CNA – Daily United States (US) sign-ups for Netflix have jumped in the first few days after the streaming giant’s password-sharing crackdown came into effect on May 23, data from research firm Antenna showed.

The news sent shares of the company up 2.3 per cent to USD418.92 in early trading.

Looking for new ways to make money in a saturating market and a tough economy, Netflix moved to regulate the sharing of account passwords with friends and family – a drastic turnaround for a company that had once tweeted “Love is sharing a password”.

Netflix had estimated that more than 100 million households had supplied their log-in credentials to people outside their homes. Under the new rules, US users can add a member outside of their homes for an additional fee of USD8 per month.

Its calculations seem to have paid off as the company recorded nearly 100,000 daily sign-ups on both May 26 and 27, according to Antenna. Netflix, which has expanded its crackdown to more than 100 other countries, did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

The streaming video pioneer saw its four largest days of US user acquisition after the change came into effect in the four-and-a-half years that Antenna has been covering the company.

The recent spike also exceeded levels seen during the initial US COVID-19 lockdowns in March and April 2020, according to Antenna, which sources data from third-party data collectors that track online purchase receipts, credit, debit and banking data details with permissions.

DOVER (AP) – The names of individual customers of collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX Trading can be permanently shielded from public disclosure, a Delaware bankruptcy judge ruled on Friday.

Following a two-day hearing, Judge John Dorsey rejected arguments from lawyers for several media outlets and for the United States (US) bankruptcy trustee, which serves as a government watchdog in Chapter 11 reorganisation cases, challenging FTX’s request to keep the names of customers and creditors secret.

Dorsey ruled that customer identities constitute a trade secret. He also said FTX customers need to be protected from bad actors who might target them by scouring the internet and the “dark web” for their personal information.

“It’s the customers that are the most important issue here,” he said. “I want to make sure that they are protected and they don’t fall victim to any types of scams that might be happening out there.”

Attorney for the media outlets Katie Townsend had argued that the press and the public have a “compelling and legitimate interest” in knowing the names of those affected by the stunning collapse of FTX.

“That collapse sent shock waves not just through the cryptocurrency industry, but the entire financial industry,” Townsend said. “And at this point, we don’t even know where the shock waves, both individually and institutionally, have hit the hardest, and what institutions may have the largest, or no, exposure as a result.”

But lawyers for FTX and its official committee of unsecured creditors argued that its customer list is both a valuable asset and confidential commercial information. They contend that secrecy is needed to protect FTX customers from theft and potential scams, and to ensure that potential competitors do not “poach” FTX customers. FTX believes its customer list could prove valuable as part of any sale of assets, or as part of a reorganisation.

“The debtors are in a position to realise value from these customer lists,” said FTX attorney Brian Glueckstein.

FTX entered bankruptcy in November when the global exchange ran out of money after the equivalent of a bank run. Founder Sam Bankman-Fried has pleaded not guilty to charges that he cheated investors and looted customer deposits to make lavish real estate purchases, campaign contributions to politicians, and risky trades at Alameda Research, his cryptocurrency hedge fund trading firm.

Three former FTX executives have pleaded guilty to fraud charges and are cooperating with investigators.

CNA – Twitter will soon begin paying verified content creators for ads in their replies, with the first payment block of around USD5 million, company owner Elon Musk said on Friday.

“Note, the creator must be verified and only ads served to verified users count,” Musk, the billionaire who bought Twitter last October, said in a tweet.

Since Tesla CEO Musk acquired Twitter, the platform has struggled to retain advertisers, who have been wary about the placement of their ads after the company laid off thousands of employees.

The move comes as Twitter’s newly named CEO, Linda Yaccarino, an advertising veteran from NBCUniversal, is about to take the helm at the social media platform.

PARIS (AFP) – Despite the recent fall in oil prices, high air fares may stay in place for some time to come, said airline industry professionals and experts.

The gradual return of demand for travel last year following the lifting of COVID-19-related travel restrictions, had already given the signal for higher fares.

