Category: ACN Newswire

JAKARTA, INDONESIA, Oct 30, 2026 - (ACN Newswire via SeaPRwire.com) - PT Garuda Indonesia (Persero) Tbk (GIAA) reported a 13.2% year-on-year increase in revenue to US$2.71 billion for the first nine months of 2026, supported by stronger contributions from its core airline operations and a 31.3% rise in non-airline business revenue. The performance reflects the Group's expanding revenue base and continued transformation progress, despite persistent pressure from elevated jet fuel prices.Revenue from scheduled airline services increased 12.6% year-on-year, contributing an additional US$233.2 million, while non-scheduled services grew 2.1%, adding US$6.3 million. Non-airline businesses recorded a US$77.0 million revenue increase, accounting for approximately 24.3% of the Group's total revenue growth during the nine months of 2026.The performance was achieved amid continued industry-wide cost pressures, particularly from higher jet fuel prices driven by geopolitical tensions in the Middle East and volatility in global energy markets. The Group's fuel expenditure rose 42.9% year-on-year, equivalent to US$309.8 million, contributing to a 15.7% increase in overall operating costs.Excluding fuel, operating expenses increased by approximately 3.1%, significantly below revenue growth of 13.2%, reflecting progress in cost management and operating efficiency.Garuda Indonesia Group recorded an operating profit of US$97.2 million, while its net loss narrowed by 3.0% to US$179.3 million. The results demonstrate continued revenue momentum and improving cost discipline as the Group advances its financial recovery.Non-Airline Businesses Strengthen Group-Wide GrowthGaruda Indonesia Group's diversified business portfolio continued to make a greater contribution to overall performance, with non-airline revenue rising 31.3% year-on-year to US$322.8 million.Growth was supported by a 42.4% increase in aircraft maintenance revenue from external customers at GMF AeroAsia, alongside a 76.1% rise in travel agency services revenue. These developments highlight the growing commercial potential of the Group's broader business ecosystem, complementing its core passenger airline operations.Garuda Indonesia President Director and Chief Executive Officer Thomas Oentoro said the performance reinforces the importance of developing stronger contributions from across the Group's businesses. "Strengthening our core airline operations remains essential, but our future growth must also come from making better use of the capabilities and opportunities across the Group. The increasing contribution from our non-airline businesses demonstrates how a more integrated and commercially focused business ecosystem can support our financial recovery," Thomas said.He added that continued support from Danantara, as the Group's shareholder, would play an important role in advancing operational improvements and strengthening collaboration across its businesses."With Danantara's support, we are focused on improving productivity, unlocking greater value from our existing assets and capabilities, and ensuring that each business contributes more effectively to the Group's overall performance," he said.Fleet Recovery Supports Passenger Growth and Operational ReliabilityOperational improvements also contributed to stronger traffic performance during the first nine months of 2026, with Garuda Indonesia Group carrying 16.7 million passengers, compared with 15.6 million in the corresponding period last year.Of the total, Garuda Indonesia carried 7.7 million passengers, while Citilink served 8.9 million. Combined flight frequencies increased 7.9% year-on-year to 117,868 services, from 109,259 previously.The growth was supported by continued fleet reactivation initiatives, with the Group's serviceable fleet reaching 106 aircraft as of September 2026, comprising 64 Garuda Indonesia and 42 Citilink aircraft. This represented an increase of 24 serviceable aircraft from 82 in the same period last year, reflecting ongoing efforts to restore fleet availability and optimize operating capacity with support from Danantara.Alongside higher fleet availability, operational reliability continued to improve. The Group's on-time performance (OTP) reached 92.01%, an improvement of 5.86 percentage points from 86.15% a year earlier.Thomas emphasized that fleet recovery must translate into sustained improvements in productivity, network efficiency and customer experience. "Restoring fleet availability is an important part of our transformation, but adding capacity alone is not enough. Every aircraft must be deployed productively, every route must contribute to a more efficient network, and our customers must see tangible improvements in reliability and service," he said.Advancing Transformation Towards Sustainable ProfitabilityLooking ahead, Garuda Indonesia Group will continue to accelerate its transformation priorities, focusing on fleet productivity, disciplined network optimization, stronger contributions across its business portfolio and sustained cost management.These priorities will guide the Group's efforts to strengthen competitiveness, improve financial resilience and translate operational progress into more consistent financial performance.