- Tariffs, declining real wages, slowing growth: Japan’s central bank has its work cut out CNBC
- Japan’s May real wages fall the most in nearly two years Reuters
- Japan’s 2025 wage talks conclude with highest gain in 34 years The Japan Times
- In labour-starved Japan, workers land another bumper pay hike CNA
- Japan’s Real Wages Fall Most Since 2023 as Inflation Bites Bloomberg.com
Category: 3. Business
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Tariffs, declining real wages, slowing growth: Japan's central bank has its work cut out – CNBC
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Investors to double down on US junk bonds on another tariff tantrum – Reuters
- Investors to double down on US junk bonds on another tariff tantrum Reuters
- Lessons From Financial Markets Since Liberation Day Council on Foreign Relations
- It’s Liberation Day all over again, but on a much smaller scale Forexlive | Forex News, Technical Analysis & Trading Tools
- Gold, defence stocks still vital hedges in 2025 bull market landscape: Ed Yardeni The Economic Times
- Investors are all smiles as ‘Liberation Day’ Part 2 looms Yahoo Finance
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Samsung expects second-quarter profits to more than halve as it struggles to capture AI demand
Samsung signage during the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in San Jose, California, US, on Thursday, March 20, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
South Korea’s Samsung Electronics on Tuesday forecast a 56% fall in profits for the second quarter as the company struggles to capture demand from artificial intelligence chip leader Nvidia.
The memory chip and smartphone maker projected operating profit for the quarter ending June to be around 4.6 trillion won, down from 10.44 trillion Korean won year over year.
The figure is a deeper plunge compared to SmartEstimate from LSEG, which is weighted toward forecasts from analysts who are more consistently accurate.
According to LSEG SmartEstimate, Samsung was expected to post an operating profit of 6.26 trillion won ($4.57 billion) for the quarter. Meanwhile, Samsung projected its revenue to hit 74 trillion won, falling short of LSEG smart estimates of 75.55 trillion won.
Samsung is a leading player in the global smartphone market and also one of the world’s largest makers of memory chips, which are used in devices such as laptops and servers.
However, the company has been falling behind competitors like SK Hynix and Micron in high-bandwidth memory chips — an advanced type of memory that is being deployed in AI chips.
“The disappointing earnings are due to ongoing operating losses in the foundry business, while the upside in the high-margin HBM business remains muted this quarter,” MS Hwang, research director at Counterpoint Research, said about the earnings guidance.
SK Hynix, the leader in HBM, has secured a position as Nvidia’s key supplier. While Samsung has reportedly been working to get the latest version of its HBM chips certified by Nvidia, a report from a local outlet suggests these plans have been pushed back to at least September.
The company did not respond to a request for comment on the status of its deals with Nvidia.
Ray Wang, research director of semiconductors, supply chain and emerging technology at Futurum Group told CNBC that it is clear that Samsung has yet to pass Nvidia’s qualification for its most advanced HBM.
“Given that Nvidia accounts for roughly 70% of global HBM demand, the delay meaningfully caps near-term upside,” Wang said. He noted that while Samsung has secured some HBM supply for AI processors from AMD, this win is unlikely to contribute to second-quarter results due to the timing of production ramps.
Meanwhile, Samsung’s chip foundry business continues to face weak orders and serious competition from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Wang added.
Reuters reported in September that Samsung had instructed its subsidiaries worldwide to cut 30% of staff in some divisions, citing sources familiar with the matter.
Samsung Electronics’ stock is up about 16% year-to-date, according to LSEG data. The company will release its detailed third-quarter results towards the end of this month.
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Ascentage Pharma Appoints Dr. Veet Misra as Chief Financial Officer and Eric Huang as Senior Vice President of Global Corporate Development and Finance
ASCENTAGE PHARMA GROUP INTERNATIONAL ROCKVILLE, Md. and SUZHOU, China, July 07, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Ascentage Pharma Group International (NASDAQ: AAPG; HKEX: 6855) (“Ascentage Pharma” or the “Company”), a global biopharmaceutical company dedicated to addressing unmet medical needs in cancers, announced the appointments of Veet Misra, Ph.D., as the Company’s Chief Financial Officer, and Mr. Eric Huang, as Senior Vice President of Global Corporate Development and Finance. Both Dr. Misra and Mr. Huang will report directly to Dajun Yang, M.D., Ph.D., the Company’s Chairman & Chief Executive Officer.