But this year, just as the airlines are expecting to see passenger numbers almost back to pre-crisis levels, prices have really taken off.

In France in April, the average cost of an air ticket was 32.6 per cent higher than four years earlier, according to the French Civil Aviation Authority.

That increase was as much as 51 per cent for flights to the Asia-Pacific region.

In the United States, the air ticket price index published by the St Louis Federal Reserve showed an 11-per-cent increase in air ticket prices between April 2019 and April 2023.

This is despite the fact that oil prices have eased since peaking in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine in early 2022.

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) estimates that they will fall to an average of USD98.5 a barrel this year, compared with USD135.6 last year.

Representing between 25 per cent and 30 per cent of airline costs, fuel normally has a significant effect on ticket prices.

However “labour costs and other costs associated with the supply chain… seem to be higher or rising”, IATA’s chief economist Marie Owens Thomsen said earlier this week in Istanbul.

“Airlines will have to find a way to cover those costs or they will start making losses again,” at a time when they are barely back in the black and have to pay off the colossal debts incurred due to COVID-19, she added at the general meeting of her association, which brings together 300 airlines from around the world.

For Vik Krishnan, a specialist in the airline sector at strategy consultancy McKinsey, the main issue is now “less about oil prices and more about the fact that there are too few seats chasing too many people who want to be in them”.

Despite order books that are sometimes full right up to the end of the decade, aircraft manufacturers are struggling to meet their delivery targets because of shortages of parts or materials from their suppliers.

There is also the thorny issue of labour costs.

“Many airlines had to recut their deals with their flight and cabin crews… but also all of the supply, the ground handlers, the maintenance shops, they all had to pay considerably higher wages coming out of COVID,” said Geoffrey Weston from the consultancy firm Bain & Company.

“There aren’t many factors that are going to bring ticket prices down,” echoed aviation sector specialist at AlixPartners Pascal Fabre.

And given that the airline industry will have to invest hundreds, if not thousands, of billions of dollars in new aircraft and renewable fuels if it hopes to meet its 2050 decarbonisation target, IATA’s Owens Thomsen sees no respite for consumers any time soon.

“Costs are likely to increase until such a point when all of these solutions have become commercially viable and produced at scale.

“When we reach that lucky moment, we can start thinking that these costs can decline again.

I cannot pinpoint necessarily when that’s going to happen but I’m tempted to say 2040”.

ZURICH (AFP) – UBS is set to finalise the takeover of Credit Suisse tomorrow, but the hardest part is yet to come: turning the arranged marriage of Switzerland’s biggest banks into a success.

Reassuring the financial markets, customers, employees, the government and the public remains a challenge once the mega-merger is completed.

“From Monday onwards, UBS can start being proactive,” analyst at Swiss investment manager Vontobel Andreas Venditti told AFP.

Switzerland’s largest bank must already have an idea of what bits of Credit Suisse it wants to keep, close or sell, but “so far they were limited in what they could do”, he said.

On June 5, the two Zurich-based banks announced that the merger should be completed on June 12.

A merger this complex could turn out to be a nightmare, particularly given how little time UBS has had.

UBS expects an exceptional accounting gain of nearly USD35 billion due to the difference between the purchase price and the recognised net assets of Credit Suisse.

UBS chief executive Sergio Ermotti has warned the coming months will be “bumpy” for the bank.

Takeover preparations have already brought “a first wave” of emotions and difficult decisions, but “other waves” are still to come, he told the Swiss Economic Forum conference in Interlaken on Friday.

He said jobs would be the trickiest part of the merger, adding that cuts were inevitable given the overlap in some activities.

Like UBS, Credit Suisse was among 30 international banks deemed too big to fail due to their importance in the global banking architecture.

But the collapse of three United States (US) regional lenders in March left Credit Suisse looking vulnerable, and its share price plunged more than 30 per cent during trading on March 15.