“Our transformation is gaining momentum, and we're focused on building on that progress. What matters now is turning these improvements into stronger financial results and a consistently better experience for our customers. That is how we intend to rebuild Garuda Indonesia's competitiveness and restore its position as a world-class airline," Thomas concluded.PT GARUDA INDONESIA (PERSERO) TBKCORPORATE COMMUNICATIONSMedia Contact:corpcomm@garuda-indonesia.com Copyright 2026 ACN Newswire via SeaPRwire.com. All rights reserved. www.acnnewswire.com

HONG KONG, Oct 30, 2026 - (ACN Newswire via SeaPRwire.com) - On 4 September 2026, the Philippine Department of Tourism gave reporters a number: 4,115,860 international visitors for January to August, up 3.7% on the same months of 2025. On 18 September 2026 the department's own dashboard displayed 4,415,860 for the identical period, up 0.78%. The distance between the two September 2026 releases is exactly 300,000 people, or 7.3% of the smaller figure. Neither release was withdrawn. Neither was labelled a correction.For anyone outside the tourism trade this looks like a clerical problem. It is not. It is what happens when an official statistical series changes the instrument that produces it while keeping the name, the headline format and the political purpose. The country still received a quantity of foreign visitors between January and August 2026. Three separate counting systems were pointed at that quantity, and they returned three different answers.This piece treats the three systems as instruments and runs the same task through each one. The task is simple enough to repeat: count every person admitted to the Philippines between 1 January and 31 August 2026 who is not a resident, break the total down by country of passport, and compare it with the same count for 2025. What follows is the output of each instrument, the arithmetic that separates them, and a short guide to which counter is fit for which job.One task, stated so that it can be repeatedPrecision about the task matters, because most of the disagreement in Philippine arrival statistics comes from people using the same words for different operations.The unit is a person, not a trip. A visitor who enters twice in eight months counts twice, which is how almost every tourism authority in the world counts. The territory is the customs and immigration boundary, including airports and seaports. The window is 1 January to 31 August 2026, the period DOT reports as the year to date. The classification key is country of passport, which is what produces the familiar table of source markets.The task has one property that makes it unusually hard to do cleanly. The Philippines has a very large diaspora, and a large share of the people crossing its border on a foreign passport are former citizens coming home to visit family. Under the Balikbayan programme, dating from Republic Act 6768 and amended by Republic Act 9174, a former Filipino who has naturalised abroad can enter visa free for a year. That person is a foreign passport holder on arrival and a returning family member in every other sense. Whether they enter the count decides whether the American market is 818,318 or 926,575.DOT's published total for 2025 was 6.44 million visitors, with tourism receipts of PHP 694 billion and tourism direct gross value added of PHP 2.27 trillion, or 8.1% of GDP. In 2025 the sector supported 7.7 million jobs. Those are the numbers the department is accountable for. The arrival counter is the input that feeds them.Instrument one: a form filled in before landingThe first instrument is eTravel, the government's online arrival registration. It is mandatory for every inbound traveller, including Filipino passport holders and crew, and it opens 72 hours before departure. A completed form produces a QR code that airlines check at check-in and immigration officers scan on arrival.Because eTravel is a registration system, its raw output is a count of registrations, not a count of admissions. Almost everyone who registers does land, so the two numbers are close. They are not identical. A registration