Dr. Yang said, “I am excited to welcome Veet and Eric to our senior management team. As an innovative biopharmaceutical company dual listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, Ascentage Pharma is entering a phase of notable growth. The addition of these seasoned executives will help accelerate the implementation of our global strategy of becoming a leading, fully integrated global biopharmaceutical company.”
Dr. Misra brings a rare combination of deep scientific background in biology and significant experience in U.S. capital markets in the biopharmaceutical sector. “I am confident that Veet’s unique blend of scientific acumen and capital markets expertise can help us garner stronger traction in the global capital markets and strengthen our operations,” added Dr. Yang.
Mr. Huang brings rich expertise in the global pharmaceutical industry and a wealth of experience in corporate management. “This makes Eric a great match for Ascentage Pharma’s long-term growth needs. His experience will help drive excellence in Ascentage Pharma’s corporate operations as the Company continues to make headway in expanding globally,” said Dr. Yang.
Dr. Misra commented, “I am thrilled to join Ascentage Pharma as its Chief Financial Officer. Ascentage Pharma is a global leader in apoptosis-targeted therapies. Its dual listing in Hong Kong and the U.S. reflects strong recognition of the Company in these two premier markets. I look forward to working with my colleagues to accelerate the global development of the Company’s innovative pipeline and create sustained value for patients and shareholders.”
Mr. Huang said, “It is my great honor to join Ascentage Pharma, a company that has established growing global competitiveness in the field of hematologic malignancies. The strategic partnership with Takeda and the dual listing in Hong Kong and the U.S. have created a sound foundation for global expansion. I look forward to working closely with the Company’s management team to further improve operations and efficiently integrate the Company’s existing resources to accelerate the global development and commercialization of its core assets, ultimately bringing more novel therapeutics to patients in need.”
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Fitch Rates Venture Global Plaquemines LNG's New Senior Secured Notes 'BB'; Outlook Stable – Fitch Ratings
- Fitch Rates Venture Global Plaquemines LNG’s New Senior Secured Notes ‘BB’; Outlook Stable Fitch Ratings
- Venture Global subsidiary closes $4bn senior secured notes Yahoo Finance
- Venture Global’s $4B Debt Offering: A Strategic Play for LNG Supremacy AInvest
- Venture Global Raises Massive $4B in Senior Notes, Total LNG Facility Funding Hits $6.5B Stock Titan
- Venture Global Unit Completes $4 Billion Offering of Senior Secure Notes MarketScreener
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WHO certification scheme on the quality of pharmaceutical products
Overview
The World Health Organization (WHO) established the Certification Scheme on the Quality of Pharmaceutical Products Moving in International Commerce in 1969. As one of the earliest instruments promoting regulatory reliance, the Scheme was designed to support Member States in ensuring the quality of medicines circulating in the global market. Over the years, it has undergone several amendments to align with evolving regulatory frameworks and global health needs.
This publication presents an overview of the WHO Certification Scheme, detailing its objectives, historical development, and role within the broader regulatory ecosystem. It examines the Scheme’s strengths and limitations, and offers recommendations for its effective use alongside other regulatory tools. The publication also incorporates insights from National Regulatory Authorities across various WHO regions, as well as perspectives from industry representatives, providing a well-rounded view of the Scheme’s implementation and impact.
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How firms navigate parental leave: Evidence from Austria
Fertility rates are declining globally – South Korea’s rate fell to 0.72, the lowest in the world (Kim and Yum 2025) – while large gender inequalities persist in many countries (Berniell et al. 2024). Governments have expanded policies that support working families to address both challenges, but these policies create operational dilemmas for firms: should they temporarily replace the absent employee with a new hire, redistribute their workload among existing workers, or adjust production and reduce the size of the firm? The answer depends on recruitment and training costs firms face when searching for suitable replacements in a labour market with frictions, where temporary worker absences are costly.
The length of the leave is a crucial factor in this debate. Although longer leave can be beneficial for women (Olivetti and Petrongolo 2017), and generous leave can lead to higher fertility (Kim and Yum 2025), there is concern that these policies adversely affect firms. Indeed, there are two papers that find potential negative impacts on firms. Ginja et al. (2022) examine a Swedish reform that retroactively extended parental leave by three months and find that the longer leaves imposed higher wage costs on firms and some indications that sales and value added per worker were negatively impacted. Gallen (2019) studies a Danish reform that unexpectedly extended leave by 22 weeks and reports negative effects on firm survival and coworker retention, with some coworkers experiencing lower earnings when changing jobs and delaying their own fertility decisions.
