Asia Pacific

South Korea's No. 3 smartphone maker, Pantech Co., which has been under court receivership, is now up for sale on Wednesday, in a desperate move to get the company back on its feet, the Yonhap News Agency reported. The latest development came as the Seoul Central District Court gave its nod to a plan by Pantech creditors led by the Korea Development Bank to sell the company, a month after it commenced the troubled firm's court receivership program. Sale manager Samgjong KPMG will accept bids from potential buyers until 3 p.m. on Oct. 7.

China’s four biggest banks may ease mortgage lending, the latest in a series of policy steps aimed at supporting the country’s sliding property market, the 21st Century Business Herald reported yesterday, Bloomberg News reported. Criteria for loans to first-home buyers may be eased and people who have paid outstanding mortgages may be considered eligible for first-home status, the Guangzhou-based newspaper said, citing unidentified people at Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd. (601398) and Agricultural Bank of China Ltd.

China has launched a fresh effort to boost its flagging economy with cash injections by the central bank, but signs are mounting that monetary stimulus is losing its effectiveness as debt-ridden companies lose their appetite for borrowing even at low rates, the Financial Times reported. ‘Mini-stimulus’ measures launched since April have focused on increasing the supply of money and credit. Last week the central bank moved to inject $81bn into the banking system via loans to the five biggest banks.

Ultrasonic launched talks with creditors to try and avoid an insolvency and formally fired its two top executives on Thursday after they disappeared along with the Chinese shoemaker's cash, Reuters reported. Earlier this week, the German-listed firm said chief executive Qingyong Wu and chief operating officer Minghong Wu had gone missing at the weekend, and most of its cash reserves in China and Hong Kong had vanished.

Economist Paul Krugman thinks that if Japan’s sales tax reaches 10%, it could mean a disastrous return to deflation, The Wall Street Journal Japan Real Time blog reported. In an interview published this week in Shukan Gendai, a weekly Japanese magazine, Mr. Krugman, a Princeton University economist and New York Times columnist, weighed in on Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s economic policy as Mr. Abe’s administration closes in on the two-year mark in December. Saying that Mr. Abe has listened to the wrong people, Mr.

Another rural bank has been shuttered by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, ABS-CBN News reported. The Monetary Board (MB) placed the Rural Bank of Padre Burgos (Southern Leyte), Inc. under the receivership of the Philippine Deposit Insurance Corporation (PDIC) last September 12. The PDIC took over the bank on September 15. The rural bank's head office is located in Poblacion, Padre Burgos, Southern Leyte. As of June 30, 2014, records showed the bank has 6,120 accounts with total deposit liabilities of P32.6 million.

Dozens of countries with the most advanced economies have agreed on principles for concrete action to prevent corporations from gaming the international tax system, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said in a report on Tuesday, the International New York Times reported.

The world's second-largest economy is faring worse than previously thought, with government stimulus measures proving too short-lived to counter China's sharp real-estate downturn or to prop up flagging factory output, The Wall Street Journal reported. The latest indicator of China's deceleration came over the weekend with a sharper-than-expected drop-off in industrial production for August to 6.9% year-over-year, the slowest pace since 2009, during the global financial crisis.

Housing sales in China in the first eight months of the year fell 10.9% to 3.43 trillion yuan ($559 billion), according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics issued Saturday, The Wall Street Journal reported. Sales in the first seven months of the year were down 10.5% from a year earlier at 2.98 trillion yuan. Property developers across the country have been struggling with weak sales, bulging inventories and tight credit conditions since the start of the year, and some authorities, mostly at the local level, have been loosening policies to support the sluggish market.

Li Keqiang, Chinese premier, has assured global investors they are still welcome in China and said a rash of recent fines and regulatory investigations into their businesses were not specifically targeting them, the Financial Times reported. Mr Li’s comforting words to global companies, made on Wednesday at the World Economic Forum in Tianjin, came as revised government figures showed that, in 2013, outbound Chinese investment exceeded $100bn for the first time.