can be filed and the flight missed; a connecting passenger can be rebooked; a seafarer can register for a leg that is later cancelled.The 4 September release used eTravel alone. Its market table read: United States 818,318, South Korea 727,379, Japan 350,191, China 310,088, Australia 234,156, Canada 231,972, Taiwan 154,957, United Kingdom 132,370, Singapore 126,812, India 77,883. In the January to August 2026 window, growth was led by China at 69.15% and India at 32.20%, with South Korea down 17.42% and Taiwan up 9.63%.Instrument two: the form plus the immigration recordThe second instrument merges eTravel registrations with records held by the Bureau of Immigration, the agency that actually admits people at the port. DOT launched a public dashboard on 16 September 2026 that runs on this merged basis, and the 18 September coverage described the source plainly: eTravel records from the Department of Information and Communications Technology, plus Bureau of Immigration records.The merged total for the same eight months is 4,415,860, against 4,381,585 in 2025, a gain of 34,275 people. The market table rearranges itself. In the September 2026 release the United States rises to 926,575, or 20.98% of the total. South Korea sits at 744,732 in the same table, or 16.86%. Japan appears at 321,545, or 7.3%.Table 1: Three published counts of the same eight-month task, with each publisher's own stated changeInstrumentPublisher and dateJan to Aug 2026Change as publishedeTravel registrations onlyDOT, 4 September 20264,115,860+3.7%eTravel plus immigration recordsDOT dashboard, 18 September 20264,415,860+0.78%Private estimateLPC, reported 7 October 2026about 4.40 millionroughly flat Source: DOT 🔗, Philippine Tourism Data Dashboard, September 2026 (site home); Economic Daily News 🔗, 4 September 2026; Migrant Times 🔗, 19 September 2026Instrument three: a number with no published methodThe third instrument is a private estimate. On 7 October 2026, Chinese-language Philippine coverage cited LPC, a property research house, putting arrivals for January to August at about 4.40 million, essentially flat on 4.38 million a year earlier. The same report said growth peaked at 12% in February 2026, stalled from April, and turned negative year on year from May. For January to August 2026 it put China at about 303,000, up roughly 93%, and Korea at 744,000, down 22%.The LPC number is worth including precisely because it is not an official series. It reaches the same order of magnitude as the merged count through a different route, and its market detail agrees with the merged series on Korea while agreeing with the eTravel series on nothing else. But no methodology is published: not the sample, not the treatment of balikbayan, not whether the count is by port of entry or by first destination. A number without a published method is a signal rather than a measurement, and it should be cited as one.The 300,000 gap does not behave like an additionThe obvious explanation for the gap is that the merged series adds returning overseas Filipinos to the eTravel count. Three hundred thousand extra people over eight months, in a country with ten million citizens abroad, is a plausible size for that flow. The explanation is probably right in aggregate and wrong in detail.If the merged series were eTravel plus an extra population, no market could shrink when you move from one to the other. Japan shrinks. The eTravel series has Japan at 350,191; the merged series has it at 321,545, a fall of 28,646, or 8.2%. China also falls, from 310,088 to 303,000, down 2.3%. The United States rises by 108,257, or 13.2%. Korea rises by 17,353, or 2.4%.A series that is a strict superset cannot subtract 28,646 Japanese visitors. Something else is happening. The two instruments are not nested; they are differently shaped. A registration form records the passport and itinerary declared before travel. An immigration record reflects what the officer admitted, under which category, at which port. Reclassify a group, deduplicate a set of records, or change how a transit passenger is booked, and individual markets move in both directions while the total still rises.That is the useful finding here, and it is more interesting than the headline gap. The 300,000 is not a pile of extra people sitting on top of the first count. It is the net of additions and subtractions across a much larger set of records, which means the market-level numbers from the two series cannot be mixed. A sentence that pairs the merged total with the eTravel country table is not approximately right. It describes a population that no instrument measured.Four pairings, four growth ratesThe growth rate is where the instrument choice