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.

194
Articles
Business
Primary beat
Jul 2026
Writing since
~1230 min
Total reading
All 194 Business 125 Chinese Culture 46 Home & Living 23

Articles · Business Showing 31–40 of 125

Singapore's Parliament House in front of the central business district towers, a Singapore flag flying behind it
Business

Singapore's Small Claims Tribunals shut two years before your claim expires

The tribunals lose jurisdiction two years after the cause of action accrued, while a contract claim lives for six under the Limitation Act. For four of those years the claim is enforceable and the cheap forum is closed — and the $30,000 ceiling needs the other side's signature.

18 Sep 2026 · 6 min read
A receding row of national flags on poles against a pale sky
Business

Costa Rica Joins the Digital Trade Pact Singapore Started

The fifth party to DEPA, and the second to accede. Six applicants remain outside, including China, whose process opened in 2022 and has not finished.

18 Sep 2026 · 5 min read
The Hanoi skyline at golden hour, high-rise towers above dense low-rise housing
Business

VinFast Is Buying Its Founder's Property Company for $1.2 Billion

The filing says the price is at a discount to an independent valuation. It does not name the valuer, publish the valuation, or say how large the discount is.

17 Sep 2026 · 6 min read
Stacks of silver and two-tone coins on a dark surface.
Business

Thai severance pay now reaches 400 days, and so does the tax exemption

Thailand's severance table stopped at 300 days' wages until 2019. The Labour Protection Act now has a sixth tier of 400 days for twenty years' service, and the income tax exemption on severance covers the last 400 days' wages up to 600,000 baht.

17 Sep 2026 · 5 min read
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
Editorial Policy →
Advertisement