Interesting regional insights on how the next stage of economic developments may play out. Last Friday, US President Donald Trump announced some form of sanctions would be placed on Hong Kong following Mike Pompeo’s announcement earlier in the week that he no longer considered Hong Kong as being autonomous from mainland China. Trump specifically mentioned that the preferential trade nature of the US-Hong Kong Special Policy Act would be reconsidered. I discussed this in the a

Hong Kong customs has uncovered HK$85 million worth of smuggled cigarettes in the largest seizure of its kind in two decades, after authorities acted on intelligence indicating a syndicate was shipping the haul into the city in four containers. Some 31 million cigarettes were stashed in the containers from Yokohama in Japan. They were then shipped through different ports in South Korea, Vietnam and mainland China, according to Lee Hoi-man, deputy head of the Revenue and Gener

UN report shows that Asian exports declined this year for the first time in a decade, sparked largely by the knock on effect of US-China tariffs China’s annual exports fell by 1.4 per cent in value terms this year, Hong Kong’s by 4.8 per cent and Singapore’s by 14.9 per cent The year of pig brought the worst 12 months for Asia-Pacific trade since the global financial crisis 10 years ago, with the United Nations laying much of the blame on the US-China trade war. In 2019, for

Shanghai gets green light to set up duty-free customs area to facilitate direct global trade, in a move that bypasses Hong Kong! A fenced customs area will be established at Shanghai’s Yangshan Deep Sea Port and at the Lingang free-trade zone (FTZ) Cargo inside the area will be exempted from import duties, according to the November 4 circular by the The General Administration of Customs China’s government has given the green light to set up a duty-free zone at Shanghai’s port

CargoSmart announced the completion of an interoperability proof of concept (PoC) with the Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s (HKMA) trade finance blockchain, eTradeConnect. The trial combined supply chain shipping data with trade finance transactions, and also involved PwC, HSBC, COSCO, Hong Kong’s Bank of China and Standard Chartered Bank, OOCL, and the Bank of East Asia. The firms hoped to show that blockchain could be used in the interoperability of shipping and finance data.