The Swiss government, the central bank and financial regulators then stepped in and strong armed UBS into a USD3.25 billion takeover announced on Sunday, March 19, before the markets reopened the following day.

AP – American Airlines and JetBlue said on Friday they should be allowed to keep selling tickets on each other’s flights in the Northeast and link their frequent-flyer programmes despite losing an antitrust trial over their partnership.

The Justice Department said if the airlines get their wish, travellers would miss out on the benefits of restoring competition between the carriers.

In separate filings, the airlines and the government told a federal judge in Boston how he should carry out his ruling last month to break up the partnership. American’s CEO has said his airline will appeal the verdict.

The Justice Department proposed a final judgement that would order American and JetBlue to end most parts of the deal immediately. The government said the airlines should honour existing tickets to avoid hurting travellers, but then quickly wind down their sharing of airport gates and takeoff and landing slots at key airports.

The airlines want to keep selling tickets on each other’s flights – called code-sharing – and offering reciprocal frequent-flyer benefits because those practices “are common in the airline industry.” American and JetBlue also objected to the Justice Department’s request that they be barred from any deals involving revenue-sharing or coordinating routes with each other for 10 years, and with any other United States (US) airline for two years.

The airlines call their partnership in New York and Boston the Northeast Alliance, or NEA.

The Justice Department said that by asking to keep elements of the deal, the airlines are trying “to craft a new ‘NEA Lite’ on the fly”.

The airlines launched their partnership after getting approval from the outgoing Trump administration in January 2021. They argued it helped them compete against Delta Air Lines and United Airlines in the Northeast.

HELSINKI (XINHUA) – China is back on track for economic growth and new opportunities, Finnish experts said in the latest edition of the China Review published by the Finland Chamber of Commerce on Friday.

China’s economy has grown strongly since the end of last year due to the country constantly optimising COVID-19 response measures, and China’s economic growth forecasts are generally updated upwards by analysts, country director for China at Business Finland Marko Tiesmaki said in the report.

According to him, China’s market is expected to enter a strong growth phase in the next few years.

The report said that several joint Finnish-Chinese projects are currently underway in energy production, distribution and storage.

Most of the Finnish companies active in China are successful and optimistic about China’s economic growth, according to the report.

Citing a business survey conducted earlier this year, the report noted that almost 80 per cent of the respondents expected turnover, profitability and investments to increase in China this year.

Expert from the Finland Chamber of Commerce Lenita Toivakka pointed out in the report that the work for the green transition will not be successful without cooperation with China.

There are opportunities for Finnish companies in such fields as low-carbon solutions, emission-free transport, digitalisation, health technology and smart health services, Toivakka said.

The latest edition of the China Review was written by Finnish experts from the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment, the Bank of Finland, Business Finland and the Finnish Institute of International Affairs.

CNA – For the last three years, the Malaysian economy has kept its balance against a backdrop of protracted challenges ranging from a health crisis, political uncertainty and sharply rising prices that have plunged the country into the worst cost-of-living crisis ordinary citizens have ever faced.

Now, darker storm clouds are starting to form, as a global economic slowdown and tighter credit conditions point to a further weakening in the domestic economy. Malaysia’s economy expanded 5.6 per cent in the first quarter of the year, well above market expectations of a 4.8 per cent growth.

However, the picture is by no means upbeat, said BMI, a unit of the rating company Fitch Group. The first-quarter growth was sharply lower than the 7.1 per cent increase in the fourth quarter of last year.

BMI is expecting Malaysia’s gross domestic product to expand by 4.2 per cent this year, half that of the 22-year high of 8.7 per cent logged in 2022.

All of this means that the rebound Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim pledged to deliver during the run-up to the November 2022 general election when he urged Malaysians to give his Pakatan Harapan (PH) coalition a chance to lead the country is looking bleak.

There are serious ramifications.

Delivering on pledges to ordinary Malaysians will in turn boost investor confidence, both domestic and foreign, in the country. MIDF Research, a local investment advisory firm, noted that the local equities market has seen net outflows for 16 of the 22 weeks this year, with more than MYR2.9 billion (USD628 million) sucked out of the local stock market.