becomes politically visible, because 2026 is the year the Philippines is trying to defend a target.DOT's stated goal for 2026 is between 6.4 million and 6.8 million international visitors, with 7 million described in September coverage as a stretch figure. Against a 2025 outcome of 6.44 million, the low end of that range is flat and the high end is a 5.6% gain.Now count the ways to compute a year-on-year change for the first eight months. The eTravel series compares like with like and reports +3.7%. The merged series compares like with like and reports +0.78%. Cross the two and the answer changes sign.Table 2: The same eight months, four ways of pairing a numerator with a baselineNumeratorBaselineImplied change4,115,860 (eTravel, 2026)3,969,000 (eTravel, 2025, implied)+3.7% as published4,415,860 (merged, 2026)4,381,585 (merged, 2025)+0.78% as published4,115,860 (eTravel, 2026)4,381,585 (merged, 2025)-6.1%4,415,860 (merged, 2026)3,969,000 (eTravel, 2025, implied)+11.3% Source: derived from the three series in Table 1; the 2025 eTravel baseline is implied by dividing 4,115,860 by 1.037 and is therefore an estimate, not a published figureThe third row is the one that should worry the department. If a reader takes the newer 2025 baseline and the older 2026 numerator, Philippine arrivals fall 6.1% in the first eight months. If a reader takes the older baseline and the newer numerator, they rise 11.3%. The two published figures are both defensible. The two unpublished combinations are both nonsense, and both are one careless citation away from print.The 2025 baseline moved by roughly 412,000 people between the two releases, which is larger than the 300,000 gap in 2026. That restatement is the part nobody has explained in public. A statistical office restating a baseline by 9.4% in 2026 is entitled to do so, but it normally publishes a note saying what changed. Without that note, the 2025 comparison set is a moving floor.What each counter is good forNone of this makes any of the three instruments wrong. It makes them specialised. The mistake is treating them as interchangeable, and the fix is a short routing table.· For a headline about foreign tourists, use the eTravel series. It excludes most returning citizens by construction, which is what the word tourist is usually meant to capture.· For airline capacity, airport slots and hotel pipeline planning, use the merged series. It includes every admission, including the balikbayan who occupies a seat and a room.· For tourism receipts and GDP contribution, use neither. Use the Philippine Statistics Authority's tourism direct gross value added and DOT's receipts series, which count spending rather than heads.· For the 6.4 million target, ask which series the target is measured on. The published target does not say, and the two candidates differ by 7.3% at the eight-month mark.That last gap matters arithmetically. To reach 6.4 million on the eTravel basis, the Philippines needs about 2.28 million arrivals in September to December, or 571,000 a month. On the merged basis it needs about 1.98 million, or 496,000 a month. The four-month run rate implied by the merged series is already close to the lower threshold; on the eTravel series it is not.The 6.4 million target is a fourth instrumentA target is not a measurement, but it behaves like one once it enters a press conference. The 2026 target carries a complication: it was set before either the eTravel or the merged series existed in its current form, so the baseline it was built on is neither.DOT's own mid-year communications show the strain. On 6 October 2026 the tourism secretary was reported expressing confidence in the 6.4 million goal, with cumulative growth of 3.46% to that date. That 3.46% figure, reported in October 2026, is consistent with the eTravel series and inconsistent with the merged one. By 18 September 2026 the dashboard series showed growth of 0.78% for eight months. Both statements are true of their own instrument. Only one of them can be true of the target, and the target does not specify which.There is a second complication, which is the China market. The Philippines opened 14-day visa-free entry for Chinese citizens in January 2026 at Manila and Cebu, and DOT has been seeking to extend it to Clark, Caticlan, Bohol and Palawan. Chinese arrivals rose from 1.74 million in 2019 to a peak that has never been recovered, then collapsed, and are now 310,088 on the eTravel basis for eight months of 2026, up 69.15% year on year. The October 2026 LPC estimate puts the gain at 93%.A market growing at 69% or 93% from a small base is exactly where instrument differences bite hardest, because the base is small and the reclassification