Eva Chin writes for RECATOOLS on the practical side of running a household and a business in Southeast Asia: the arithmetic of a tropical home, Chinese naming and cultural practice, education and qualifications across the region, and the commercial decisions small businesses actually face. Coverage of cultural practice is educational — it explains what a tradition holds and where it came from, and does not make predictive claims.

8
Articles
Business
Primary beat
Jul 2026
Writing since
~70 min
Total reading
All 8 Business 5 Chinese Culture 3

Articles Showing 1–8 of 8

The Singapore skyline at night reflected in the water of Marina Bay.
Business

Grab's Profit Rose 54%. Its Biggest Profit Engine Got Slightly Worse

Grab reported record second-quarter results. On its own measure, the segment carrying most of the profit saw its margin decline.

5 Aug 2026 · 8 min read
Rack-mounted server blades lit blue and red inside a data centre cabinet.
Business

Vietnam Put a Vietnamese Language Model on Its List of Strategic Technologies

Decision 21/2026/QD-TTg names ten strategic technologies and thirty strategic products. One of them is large-scale Vietnamese language models.

4 Aug 2026 · 9 min read
Stacked shipping containers at a port under a bright sky
Business

The FCC Barred Imported Humanoid Robots on Security Grounds. Beijing Says It Will Retaliate

The restriction covers bipedal and quadruped machines and applies to new device models rather than units already in service. China calls it unilateral bullying, with a leaders' summit due in September.

3 Aug 2026 · 5 min read
A calligraphy brush drawing a broad ink stroke on white paper.
Chinese Culture

How Chinese Given Names Actually Work — and Why Everyone Picks the Same Ones

A person could once carry four names: a milk name, a generation character shared with every cousin, a given name, and a courtesy name conferred at twenty. Three are gone or going. What is left is the freest naming decision anywhere, producing some of the most uniform results — every name in the reported 2021 top ten is two characters, drawn from the same small pool. Plus the stroke-count bug this audit found in our own suggester.

1 Aug 2026 · 10 min read
The Khoo Kongsi clan house in George Town, Penang — a Hokkien clan association of the kind that keeps surname and dialect-group records.
Chinese Culture

Tracing Chinese Ancestry in Southeast Asia: Start With How Your Name Is Spelled

Tan, Chan and Chin are the same character. Which one is on your IC records which dialect group your family belonged to, and that narrows the province, the clan associations and the language of the records. Plus the 1966 Indonesian name change that breaks most trails outright — and the honest limits of what any of this can deliver.

1 Aug 2026 · 10 min read
One industrial structure whose two corridors diverge, the left rising into light and the right descending into shadow — illustrating one company's two divisions moving in opposite directions.
Business

Samsung's Chip Division Made a Record Profit. Its Phone Division Lost Money for the First Time. Same Quarter, Same Cause

The memory business set an all-time high while the handset division posted an operating loss. Both results come from the same thing: the price of memory.

1 Aug 2026 · 6 min read
A thin new crescent moon in a deep navy twilight sky above the silhouetted rooflines of tropical shophouses, a minaret and palm trees.
Chinese Culture

Dates, Calendars and Holidays Across ASEAN

Ask our working-days calculator how many working days Singapore has in 2026 and it used to say 252. The answer is 251 — it had Hari Raya Puasa on the wrong day and was missing two in-lieu Mondays. Those are small errors with one cause: scheduling anything here means running three calendars at once, and only one of them stays where you left it. Why Chinese New Year wanders inside a fixed window while Hari Raya has no season at all, why the replacement day rather than the festival is what removes a day from your working year, and why a two-day holiday produces a two-month disruption window.

29 Jul 2026 · 10 min read
A worn wooden approval stamp resting on a desk, lit low against a dark background.
Business

Naming a Company in Malaysia and Singapore: What SSM and ACRA Actually Accept

Your first three names get rejected and nobody explains why. Both registries run a mechanical test: they strip your name to a stem before comparing it, so suffixes, plurals, punctuation and adding your own country change nothing. This is what SSM and ACRA actually accept — the disregard lists side by side, the words that need a third agency's permission, why reserving a name is not being granted it, and why a trademark can unmake your company name while your registration protects you from nothing. Then the half no registry handles: your Chinese name, which is registered nowhere, and the stroke tradition most calculators — ours included until this week — have been computing with the wrong numbers.

29 Jul 2026 · 12 min read
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