One concern with this research is that it examines a sudden change to a system that firms could not anticipate. It is thus not clear whether the negative effects on firms manifest because they were surprised by workers suddenly taking longer leave, and if they could handle longer leave if given enough time to plan.
In our recent paper (Brenøe et al. 2025), we use data from Austria to examine how firms respond to births and variations in the length of leave when they have enough time to plan for a change in the system. This provides an ideal setting for analysis for two reasons. First, Austrian mothers take exceptionally long leave compared to other countries – typically between one and two years. If extended leaves impose significant costs on firms, the Austrian context should reveal these effects clearly. Second, Austria implemented major parental leave reforms that substantially altered leave durations, providing a quasi-experimental setting.
Our first key finding concerns how firms adjust their workforce in anticipation of a leave. Figure 1 shows that firms begin increasing new hires approximately two quarters before the birth event. The number of new hires peaks in the quarter immediately before birth, when many expectant mothers begin their maternity protection period. Cumulatively, firms hire approximately 0.89 additional workers for each woman going on leave, achieving nearly complete replacement.
Figure 1 How a birth impacts firms’ hiring
Notes: Figure 1 shows how many new workers are hired by firms if an employee has a child. We estimate this effect with a methodology that compares firms affected by a birth to comparable firms with no birth. We plot the effect separately for hiring of female and male workers.
Importantly, these replacement hires are almost entirely female – only 9% of excess hires during the anticipation period and 17% during the leave period are male. This pattern suggests significant gender segregation within firms in the allocation of workers to specific roles.
The gendered nature of firm responses extends beyond hiring. Figure 2 shows the evolution of the wage bill by gender. The female wage bill in treated firms initially increases during the anticipation period as replacement workers are hired, then drops sharply when the mother goes on leave. In contrast, the male wage bill shows a small but persistent increase. In the medium run, five years after the birth event, the total wage bill returns to levels comparable to control firms, but its composition has shifted toward male workers. This reallocation appears permanent, suggesting that births trigger lasting changes in firms’ gender composition.
Figure 2 How a birth impacts firms’ wage bills
Our second major finding addresses the central policy question: does the duration of leave matter for firms? Figure 3 provides clear evidence. Panel 3(a) confirms that actual leave-taking varied strongly across regimes in the short run – with approximately 40, 60, and 80 days of leave per quarter in the 1-year, 1.5-year, and 2-year regimes, respectively. Yet panels 3(b) and 3(c) show that this variation in leave duration had virtually no impact on firms’ hiring patterns or wage bills.
Figure 3 Are firms differently affected if women are on long leave?
Notes: Figure 3 shows how an employee having a child affects firms depending on how long mothers can remain on parental leave. Panel (a) shows that the Austrian parental leave reforms shifted large shares of mothers from taking 1 year to taking 1.5–2 years of leave. Panels (b) and (c) show how firms’ hiring and wage bills were not significantly different in those three policy situations.
Whether mothers could take one year or two years of leave, firms hired the same number of replacement workers during the anticipation period. The wage bill increased by similar amounts across all regimes during anticipation and returned to baseline levels in the medium run, regardless of how long the actual leave lasted.
We also find no effects on average daily wages or, importantly, on firm survival rates. Even in the most generous regime, where mothers routinely took two-year leaves, firm closure rates remained unaffected through five years after the birth event.
There is one caveat in the Austrian setting, and that is the lack of direct data on sales or value added. However, our wage and closure results broadly correspond to findings from Denmark by Brenøe et al. (2024), who do not find that leaves lead to big impacts on sales in the periods where the leave policy was stable. Ultimately we have to leave these more granular dimensions of impact on firms open for future research.
Implications for policy
Our findings offer several insights for policymakers considering parental leave reforms. First, the contrast between our results and those from Denmark and Sweden highlights the importance of implementation. When the Danish and Swedish reforms were applied retroactively, catching firms unprepared, they generated disruption and costs. In Austria, the changes did not come as a shock, and even though the reforms substantially changed leave durations, we find no negative effects on firms. This suggests that the predictability of leave policies may matter more than their generosity in terms of the maximum available duration.
Second, the finding that leave duration has minimal impact on firms challenges common assumptions in policy debates. We show that variations in maximum leave length between one and two years – a substantial difference by international standards – do not translate into differential costs for firms. Once leaves exceed a certain threshold, further extensions appear to impose little additional burden on employers.
Third, the gendered nature of firm responses reveals both how firms manage leave absences and why gender inequalities may persist despite generous policies. The near-exclusive hiring of female replacements suggests that many workplaces remain highly gender-segregated. Women appear concentrated in easily replaceable roles, which facilitates smooth transitions during leaves but may simultaneously limit career advancement opportunities.
