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 Showing 171–180 of 194

A well-used orange and grey electric cement mixer standing on a building site, its drum crusted with dried mortar, beside scaffolding poles and a plastic bucket.
Home & Living

How Many Bags of Concrete Do You Actually Need?

Ask this site and you get 80 or you get 7. Both are right: one tool counts bags of ready-mixed concrete, the other counts bags of cement. The gap is 10.8 to 18 times, and it is the word “bag” doing the damage.

16 Aug 2026 · 7 min read
Laser equipment on an optical bench, illustrating a report on quantum computing company IonQ and what its revenue actually measures.
Business

A Quantum Company Reported Real Revenue. Read Which Part Is Quantum Computing.

Revenue up 287 per cent to US$80.1 million, a fifth consecutive record quarter, and a US$1.8 billion foundry purchase by a company guiding to under US$300 million a year. The organic figure is 132 per cent, and the four segments are not equally speculative.

16 Aug 2026 · 7 min read
A laptop, notebook and phone on a desk, illustrating a report on venture funding flowing into tools that secure enterprise AI systems.
Business

AI Security Becomes Its Own Budget Line

Seven of the twelve cybersecurity funding deals announced between mid-July and early August went to companies protecting AI agents and applications. Mindgard's US$30 million Series A is one of them, and its product list describes what enterprises can no longer answer for themselves.

15 Aug 2026 · 7 min read
Industrial production equipment on a factory line, illustrating a report on South Korea funding its chip equipment and materials suppliers.
Business

South Korea Has a New Chip Fund. Samsung and SK Hynix Are Not the Point.

Five trillion won goes to materials, components, equipment and fabless design - the layer under and alongside the champions. A country with two of the best memory makers on earth has decided the marginal state dollar belongs elsewhere.

15 Aug 2026 · 8 min read
Traffic at a wide city intersection in China, illustrating a report on the Guangzhou company Pony.ai expanding its robotaxi service into Europe.
Business

2,000 Robotaxis, Five European Cities. One of Them Exists.

Pony.ai and Uber will put more than 2,000 robotaxis across five European cities. Four are unnamed and none has a date, so the number has no denominator. The structure underneath it is the reusable part - and it is the third market-access template we have covered this week.

15 Aug 2026 · 8 min read
Close-up of a green printed circuit board, illustrating a report on SMIC mature-node foundry capacity and rising wafer prices.
Business

SMIC Is Running at 93.7 Per Cent. Prices Are Going Up.

Revenue passed US$3 billion for the first time and profit tripled, but the line that matters came from the earnings call: SMIC intends to charge more. At 93.7 per cent utilisation, and capped on expansion by the same export controls meant to constrain it, the company can.

15 Aug 2026 · 8 min read
Ink-wash drawing of a scholar's table: a corded stack of thread-bound volumes, one open beside them, with a brush resting on an inkstone.
Chinese Culture

What Links the 36 Stratagems to the Art of War's 13 Chapters

The two are separate books a thousand years apart, so a stratagem filed under a chapter is a reading aid, not a lineage. Two links quote the stratagem's own characters, one borrows its image, most state the principle it applies — and one of the thirty-six has no honest home in the treatise at all.

13 Aug 2026 · 6 min read
Two people at a glass table, one pointing at a specific line on a printed contract.
Business

Two Offers, the Same Salary, and Opposite Answers

Two Singapore offers at the same S$144,000 a year rank in opposite directions depending on what you count. One wins by S$1,020 on cash reaching the bank; the other wins by S$1,200 once employer contributions are counted. The cause is the CPF ceilings, and the lesson is that the employer's share is real pay no offer letter mentions.

13 Aug 2026 · 8 min read
A worn mid-century booklet of the Thirty-Six Stratagems, of the kind the collection first surfaced in.
Chinese Culture

How Well Attested Are the 36 Stratagems?

The Thirty-Six Stratagems are introduced as ancient military history. Reading all thirty-six origin texts end to end, twenty-seven name a dated episode with named people — but four take their name from a poem or an anecdote and borrow a battle afterwards, two are proverbs with no incident at all, two hedge, and the single most famous entry is the one a named historian examined and rejected.

13 Aug 2026 · 6 min read
Close-up of a green printed circuit board showing surface-mounted components, solder pads and a connector edge
Business

Foxconn Now Earns More From AI Racks Than From Everything Apple

Cloud and networking hit 51 per cent of second-quarter revenue against 29 for consumer electronics - the first time AI servers have outearned the iPhone business. The 2027 ceiling is now TSMC's packaging line, not Foxconn's floor space.

13 Aug 2026 · 8 min read
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