China girlfriend rental app gets leg up from Lunar New Year demand

BEIJING - As millions in China head home to celebrate the Lunar New Year holiday with their families, 24-year-old Luoluo is busy answering messages on a mobile app from desperate men looking to hire an instant girlfriend whom they can present to mom and dad.

On visits home during the holiday, which kicks off on Friday, single people are often subjected to tough lectures from relatives keen on reinforcing the importance of marriage and securing the family blood line.

Some singles resort to hiring fake girlfriends and boyfriends to appease their parents. But an explosion in smartphone use in recent years means one can now pay for such a date through a handful of mobile apps, with just a few clicks.

"Over 1,000 users on our platform have signed up as dates for hire for the New Year break," Cao Tiantian, founder of date-for-hire app Hire Me Plz, told Reuters.

Subscribers to the app pay from as little as 1 yuan ($0.15) to 1,999 yuan an hour for a dinner date, a chat, a game of mah-jong or even a foot massage.

Prices surge around the time of Lunar New Year, with thousands of attractive twenty-somethings like Luoluo commanding fees of 3,000 yuan to 10,000 yuan a day.

"I'm still seeking people to fill my time slots," said the woman from the southwestern province of Sichuan, who has just two half-day slots left to fill over the next seven days.

"But only those who stay in the same province as me. I don't have time to waste on travel," she added.

Apart from Hire Me Plz, there are five major date-hiring apps in China, which make their money by taking a cut from hires, and also from subscription fees.

"Our business model is still new, though an increasing number of young people have accepted the idea of selling their time as commodity," said Beijing-based Cao, who expects date-rental to become a multi-billion dollar market in five years.

Since its launch in 2015, Hire Me Plz has garnered a user base of 700,000 and 1.7 million followers on Tencent's (0700.HK) WeChat, China's biggest mobile social media network.

Date rentals - offline or online - have drawn criticism in recent years, with some netizens on social media and legal experts questioning the morality and legality of the business.

"There are no clear prohibitions in Chinese laws regarding date rentals. But risks exist among such deals, which may also violate the law to some extent," state-run China News Services this month cited Li Hongzhao, an official of the Beijing Lawyers Association Criminal Law Committee, as saying.

Li said it is sometimes hard to define the boundaries of appropriate intimacy and when an act of intimacy becomes sexual assault.

Sex is not part of the services offered on any of the mobile apps. Prostitution is illegal in China.

Dating services are also offered by individuals on Baidu's (BIDU.O) Tieba classifieds and Tencent's QQ messaging service. But buyers beware - those services provide no identity authentication, unlike the mobile apps.

Hire Me Plz's Cao said the initial aim of her app was to help overcome the problem of loneliness experienced by young people leaving home to work alone in big cities.

"I was seeking a more effective way to ask someone out. Who wants to chat for months via social networks and end up with nothing?"

Elsewhere in Asia, online date-for-hire services are mostly found on website-only platforms, such as Soulmate in South Korea and Pally Asia in Singapore.

Pally Asia, which calls itself a "rent-a-friend" platform, plans to push out an app in the first half of this year.

($1=6.8758 Chinese yuan)

(Additional reporting by Fathin Ungku in SINGAPORE and Nataly Pak in SEOUL; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Asia stocks slip, Japan rebounds in holiday-thinned trade

TOKYO - Asian shares pared losses on Monday as a weaker yen helped Japan's Nikkei snap a four-day losing streak, but trade was thin with many regional markets closed for the Lunar New Year holiday.

Wall Street's losses on Friday curbed overall sentiment, though S&P 500 E-Mini futures ESc1 rose about 0.4 percent as investors focused on signs of strength in a mixed U.S. nonfarm payrolls report released late last week.

Financial spreadbetters predicted Britain's FTSE 100 to open around 0.6 percent higher, and Germany's DAX and France's CAC 40 to each open up about 0.4 percent.

MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan was down 0.1 percent, with Australian shares slipping a few points to end nearly flat.

But Japan's Nikkei erased early steep losses as the dollar gained on the yen, and ended up 1.1 percent.

With Singapore, Hong Kong and mainland China all closed for the new year holiday, volume was thin. China, a focus of recent market concern, will be closed for the entire week for the holiday.

Data released over the weekend showed China's foreign reserves fell for a third straight month in January, as the central bank dumped dollars to defend the yuan and prevent an increase in capital outflows.

