikes in spending, though the returns across the industry have so far failed to match investment, recent surveys showed.
The ChatGPT-maker outlined ambitious new plans in the last month to build $1 trillion or more of computing capacity and launched a viral AI-video-generating app called Sora, which has shot to the top of Apple’s app rankings.
All this has made OpenAI a massive money-losing operation to date. Altman said it was “not in my top 10 concerns, but we obviously someday have to be very profitable.”
Monday’s moves are the latest in a stream of announcements for OpenAI, which sparked the modern AI boom with the launch of ChatGPT about three years ago.
Many of Altman’s ambitions are bold and expensive even by Silicon Valley standards, sparking some concerns among tech investors about whether or not AI investments are a bubble.
Altman said during the question-answer session that many areas of the AI industry are “kind of bubbly,” but that “real value will get created.”
Reporting by Deepa Seetharaman and Kenrick Cai in San Francisco; Editing by Pooja Desai and Christopher Cushing
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab
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Kenrick Cai is a correspondent for Reuters based in San Francisco. He covers Google, its parent company Alphabet and artificial intelligence. Cai joined Reuters in 2024. He previously worked at Forbes magazine, where he was a staff writer covering venture capital and startups. He received a Best in Business award from the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing in 2023. He is a graduate of Duke University.
Companies touting their artificial intelligence products dominated the Promenade, the main road in Davos. In past years at the World Economic Forum annual meeting, cryptocurrency firms were the most prominent down the Promenade. But AI fever has taken over in 2024.
Arjun Kharpal | CNBC
"We few, we happy few, we band of brothers." The rallying cry from Shakespeare's Henry V,ahead of the Battle of Agincourt, might as well be the motto of today's artificial intelligence elites.
Last night, OpenAI unveiled a partnership with AMD, in which it will deploy 6 gigawatts of the latter's Instinct graphics processing units to power its AI infrastructure. The deal includes a warrant for OpenAI to acquire up to 10% of AMD.
That comes after OpenAI's $100 billion pact with Nvidia.
OpenAI was also the catalyst for a surge in Figma shares after CEO Sam Altman promoted the design software vendor's technology in an onstage demo.
But as our U.S. colleagues have pointed out, the arrangement between OpenAI and AMD adds a new layer to the increasingly circular nature of AI's corporate economy, where capital, equity and compute are traded among the same handful of companies building and powering the technology.
Nvidia is supplying the capital to buy its chips. Oracle is helping build the sites. AMD and Broadcom are stepping in as suppliers. OpenAI is anchoring the demand.
It's a tightly wound circular economy, and one that analysts fear could face real strain if any link in the chain starts to weaken.
As the AI arms race accelerates, the question looms — can this "band of brothers" carry the weight of an entire industry's expectations?
And, just like the Battle of Agincourt, can they be remembered not for their numbers, but for their impact on the AI space?
— CNBC's MacKenzie Sigalos contributed to this report.
What you need to know today
OpenAI-AMD announce deal. That could see Sam Altman's company take a 10% stake in the chipmaker. OpenAI will deploy 6 gigawatts of AMD's Instinct graphics processing units over multiple years and across multiple generations of hardware. Shares of AMD skyrocketed 23.71% Monday following the news.
Figma rides OpenAI hype. The design software vendor's stocks climbed 7% after Altman discussed Figma's integration into ChatGPT, and showed how third-party applications could plug in with OpenAI's Apps software development framework.
Tesla teases potential new car model. Tesla shares rose more than 5% Monday after the electric vehicle maker posted a teaser video on X, sparking speculation that the company could be gearing up to release a new car.
S&P and Nasdaq reach new records. On Monday stateside, both indexes were spurred by optimism about increased M&A activity after two major deals were announced, namely, the OpenAI-AMD partnership, and Fifth Third Bancorp's agreement to buy fellow bank Comerica for $10.9 billion. In Europe, the Stoxx 600 ended the day little changed.
[PRO] Three big bets outside the U.S. Bridgewater Associates has identified three key markets which it says can provide a layer of resilience to portfolios as investors' equities exposures hit all-time highs.
And finally...
Paul Tudor Jones speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 21, 2020.
Adam Galica | CNBC
Paul Tudor Jones says ingredients are in place for massive rally before a 'blow off' top to bull market
Billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones believes the conditions are set for a powerful surge in stock prices before the bull market tops out.
"My guess is that I think all the ingredients are in place for some kind of a blow off," Jones said Monday on CNBC's "Squawk Box."