is large. If the visa-free expansion proceeds, the 2027 comparison will be built on a 2026 base that two instruments disagree about by 7,000 people in one market and 300,000 in total.Receipts are the counter nobody argues aboutAmid three arrival counters there is one number that has not been restated: money.Tourism receipts for 2025 were PHP 694 billion. Tourism direct gross value added was PHP 2.27 trillion, or 8.1% of GDP, with shopping, accommodation and food services the largest components. Those figures come from the Philippine Statistics Authority's tourism satellite account, which is built from expenditure surveys and business records rather than from a form filled in at the airport.Dividing receipts by arrivals gives a rough yield per visitor. For 2025, on 6.44 million arrivals, PHP 694 billion works out to about PHP 107,800 per visitor, or roughly USD 1,900 at an exchange rate near 57 pesos to the dollar. That is a high figure by regional standards and it is one reason the arrival count matters less than it appears: a 300,000-person disagreement moves receipts by about PHP 32 billion, or 4.6%, if the marginal visitor spends the average. It does not move the GDP contribution, because the satellite account does not divide by an arrival count.The distinction is worth holding on to. Arrival counters are an input to marketing and aviation planning. Receipts and value added are the economic output. When the two disagree, the output number is the one that has been through an accounting process.What would settle thisThree things would close the gap, and all three are cheap.First, publish the bridge. DOT has both series. A one-page table showing, for each source market, the eTravel count, the immigration count and the difference, would explain the 300,000 in an afternoon and end the guessing. Statistical agencies do this routinely when they change a collection method; the silence is a choice, not a constraint.Second, restate 2025 on both bases and say so. The 2025 figure moved by about 412,000 between releases. Publishing both baselines, with the date each was computed, would let analysts compute a like-for-like change without inferring one.Third, state which series the 6.4 million target is measured on. This costs nothing and removes an entire genre of misleading coverage, including the genre that quotes a merged total next to an eTravel market table.Until then, the honest way to cite Philippine arrivals in 2026 is to name the instrument in the same sentence as the number. "4.4 million on the merged series" and "4.1 million on eTravel" are both accurate. "4.4 million visitors, with 818,318 Americans" is not, and it will keep appearing in print because the two numbers are one search apart.Data basisData as of October 2026. The primary metric is international visitor arrivals for 1 January to 31 August 2026, as published by DOT in two releases and by LPC through Philippine media. All three totals are taken as published. The two crossed pairings in Table 2 divide one published numerator by another series' baseline, which is arithmetic, not measurement.Three definitions govern the work. The numerator counts persons, not trips. The growth denominator is the same eight calendar months of 2025. Markets are classified by passport, which is why the balikbayan treatment moves the United States line far more than the China line. One adjustment is deliberately not made: no returning-citizen flow is added or subtracted, because no publisher discloses it by market.Limitations· The LPC estimate is triangulation only; no sample, method or port coverage is published.· The 2025 eTravel baseline is derived from a rounded 3.7% growth rate, so it carries about plus or minus 15,000.· Receipts per visitor divides spending by an arrival count from another collection system, so it is an average, not a marginal yield.Sources· Department of Tourism 🔗, Philippine Tourism Data Dashboard and 2025 year-end results, September 2026 (site home)· Economic Daily News 🔗, DOT January to August arrivals at 4.11 million, 4 September 2026· Migrant Times 🔗, visitor arrivals edge up to 4.42 million through August, 19 September 2026· The Nation Week 🔗, tourism and statistics, dashboard launch and 2025 value added, 18 September 2026· China News Service via Toutiao 🔗, LPC estimate of 4.40 million arrivals, 7 October 2026· Philippine Consulate General, Toronto 🔗, Balikbayan privilege under Republic Act 6768 and 9174 (site home) This article was prepared by the expert team at Global Infinity Labs, drawing on insights and data provided through its MCP data services. About Global Infinity LabsGlobal Infinity Labs is an AI innovation company specializing in MCP data services.Email: support@globalinfinitylabs.com Copyright 2026 ACN Newswire via SeaPRwire.com. All rights reserved. www.acnnewswire.com