Beijing has been struggling to underpin the yuan, which faces depreciation pressure as China's growth rate slows to its lowest levels in a quarter of a century.

"Just as China's persistent accumulation of foreign reserves in the first decade of the 21st century signalled that its managed currency was undervalued, its persistent loss of foreign reserves signals that the yuan has become overvalued by market criteria," economist Bill Adams at PNC Financial Services Group said in a research note.

"There is a large probability that China's central bank tires of spending its foreign reserves to defend an overvalued currency in the near future. The People's Bank of China will likely widen the currency's trading band and permit a larger managed slide against the dollar in coming months."

Also over the weekend, North Korea's launch of a long-range rocket drew international condemnation.

SOME STRENGTH IN US JOBS

On Wall Street, major U.S. indexes logged both daily and weekly drops. The Nasdaq Composite led session losses, plunging 3.25 percent after a spate of disappointing forecasts from the technology sector.

Recently weak U.S. economic data has led investors to pare bets on a steady pace of interest rate increases by the Federal Reserve.

The U.S. nonfarm payrolls report on Friday showed an increase of just 151,000 jobs last month, falling well short of expectations for a rise of 190,000.

But the unemployment rate fell to 4.9 percent, the lowest since February 2008, and wages rose, indicating some signs of underlying strength in the labour market despite the weak headline figure.

Speculators slashed bullish bets on the U.S. dollar for a sixth straight week through Feb. 2, as net longs fell to their lowest level since roughly the third week of October, according to Reuters calculations and data from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission released on Friday.

In currency markets, the dollar index, which tracks the greenback against a basket of six major rivals, edged up 0.1 percent to 97.127, well above a nadir of 96.259 plumbed last Thursday, its lowest since October.

The dollar rose about 0.5 percent to 117.42 yen, moving away from Friday's 2-1/2 week low of 116.285. It slid 3.6 percent last week, its biggest weekly drop since July 2009.

"What we are seeing today is a correction after overwhelming selling in the dollar we saw last week. It is just unwinding of positions, not fresh bets against the yen," said Koichi Takamatsu, executive director of forex trading at Nomura Securities.

The euro edged down about 0.2 percent to $1.1137, though it remained in sight of Friday's three-month high of $1.1250 scaled immediately after the headline figure of the payrolls data led investors to reduce their bets on further Fed rate hikes.

The Australian dollar added 0.5 percent to $0.7094 after plunging nearly 2 percent against its U.S. counterpart on Friday.

Crude oil futures edged higher on hopes that big oil producers will take steps to address the global supply glut that has led to recent steep selloffs.

Saudi Arabia's oil minister Ali al-Naimi discussed cooperation between OPEC members and other oil producers to stabilise the global oil market with his Venezuelan counterpart on Sunday, according to state news agency SPA.

But nothing was decided, so caution kept gains in check. Brent crude added about 0.9 percent to $34.38 a barrel, while U.S. crude futures also rose about 0.9 percent to $31.17.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

Asian shares slump in holiday-thinned trade

TOKYO - Asian shares got off to a rocky start on Monday after mixed U.S. jobs data helped sink shares on Wall Street, but trade was thin with many regional markets closed for the Lunar New Year holiday.

MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan was down 0.2 percent, with Australian shares slipping 0.3 percent. Japan's Nikkei skidded 1.2 percent in early trade.

With Singapore, Hong Kong and mainland China all closed for the new year holiday, "volumes will be well below average and there tends to be a build-up of global leads that is released once Asian investors return to their desk – expect 'release valve trading late in the week," Evan Lucas, market strategist at IG in Melbourne, wrote in a note to clients.

U.S. nonfarm payrolls increased by just 151,000 jobs last month, falling well short of expectations for a rise of 190,000.

But the unemployment rate fell to 4.9 percent, the lowest since February 2008, and wages rose, indicating some signs of underlying strength in the labor market despite the weak headline figure.

Recently weak U.S. economic data has led investors to pare bets on a steady pace of interest rate increases by the Federal Reserve.

Markets in China, a focus of recent market concern, will be closed for the entire week for the holiday.

Data released over the weekend showed China's foreign reserves fell for a third straight month in January, as the central bank dumped dollars to defend the yuan and prevent an increase in capital outflows.

Beijing has been struggling to underpin the yuan, which faces depreciation pressure as China's growth rate slows to its lowest levels in a quarter of a century.

