DHAKA -- International mobile phone brands Nokia, Samsung, Vivo and others are increasingly choosing to set up manufacturing ventures in Bangladesh to avoid the South Asian country's high import tariffs and get direct access to its large and growing population.

Bangladesh, once a perennial bottom-dweller in global league tables, has drawn increasing attention in recent years as its economy racks up high growth rates and consumer spending power in the country of 163 million people expands.

It has also taken steps to attract foreign investment and increase

HO CHI MINH CITY -- Vietjet has received shareholder approval to sell a stake of up to 15%, the Vietnamese budget airline said on Tuesday, adding it will also consider a $300 million international bond sale.

While cargo shipping made Vietjet one of the few profitable carriers in 2020, it said shareholders at the annual meeting approved "a more cautious business plan for 2021" due to the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

An "exponential increase in cargo revenue" this

TOKYO -- Indonesia's top ride-hailing and e-commerce companies are already "well integrated" to navigate a looming lockdown as COVID-19 cases in the country surge, GoTo President Patrick Cao said at webinar hosted by the Financial Times and Nikkei on Tuesday.

Indonesia's on-demand app Gojek and e-commerce company Tokopedia in May said they would combine and form a holding company called GoTo, in what was considered Indonesia's largest ever merger. The group will span ride-hailing

HONG KONG -- AIA Group on Tuesday said it had agreed to buy a 24.99% stake in China Post Life Insurance for 12 billion yuan ($1.86 billion) to boost its exposure to the nation's life insurance market.

"China is one of the largest life insurance markets globally and capturing the significant growth potential it offers is a core component of AIA's strategy," the Hong Kong-listed company said in a statement.

The deal would be financed from

HONG KONG -- A new report contends that Chinese authorities are threatening academic freedom thousands of kilometers away in Australia, quoting one student from mainland China as saying: "I have to censor myself. This is the reality. I come to Australia and still I'm not free."

U.S.-based advocacy group Human Rights Watch, which released the report late on Tuesday, conducted interviews with 48 students and academics between last September and April. The self-censoring student, identified only by the

TOKYO -- Despite being known as a leader and innovator in information and communications technologies for decades, Japan's capabilities in cyberspace rank among the lowest compared with countries of a similar size because of constitutional constraints on collecting data, according to a study by an international think tank.

The study, published on Monday by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, groups 15 major nations in three tiers. While the U.S. sits alone at the top tier, Japan is grouped in the bottom tier

TOKYO -- Mitsubishi Electric falsified inspection data for some of its train air-conditioning equipment, the Japanese market leader revealed Tuesday, in cheating suspected of going back to the 1980s.

The improper inspections were uncovered by an internal investigation, and a probe is ongoing, the company said in a statement.

This revelation marks the latest scandal to cast doubt on quality checks in Japanese industry, with problems extending from cars to steel to earthquake safety equipment.

The problems at Mitsubishi Electric's Nagasaki works included

SINGAPORE -- Top Singaporean real estate group CapitaLand has agreed to sell stakes in six Chinese commercial properties to China's Ping An Life Insurance in a deal valued at 46.7 billion yuan ($7.23 billion).

CapitaLand will unload part of its ownership of two Raffles City projects in Shanghai and one each in Beijing, Ningbo, Chengdu and Hangzhou.

China is CapitaLand's largest market. The company plans to shift its Chinese portfolio away from housing and commercial real estate toward sectors such as

TOKYO/SINGAPORE -- The Tokyo Stock Exchange has welcomed its first listing by an Asian company under a framework providing greater investor access, with more than two dozen other foreign names weighing the Japanese market as an alternative to faraway New York and unstable Hong Kong.

Singapore-based Omni-Plus System debuted Japanese depositary receipts on the TSE's startup-heavy Mothers market. The company, which sells plastics for such products as appliances and vehicles in Southeast Asia and Japan, is only the second foreign company to list JDRs