The founder and chief investment officer of Tudor Investment said today's market is reminiscent of the setup leading up to the burst of the dot-com bubble in late 1999, with dramatic rallies in technology shares and heightened speculative behavior.
Oil steadied after a two-day advance after OPEC+ agreed on a modest supply quota increase, with traders also parsing signals from lower-than-expected Saudi prices.
Brent crude traded above $65 a barrel after a 1.5% gain on Monday, with West Texas Intermediate near $62. OPEC and allies including Russia decided at the weekend on a 137,000-barrel-a-day increment, while de-facto leader Saudi Arabia kept the price of its main grade to Asia unchanged in a sign of caution, surprising traders who had expected an increase.
(Bloomberg) — Japanese shares extended their rally after the election of a pro-stimulus lawmaker as the country’s next leader sent the yen sliding and drove up yields of long-tenure bonds. Gold set another record as political crises around the world lifted demand for the haven asset.
The Nikkei index gained 0.6% to a new peak, following a 4.8% jump on Monday. Japanese artificial intelligence and chip stocks advanced after Advanced Micro Devices Inc.’s blockbuster deal with OpenAI. The yen held its losses ahead of Tuesday’s government bond auction, the first since Sanae Takaichi’s near-certain ascent to become Japan’s next prime minister. Japanese 30-year bond yield rose to a fresh record of 3.315%.
US stocks closed at a record after a rally fueled by chipmakers. US equity-index futures, however, extended their losses after President Donald Trump called on the Democrats to reopen the government before there can be talks on health care.
While equities worldwide have surged to successive record highs, worries over the US government shutdown and a political crisis in France have driven investors toward alternative assets such as gold and Bitcoin, sending both to new peaks. At the same time, a flurry of AI-related deals among chipmakers has propelled shares higher and fueled concerns of a speculative bubble reminiscent of the late-1990s dot-com era.
“Semiconductors are ‘on fire,’” said Louis Navellier at Navellier & Associates. “The AI narrative continues to gain momentum.”
Technology stocks have been powering a global equity rally, with Monday’s AMD deal being the latest big-budget data center agreement this year. It follows last month’s announcement that Nvidia Corp. was planning to invest as much as $100 billion in OpenAI amid demand for tools like ChatGPT and the computing power needed to make them run.
With “animal spirits” surrounding the AI phenomenon getting yet another boost, Matt Maley at Miller Tabak said it’s no surprise that issues like the US government shutdown are being mostly ignored by traders.
With China and Hong Kong markets closed, investor attention is firmly on Japan. Takaichi’s election shook up global markets with stocks surging on prospects for more spending, while currencies and bonds weakened.
Options traders are the least bullish on the yen in more than three years now that Takaichi appears in-line to become the next prime minister.
Traders are also bracing for the auction of 30-year government bonds.
Two disappointing bond sales last week revived worries about fiscal spending in major markets.
Volatility in Japan’s longer-dated government bonds is on the rise following Takaichi’s win, and the moves may spill over to markets as far away as the US and UK, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
“Concerns over fiscal deterioration and potential credit downgrades have pushed long-term yields higher,” making it more likely the auction will “produce a weak result,” said Katsutoshi Inadome, senior strategist at Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Asset Management Co.
Corporate News:
The sovereign wealth funds of Abu Dhabi, Norway and Singapore and global money managers including BlackRock Inc. and Fidelity International Ltd. participated in the anchor share sale of LG Electronics Inc.’s Indian unit. A devastating fire at a major supplier for Ford Motor Co. is set to disrupt business for months, the Wall Street Journal reported. Some of the main moves in markets:
Stocks
S&P 500 futures fell 0.2% as of 9:58 a.m. Tokyo time Japan’s Topix rose 0.4% Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 fell 0.4% Euro Stoxx 50 futures were little changed Currencies
The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index was unchanged The euro was little changed at $1.1708 The Japanese yen was little changed at 150.49 per dollar The offshore yuan was little changed at 7.1425 per dollar Cryptocurrencies
Bitcoin fell 0.2% to $124,948.16 Ether fell 0.2% to $4,682.06 Bonds
The yield on 10-year Treasuries was little changed at 4.16% Japan’s 10-year yield advanced one basis point to 1.690% Australia’s 10-year yield advanced six basis points to 4.39% Commodities
West Texas Intermediate crude was little changed Spot gold was little changed This story was produced with the assistance of Bloomberg Automation.
–With assistance from Rob Verdonck and John Cheng.
