Billion dollars baby

The Hanoitimes - In addition to current incentives, Vietnam also offers tailor-made ones for hi-tech projects that help local firms further integrate into global value chains, said a senior government official. A government’s task force on promoting foreign direct investment (FDI) in Vietnam has been in contact with a number of global tech firms that are considering investing in large scale projects of up to US$1 billion each in Vietnam, according to Do Nhat Hoang, director of the Ministry of Planning and Investment’s Foreign Investment Agency. Overview of the online conference. Photo: VGP. Details of those in discussion, however, remained classified, Mr. Hoang, who is also a member of the task force, said at an online discussion on attracting FDI to Vietnam on September 4. According to Mr. Hoang, Vietnam remains a favorite investment destination for foreign businesses. While global FDI is projected to decline by 40% year-on-year in 2020, FDI commitments to Vietnam in the first eight months went down by 13% year-on-year to US$19.54 billion, and the disbursed amount was down 5.1% to US$11.3 billion. Such a decline remains acceptable given the dim outlook in regional countries and around the world, Mr. Hoang commented. Notably, year to August 20, registered FDI capital for fresh projects in Vietnam increased by 6.6% year-on-year to US$9.73 billion while existing projects have been injected an additional US$4.87 billion, up 22.2%. Mr. Hoang said through various contact channels, the task force saw growing interests in Vietnam from foreign investors. In its semi-annual industrial production report released in July, the Ministry of Industry and Trade also tipped big tech firms such as LG, Panasonic and Foxconn are looking to shift or expand production in Vietnam in the post-Covid-19 period. In early 2020, Apple recruited a series of senior positions in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, fueling rumors that the US-based tech giant is moving …

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Officers from the northern Cao Bang Province joined in a raid of a rented house where the suspects lived on Thursday night and took in five women who had agreed to sell their babies including one who is eight months pregnant. They said three other mothers had been taken to China to deliver their babies for sale. The police described it as a large trafficking gang comprising Vietnamese and foreign members. They have detained Mai Minh Chung, 36, and two other Vietnamese suspects. Investigation found Chung joined the operation in April 2019, using social networks to look for pregnant women who wished to sell their babies. For each successful transaction, the mother would receive VND80 million ($3,460) and Chung VND30 million. The babies rescued Thursday have been handed to the Vietnam Women's Union’s Center for Women and Development and the police are continuing their investigation. Vietnam is a human trafficking hotspot with the crime generating tens of billions of dollars annually , according to the Ministry of Public Security. There have been over 3,400 victims of trafficking since 2013, over 90 percent of them women, children and people from ethnic minority communities. Eighty percent of victims end up in China , which suffers from one of the worst gender imbalances due to its one-child policy and illegal abortion of female fetuses by parents who prefer sons, leading to increased trafficking of Vietnamese women and baby girls to that country. …

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Bitcoin took another large stride toward mainstream acceptance on Monday after billionaire Elon Musk’s electric vehicle company Tesla Inc revealed it had bought $1.5 billion of the cryptocurrency and would soon accept it as a form of payment for cars, sending the cryptocurrency shooting higher. The announcements, buried deep in Tesla’s 2020 annual report, drove a roughly 20% surge in the world’s most widely held cryptocurrency to over $47,000. At current prices, 0.8 bitcoins would be enough to buy an entry-level Tesla Model 3. Investors anticipated other companies will soon join a list of firms that invest in or hold bitcoin including BlackRock Inc, the world’s largest asset manager, and payments companies Square and PayPal. Musk has upended Wall Street over the last year and briefly became the world’s richest person as shares of Tesla surged nearly 500% to become the fifth most-valuable U.S. company, leaving other companies and investors eager to follow in his wake. “If any lesser mortals had made the decision to put part of their balance sheet in Bitcoin, I don’t think it would have been taken seriously,” said Thomas Hayes, managing member at Great Hill Capital LLC in New York. “But when the richest man in the world does it, everyone has to take a second look.” The news sparked heavy trading in cryptocurrencies and caused exchanges like Coinbase, Gemini, Binance to experience technical issues, according to Coindesk. It also generated discussion on Reddit. While discussions of cryptocurrencies are banned on the WallStreetBets community that fueled the GameStop Corp trading frenzy, users in other subreddits posted “to the moon,” expecting more companies to follow suit after Tesla. A well-known supporter of cryptocurrencies, Musk has weighed in regularly on the past month’s frenzy in retail investment, also driving up prices of the meme-based digital currency dogecoin and shares of U.S. video game chain GameStop. Experts said they would not be …

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