Finally, our evidence that even very long leaves do not threaten firm survival removes a common objection to generous family policies. Concerns that extended parental leave will devastate businesses appear unfounded, at least when policies are predictable and well-established.
As countries seek to address the demographic challenges of low fertility and persistent gender inequality, the Austrian experience suggests that generous parental leave need not come at the expense of firms. However, achieving true gender equality in the labour market requires addressing the underlying patterns of occupational segregation. The ease with which firms replace women on leave may itself be a symptom of the limited roles available to them.
References
Berniell, I, R Fernandez, and S Krutikova (2024), “The state of gender inequality in Latin America”, VoxEU.org, 6 August.
Brenøe, A A, S Canaan, N A Harmon, and H N Royer (2024), “Is parental leave costly for firms and coworkers?”, The Journal of Labor Economics 42(4): 1135–74.
Brenøe, A A, U Krenk, A Steinhauer, and J Zweimüller (2025), “How do firms respond to parental leave absences?”, CEPR Discussion Paper 20140.
Gallen, Y (2019), “The effect of parental leave extensions on firms and coworkers”, working paper.
Ginja, R, A Karimi, and P Xiao (2022), “Employer responses to family leave programs”, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 15(1).
Kim, D, and Y Yum (2025), “The effects of parental leave policy reforms on fertility and gender gaps”, VoxEU.org, 17 March.
Olivetti, C and B Petrongolo (2017), “The economic consequences of family policies”, VoxEU.org, 3 June.
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Cathie Wood’s Ark files for new ETFs to limit losses in flagship fund
(Reuters) -Cathie Wood’s Ark Investment Management has filed proposals for four new exchange-traded funds that aim to cushion potential losses in its flagship ARK Innovation fund.
These ETFs mark Ark’s entry into the buffer ETF market, where funds use options to limit losses while capping gains. The strategy, already used by companies such as BlackRock, Allianz and Innovator, has gained popularity among investors seeking protection in volatile markets.
The proposed funds – ARK Q1 Defined Innovation ETF, ARK Q2 Defined Innovation ETF, ARK Q3 Defined Innovation ETF and ARK Q4 Defined Innovation ETF – will each run on a rolling 12-month schedule beginning in January, April, July and October, respectively, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission last week.
FILE PHOTO: Cathie Wood, CEO of Ark Invest, speaks during an interview on CNBC on the floor of the NYSE, in New York Each fund aims to limit a drop in the share price to 50% in the ARK Innovation ETF, while passing on gains only if the ETF rises more than about 5%.
This comes as U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff war has rattled markets and pushed up volatility, although his policies are expected to benefit the fund’s holdings.
ARK’s biggest holdings include EV-maker Tesla, crypto exchange Coinbase and trading platform Robinhood, according to LSEG data.
The fund is up about 24% since the start of the year, compared with an about 6% rise in the S&P 500 index.
(Reporting by Utkarsh Shetti and Arunima Kumar in Bengaluru; Editing by Pooja Desai)
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Samsung Electronics Announces Earnings Guidance for Second Quarter 2025 – Samsung Global Newsroom
Samsung Electronics today announced its earnings guidance for the second quarter of 2025.
- Consolidated Sales: Approximately 74 trillion Korean won
- Consolidated Operating Profit: Approximately 4.6 trillion Korean won
The above estimates are based on K-IFRS. Please note that Korean disclosure regulations do not allow earnings estimates to be offered as a range. To comply with such regulations, the above figures represent the median of the estimate ranges provided below.
- Sales: 73 trillion to 75 trillion Korean won
- Operating Profit: 4.5 trillion to 4.7 trillion Korean won
※ 2025 1Q and 2024 2Q consolidated figures based on K-IFRS are as follows
(in trillion won) 2025.1Q 2024.2Q Sales 79.14 74.07 Operating profit 6.69 10.44 Continue Reading
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Apple's top AI executive Ruoming Pang leaves for Meta, Bloomberg News reports – Reuters
- Apple’s top AI executive Ruoming Pang leaves for Meta, Bloomberg News reports Reuters
- Meta Hires Researcher from Apple The Information
- Apple Loses Key AI Executive to Meta’s Multimillion-Dollar Hiring Spree MacRumors
- Meta poaches Apple’s top AI models executive, Bloomberg reports TipRanks
- Meta just hired Apple’s head of foundation models 9to5Mac
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