"Just as China's persistent accumulation of foreign reserves in the first decade of the 21st century signaled that its managed currency was undervalued, its persistent loss of foreign reserves signals that the yuan has become overvalued by market criteria," economist Bill Adams at PNC Financial Services Group said in a research note.

"There is a large probability that China's central bank tires of spending its foreign reserves to defend an overvalued currency in the near future. The People's Bank of China will likely widen the currency's trading bank and permit a larger managed slide against the dollar in coming months."

Also over the weekend, North Korea's launch of a long-range rocket drew international condemnation.

On Wall Street, major U.S. indexes logged both daily and weekly losses. The Nasdaq Composite led session losses, plunging 3.25 percent after a spate of disappointing forecasts from the technology sector.

In currency markets, the dollar index, which tracks the greenback against a basket of six major rivals, was steady at 97.038, well above a nadir of 96.259 plumbed last Thursday, its lowest since October.

The dollar edged up about 0.1 percent to 116.96 yen, moving away from Friday's 2-1/2 week low of 116.285 in a week in which it logged a 3.6-percent slide, its biggest weekly drop since July 2009.

The euro edged down about 0.2 percent to $1.1142, though it remained in sight of Friday's three-month high of $1.1250 scaled immediately after the headline figure of the payrolls data led investors to reduce their bets on further Fed rate hikes.

Crude oil futures slipped in thin trade, but were underpinned by glimmers of hope for steps by oil producers to address the global supply glut that has led to recent steep selloffs.

Saudi Arabia's oil minister Ali al-Naimi discussed cooperation between OPEC members and other oil producers to stabilize the global oil market with his Venezuelan counterpart on Sunday, according to state news agency SPA.

Brent crude was down 0.4 percent at $33.91 a barrel, while U.S. crude futures shed about 0.2 percent to $30.84.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

Apple shares drop below $100 for first time since August

Apple Inc. shares dropped below $100 for the first time in nearly five months on Wednesday following reports of slowing shipments of the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus.

Taiwan-based Foxconn, formally known as Hon Hai Precision Industry Co Ltd, will cut working hours over the week-long Lunar New Year holiday, according to a person familiar with the matter, a rare move that analysts said could be a sign of softening demand for the iPhone.

Japanese daily Nikkei, citing parts suppliers, said output of the iPhone models would be cut by about 30 percent in the January-March time frame so dealers could offload stock.

"I don't think anyone expects growth to accelerate from last year's hyper growth. The only question that remains is whether they will grow at all in 2016," said Walter Piecyk, an analyst with BTIG.

The iPhone accounts for the vast majority of Apple's revenue and profits, and worries about slowing sales have weighed on the stock, which has fallen nearly 19 percent over the last six months.

"We were already conservative about the first quarter," said analyst Kylie Huang at Daiwa-Cathay Capital Markets in Taipei, in response to Foxconn's Lunar New Year plans. "It's not just iPhone slowdown, but all of the Chinese economy."

Apple did not return requests for comment.

Foxconn said in a statement that it was "in the midst of planning operational schedules for the Lunar New Year holiday," but gave no details.

Since early December, about a third of analysts tracked by Thomson Reuters have trimmed their estimates on Apple. On average, they expect Apple to increase revenue this year by less than 4 percent, a far cry from the 28 percent achieved in the business year that ended in September.

"We can see per survey data that this decline in units is not a result of iPhone users switching away from the iPhone, but is simply due to the tough compare of the iPhone 6," said analyst Nehal Chokshi from Maxim Group, a brokerage firm.

"There is really no way that they could have produced the number of incremental users that they did on the iPhone 6 cycle with the iPhone 6S cycle," Chokshi added.

Lukewarm forecasts in December from suppliers such as Dialog Semiconductor GmbH and casing maker Jabil Circuit Inc. stoked fears that iPhone shipments could fall on an annual basis for the first time.

But some analysts questioned the extent of any slowdown.

"Apple has been gaining significant market share in pretty much every region, and I'm not seeing a global slowdown," said analyst Patrick Moorhead at Moor Insights & Strategy.

Apple's shares fell briefly to as low as $99.87 in Nasdaq trading on Wednesday, their lowest level since Aug. 24, when the shares fell to $92 as the entire stock market suffered a brief 'flash crash.'

Apple stock closed down nearly 2 percent at $100.70, amid a broadly lower stock market. The stock has not closed below $100 since Oct. 20, 2014.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com