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
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~1230 min
Total reading

Articles Showing 21–30 of 194

Supermarket shelves left partly empty, with price labels showing
Business

Ahold Delhaize Notified Regulators of Its Cyber Incident. Dutch Police Say It Has Not Filed a Report With Them

With no police report there is no criminal investigation, the police said. Albert Heijn's distribution is recovering, but online orders were still down on Thursday.

15 Oct 2026 · 5 min read
Calligraphy brushes with red handles resting beside a sheet of gridded writing paper
Home & Living

Japan's new kanji forms coincide with the mainland's in about a third of pairs

Japan fixed simpler print forms for its everyday kanji in 1949, and the 2010 Jōyō list still prints an old Kangxi form beside 362 of its 2,136 characters. Set against the mainland's GB 2312 character set, Japan's new form is the mainland's own character in 97 of the 302 separately encoded pairs.

15 Oct 2026 · 6 min read
Jakarta's skyline above the Semanggi interchange; Princeton Digital Group's hyperscale campuses are being built east of the capital
Business

Princeton Digital Group Sells Five Indonesian Data Centres to Sinar Mas's SM+

PDG is keeping its 400 MW of hyperscale campuses near Jakarta and handing its older enterprise sites to a local platform that will run 31 facilities. No price was given.

15 Oct 2026 · 4 min read
A temple hall with a curved red-tiled roof, carved dragons on the ridge and red lanterns at the doors
Home & Living

Over a third of a Hokkien dictionary's syllables change between Pe̍h-ōe-jī and Tâi-lô

Pe̍h-ōe-jī (POJ) and Tâi-lô are two ways of writing Hokkien in Latin letters, and Tâi-lô is the scheme Taiwan's Ministry of Education announced in 2006. Respelled from one to the other, 37% of the syllables in the ministry's Hokkien dictionary change, mostly through a few fixed letter pairs and a tone mark that moves.

15 Oct 2026 · 6 min read
A Hong Kong road marking reading LOOK LEFT in English above 望左 in Chinese
Home & Living

Mainland and Taiwan telegraph codebooks nearly always give a Hong Kong ID card character the same code below 8000

The four-digit groups under a Chinese name on a Hong Kong identity card are telegraph codes, which the Immigration Department calls the Chinese Commercial Code. Unicode records a mainland book and a Taiwan book, and in its record the two almost always agree on a character until its code reaches 8000.

15 Oct 2026 · 6 min read
Bangkok's skyline above the Chao Phraya River; the city is hosting the IMF and World Bank Annual Meetings where the Blueprint was launched
Business

IMF and World Bank Publish a 12-Point Plan for Fighting Online Fraud in Finance

The Bangkok Blueprint, drawn up with the Bank of Thailand, calls for accountability beyond banks, including platforms and telcos. It is guidance, not law.

15 Oct 2026 · 4 min read
A night street in Seoul lined with illuminated shop signs in Hangul
Home & Living

Revised Romanization and McCune-Reischauer agree on 15.8% of a Korean learner's dictionary

Revised Romanization and McCune-Reischauer both spell Korean as it is pronounced, yet they spell only 15.8% of the 44,034 headwords in a Korean learner's dictionary the same way. Passports skip the sound rules and spell a name syllable by syllable.

12 Oct 2026 · 6 min read
JavaScript code in an editor on a laptop screen
Business

Cloudflare Is Buying Deno, Which Will Stop Developing Its JavaScript Runtime in a Year

Ryan Dahl's team will work on Cloudflare Workers. The Deno Deploy hosting service closes in six months, and teams building on Deno now have to choose where their code goes next.

12 Oct 2026 · 4 min read
Stainless steel pipework and valves on industrial process equipment
Business

Schneider Electric Will Borrow Heavily to Buy Design Software Maker PTC for $22.6 Billion

The French energy-equipment group is paying US$205 a share in cash, funded largely by €16 billion to €17 billion of new debt, and will pause share buybacks for two years.

8 Oct 2026 · 4 min read
Hands taking a paper rubbing of Chinese characters carved into a stone tablet
Home & Living

The 3,500 commonest Chinese characters mostly have an exact Mandarin homophone

By Unicode's Unihan 17.0 readings, 89% of the 3,500 first-level characters on mainland China's 2013 standard list share their exact Mandarin sound, tone included, with another character on that level. Cantonese spreads the same characters over more syllables and groups them differently.

8 Oct 2026 · 6 min read
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