Founded in 1947, Koo In-Hwoi (founder of LG Corp) established Lucky Chemical Industrial Corp, and launched "Lucky Cream," the very first cosmetics product in Korea. In 1954, the company also launched Korea's first toothpaste brand, ‘Lucky Toothpaste’. In February 1995, the company changed its name to LG Chemical Ltd. In April 2001, LG Household & Health Care (LG H&H) spun off from LG Chemical, and was listed on the Korean Stock Exchange. Since then, it has grown to be Korean’s largest household goods and cosmetics company with currently a market capitalization of $19 billion.

Alibaba-affiliated fintech giant Ant Group has announced its long-awaited public offering with a dual listing on the new Shanghai Stock Exchange’s Star Board (or the Science and Technology Innovation Board, which is being dubbed “China’s Nasdaq”) and also on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

Chinese regulators decided to launch a new Nasdaq-style Shanghai’s Star Board on 13 June 2019. Their vision is to make the Star Board a serious competitor to the Nasdaq - an attractive financing option for dynamic companies while offering investment opportunities. It wants to create a fundraising platform for promising technology firms in key fields such as chip making, artificial intelligence and biotechnology.

LG Chem is the leading South Korean vertically integrated chemicals company that has globally competitive products, including premium grade ABS, specialty polymers, polarisers and energy storage and electric vehicle (EV) battery cells. It holds the largest market share in the global ABS market and is leading the market as a global EV leader on its superior technology. LG Chem is a way to play the increasing penetration of EV and is also poised to benefit from the EU’s Green Energy Deal.

As a leading internet technology company based in China, NetEase is dedicated to providing premium online services centred around innovative and diverse content, community, communication and commerce. NetEase develops and operates some of China’s most popular mobile and PC-client games. As of March 31, NetEase had over 100 mobile games offered in China and mobile games contributed 55% of its total revenues. In more recent years, NetEase has expanded into international markets including Japan and North America. Overseas games revenue presently accounts for approximately 10% of total online games revenue. In addition to its self-developed game content, NetEase partners with other leading game developers, such as Blizzard Entertainment and Mojang AB (a Microsoft subsidiary), to operate globally renowned games in China. Thanks to its digital activities, the company is more or less protected against the coronavirus crisis, and can even thrive on it as more people are obliged to stay at home.

MediaTek is the world’s 4th largest global fabless semiconductor company and powers more than 1.5 billion devices a year. It is a market leader in chipset technology for Smart TVs, Voice Assistant Devices (VAD), Android tablets, feature phones, Optical and Blu-ray DVD players. It’s the number two globally in mobile phones. The company’s products can be found in 20 % of homes globally and nearly 1 of every 3 mobile phones is powered by MediaTek.

The current situation in the financial world can best be described as a VUCA world. This term was thought up by the United States, in the 1980s, to describe the situation in the years following the Cold War. VUCA stands for “Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity”.

SK Hynix (Hynix) is a South Korea-based company mainly active in the production and sales of semiconductor memories. Its major products include dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), NAND flashes, as well as multi-chip packages (MCP), among others. Since piloting production of South Korea’s first 16kb static random-access memory (SRAM) in 1984, SK Hynix is now the world’s second-largest memory chipmaker (after Samsung Electronics) and the world’s fifth-largest semiconductor company. SK Hynix has consistently led the industry with smaller, faster and lower power semiconductors, mostly focused on DRAM.

Julius Baer recently published its first “Global Wealth and Lifestyle Report” that looks at the trends behind consumption patterns. Driven by a booming number of wealthy residents who are reshaping the global high-end market, Asia is now home to the three most expensive cities in the world. But as consumers worldwide begin to put sustainability in focus, the high-end market is set to undergo further transformation in the coming years.

At the end of 2018, Jair Bolsonaro was elected as the new president of Brazil. The election of Bolsonaro, sometimes called the “Trump of Brazil”, was seen as a shift to the far right and in fact one of the most radical political changes in decades. He certainly is a very controversial figure who exalted the country’s military dictatorship, advocated torture and threatened to destroy, jail or drive his political opponents into exile. Still, he managed to win the presidential elections by tapping into a deep well of resentment at the status quo in Brazil: a country whiplashed by rising crime and two years of political and economic turmoil. His promise was that he would change all of that and bring much needed change.