TOKYO -- Hitachi shares reached a roughly 20-year high in Tokyo trading on Friday, buoyed by forecasts that the company is headed toward a record net profit for the second year in a row for the 12 months ending March 2022.

The issue gained as much as 2% to 5,536 yen at one point before ending the session at 5,505 yen.

Since suffering a 787.3 billion yen ($7.23 billion) net

BANGKOK -- The Myanmar junta's election chief suggested Friday that Aung San Suu Kyi's political party, which held power prior to the February coup, may be dissolved.

"What should we do with the NLD?" asked Thein Soe, the military-appointed chairman of the Union Election Commission, at a meeting with parties other than ousted civilian leader Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy, according to a participant.

"Do we dissolve the party, or do we indict people for treason?"

LONDON -- Group of Seven nations agreed to stop financing international coal power projects by the end of this year at their first dedicated climate ministerial meeting, ramping up pressure on Japan and the U.S. to make a concrete commitment on abandoning the carbon-intensive energy source.

The two-day meeting of leading industrial nations, which ran through Friday, was held online. Attendees included Japanese Environment Minister Shinjiro Koizumi and Hiroshi Kajiyama, the minister of economy, trade and industry, as well as U.S.

Roland Kelts is the author of "Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture has Invaded the U.S.", an editor of "Monkey: New Writing from Japan," and a visiting professor at Waseda University.

Japan is world-famous for its punctual and efficient customer service, and for most of the pandemic -- with the country under varying degrees of lockdown -- this has been a godsend.

Food deliveries arrive at your door, hot and hermetically sealed, up to 10 minutes earlier than promised.

TOKYO -- Major Japanese apparel companies, including World and Mizuno, have decided to stop using Xinjiang cotton in response to allegations of human rights abuses by the Chinese government in the major cotton producing region, Nikkei has learned.

Sports brand Mizuno and apparel companies World and Cox will not be buying Xinjiang cotton, the companies told Nikkei.

Referring to the suspected human rights abuses of Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang, World's president, Nobuteru Suzuki, said: "Since there are such risks, we should not advertise and sell

TOKYO -- Sony Group will join forces with Japan's Kawasaki Heavy Industries in a bid to roll out a new remote robotics platform business that will cater to factory workers who have faced challenging conditions in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

The two companies announced on Friday plans to establish a joint company this summer in which they will each hold a 50% stake. The new company will have a capital of 100 million yen ($919,000) and will start operations soon

TOKYO -- SoftBank Group said on Friday that Ron Fisher, a longtime lieutenant of Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son, is stepping down from its board of directors along with Arm CEO Simon Segars and independent director Yuko Kawamoto.

Fisher joined SoftBank in 1995 after running a software company in the U.S., and helped Son expand SoftBank's international M&A activities. He has been a board member since 1997.

SoftBank said Fisher will continue to advise Son and Vision Fund CEO Rajeev

Tilman Ehrbeck is managing partner at Flourish, a global venture investment company. He is based in Washington, D.C.

When COVID-19 first struck a year ago, startup entrepreneurs and early-stage investors paused briefly to assess what the pandemic might mean for the burgeoning theme of fintech innovation. Rather than threatening new financial business models, though, the pandemic has brought the future forward, dramatically accelerating changes to customer behaviors and industry structure in Asia and beyond.

What had previously been expected to play out over

HONG KONG -- JD Logistics is set to raise $3.16 billion from its Hong Kong IPO after pricing its shares toward the lower end of their marketed range due to investor concerns about the sector.

Despite the uncertain sentiment, subscriptions for its initial public offering have been brisk, with retail investors placing orders for more than 200 times their share allocation, according to a person familiar with the transaction. The offering, which opened on May 17, closes on Friday.

"While the demand was