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

128
Articles
Business
Primary beat
Jul 2026
Writing since
~862 min
Total reading
All 128 Business 101 Chinese Culture 25 Home & Living 2

Articles · Business Showing 11–20 of 101

Two smiling café staff in aprons standing behind the counter.
Business

In the Philippines, the service charge belongs to the staff

Since 2019, Philippine law requires every peso of a collected service charge to go to non-managerial employees, shared by time worked and paid at least twice a month. What the law does not do is require a service charge at all — a "mandatory 10%" appears nowhere in it.

17 Sep 2026 · 5 min read
Beijing's central business district at dusk, lit towers standing against a pink and purple sky.
Business

ByteDance's Half-Year Revenue Rose 30% to $120bn. Profit Fell to $20bn.

The gap is AI infrastructure, reportedly about $23bn this year. No filing sits behind any of these numbers, because the company is private.

16 Sep 2026 · 5 min read
A whiteboard tracking a week of work, with handwritten column headings and rows of coloured sticky notes.
Business

Bending Spoons Is Buying Miro for $1.355bn. Its Record Is Steep Staff Cuts.

Miro runs at about $600m in recurring revenue. After previous acquisitions the Milan company cut 75 per cent of WeTransfer's staff and over 85 per cent of Brightcove's.

16 Sep 2026 · 6 min read
A stripped billboard frame with no advertisement against a blue sky — illustrating advertising space closed to some buyers.
Business

OpenAI Closed ChatGPT Ads to Image and Voice Rivals. Video Is Open, for Now.

Adobe learned through its account team that Firefly can no longer be advertised in ChatGPT. The two categories closed are the two where ChatGPT most recently became a competitor.

14 Sep 2026 · 6 min read
A memory chip soldered onto a green circuit board among smaller components — illustrating the commodity memory this inference design is built around.
Business

Positron Raised $875m to Build Inference Chips Around Laptop Memory

The Asimov chip uses LPDDR5X instead of the high-bandwidth memory everyone is short of. The argument is that a GPU wastes most of what HBM provides.

14 Sep 2026 · 6 min read
A spread of engraved historical share certificates marked capital stock and registered — illustrating the public listing OpenAI has declined to pursue this year.
Business

OpenAI Postpones Its Listing, and the Reason Given Is Safety

Altman says going public now would be ill-advised and that alignment work comes first. Anthropic is expected to start marketing its own listing next month.

14 Sep 2026 · 6 min read
Two office workers at their desks after dark, lit by a single desk lamp.
Business

Singapore's Employment Act has no overtime pay cap

The Ministry of Manpower publishes an overtime cap of S$2,600, or S$13.60 an hour. The Employment Act's Fourth Schedule computes overtime from the employee's own salary, and the only cap it ever had was deleted in 2019 — the published figure does not even reproduce from the formula printed beside it.

13 Sep 2026 · 4 min read
A tanker lorry on a multi-lane highway, seen alongside a concrete barrier.
Business

In Malaysia a lorry driver on RM6,000 still gets overtime and a clerk on RM4,100 may not

A lorry driver on RM6,000 and a coordinator on RM4,100 work for the same employer, and on the face of the First Schedule it is the driver who keeps a statutory right to overtime. The 2022 amendment moved the wage ceiling out of paragraph 1 and left paragraph 2, covering manual labour "irrespective of the amount of wages", exactly as it was.

13 Sep 2026 · 5 min read
A courier in a cap holds a stack of three plain cardboard parcels.
Business

Singapore's S$400 import limit is measured three different ways

A S$390 pair of trainers with S$35 shipping sits under Singapore's S$400 import threshold on one test and over it on another. On the tax authority's own worked example the parcel can be charged 9% twice, for S$76.50 of GST on S$390 of goods.

13 Sep 2026 · 5 min read
Wind turbines standing across open grassland under a dark sky and a faint rainbow
Business

DeepSeek Ordered 160,000 Huawei Chips. That Is Most of a Year's Output.

At the price reported two days ago the order runs to about $5.9bn — and to between 53 and 80 per cent of everything Huawei expects to build of that part in 2026.

13 Sep 2026 · 6 min read
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