Failure to navigate Malaysia’s economy safely out of the rough seas ahead would seriously dent Anwar’s standing among Malaysians, who are hoping that he can set the country on a new course and pull it out from its longest political and economic funk.

In recent days, Anwar has stressed that his government has delivered on bringing greater political stability, which in turn has improved the national investment climate. Anwar, who is also finance minister, told Parliament this week that approved investment for the first quarter amounted to RM71.4 billion, representing a 60 per cent increase from RM44.7 billion recorded in the same quarter in 2022.

UNSETTLED POLITICS

“I feel the political stability has boosted investor confidence and spurred investments to flow in stronger than previously, but what is important is not just announcements (of investments) and memoranda of understanding but also the implementation,” he was quoted as saying in local media.

Economists and businessmen in Anwar’s inner circle noted that after taking over the premiership in November 2022, he has mostly focussed his efforts on consolidating government finances and plugging leakages. The government has frozen billions of dollars worth of contracts awarded by the previous government through direct negotiations and is now insisting on public tenders that the administration believes can help cut costs.

“There have been big gains in injecting financial discipline in government but there is no one thing that we can trumpet to show that confidence has returned,” noted a close aide to the premier, adding that cost-of-living issues remain a huge problem for the administration.

While Malaysia’s inflation eased slightly to 3.3 per cent in April from 3.4 per cent the month earlier, the cost-of-living pressures persist, particularly in urban centres.

The prolonged ambivalence among investors is largely due to the country’s unsettled politics.

While Anwar’s so-called unity government, led by PH, enjoys a comfortable majority in the 222-member Parliament, questions remain about the administration’s support from the politically dominant ethnic Malay community that makes up more than 60 per cent of the population.

Answers to this problem will come when six states hold their respective assembly elections soon.

Anwar desperately needs to show that his multi-racial coalition government has been able to reverse the tide in the Malay vote that went in favour of the opposition Perikatan Nasional coalition, comprising Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia (Bersatu) and the right-wing Parti Islam Se-Malaysia (PAS), two purely Malay political concerns.

The states in play are the ethnically mixed Penang, Selangor and Negeri Sembilan, all legislatures currently controlled by the PH coalition that political analysts expect will see no change. The uphill challenges are in the dominant Malay states of Terengganu, Kelantan and Kedah, which are under the rule of PAS.

A status quo outcome, or even better, a win in one of the PAS-led states, would represent a major boost for the Anwar government.

POLICY STANCE ON GOVERNMENT SPENDING NOT SUSTAINABLE

Politics aside, economic headwinds remain Anwar’s most serious challenge.

Once one of the region’s budding tiger economies, Malaysia has fallen to fifth place among the economies in the ASEAN. It has been overtaken by Vietnam which ranks in the top four together with Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore.

The effects of the continuing global slowdown showed up starkly in the country’s export performance, which contracted 17.4 per cent year-on-year in April.

Bank Muamalat’s chief economist Mohd Afzanizam Abdul Rashid forecasts that overall exports this year could decline by nine per cent, compared with a 25 per cent growth in 2022. “This will leave domestic demand as the main economic driver for overall growth,” he said.

Economists noted that domestic demand, made up by government spending and private consumption, has accounted for more than 70 per cent of gross domestic product since 2019.

But this growth option is no longer sustainable. Malaysia is now suffering a serious financial hangover from the spending binge, with government debt ballooning to 1.08 trillion ringgit at end-2022, almost doubling in six years.

“The policy stance of government spending is no longer sustainable, and Malaysia needs a new economic narrative,” Sunway University’s Professor Yeah Kim Leng, who sits on a five-member panel advising Anwar on financial matters, told CNA.

“The new path must feature shifting the economy to more value-added production driven by attracting technology-intensive industries that will in turn boost wages,” added Yeah.