Performance Highlights01. Operating Performance in the Third Quarter: The Group recorded revenue of RMB47.9 billion in the third quarter, representing a year-on-year increase of 16.91% and a quarter-on-quarter increase of 3.57%; net profit attributable to shareholders amounted to RMB708 million, representing a year-on-year increase of 146.40% and a quarter-on-quarter increase of 33.5%. The year-on-year growth in the third quarter was mainly attributable to the continued contribution from offshore engineering and clean energy-related businesses, while the quarter-on-quarter growth was mainly driven by the recovery in sales volume and prices in the container manufacturing business in the second half of the year.02. Offshore Engineering Orders on Hand Exceeded US$10 Billion: Newly signed orders in the first three quarters amounted to US$5.7 billion, including US$2.5 billion secured in the third quarter. The Group signed its second FLNG EPC turnkey contract with Golar, as well as orders for multiple pure car and truck carriers, while advancing large-scale capacity expansion at its oil and gas bases.03. Recovery in Sales Volume and Prices in the Container Manufacturing Business in the Second Half of the Year: Sales volume of dry cargo containers in the third quarter reached 0.92 million TEUs, representing a year-on-year increase of 35% and a quarter-on-quarter increase of 35%.04. Accelerated Growth in the AIDC Business in the Third Quarter: New orders for over 300MW were signed in the third quarter, bringing cumulative newly signed orders in the first three quarters to over 500MW (exceeding RMB8.0 billion). The Group is also planning to bring new production capacity in Shanxi on stream to serve the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei market.Hong Kong, Oct 30, 2026 - (ACN Newswire via SeaPRwire.com) - China International Marine Containers (Group) Co., Ltd. (“CIMC Group” or the “Group”, stock code: 000039.SZ/02039.HK) is pleased to announce its unaudited results for the first three quarters ended 30 September 2026 (the “Period”) and disclose its operating performance for the third quarter.In the third quarter of 2026, the Group recorded revenue of RMB47.9 billion, representing a year-on-year increase of 16.91% and a quarter-on-quarter increase of 3.57%. Net profit attributable to shareholders amounted to RMB708 million, representing a year-on-year increase of 146.40% and a quarter-on-quarter increase of 33.5%. In the first three quarters of 2026, the Group recorded revenue of RMB126.8 billion, representing a year-on-year increase of 8.33%, while net profit attributable to shareholders amounted to RMB1.45 billion.In terms of container manufacturing business, in the third quarter of 2026, the Group’s dry cargo container sales volume increased by 35% year on year and 35% quarter on quarter to 0.92 million TEUs. According to a World Trade Organization report released in October 2026, the volume of goods trade in 2026 is projected to grow by 3.9%, significantly exceeding the forecast made at the beginning of the year. It has also raised its forecast for global goods trade volume growth in 2027 to 4.1%, primarily due to the resilience of supply chains and the driving force of the technology sector. In addition, constrained effective capacity and low vessel turnaround efficiency in the container shipping sector further boosted demand for containers. During the Period, the Group’s cumulative sales volume of dry cargo containers reached 2,055,000 TEUs, representing a year-on-year increase of approximately 14.05%. Driven by fruit transportation demand from South America, the cumulative sales volume of reefer containers reached 152,600 TEUs. In the first three quarters of 2026, the Group’s container manufacturing business achieved year-on-year growth in production and sales volumes and revenue. However, net profit declined year on year due to the impact of the lower container prices settled in the first half of the year and exchange rate movements.In terms of road transportation vehicle business, in the first three quarters of 2026, CIMC Vehicles sold a total of 116,000 vehicles of various types globally, representing a year-on-year increase of 14.62%. Among these, global sales volume of semi-trailers increased by 14.80% year on year. In the domestic market, the core production efficiency and sales scale of semi-trailer, liquid tanker and powder tanker businesses under the StarLink Project continued to improve. In overseas markets, markets in the Global South emerged as a key growth engine, with revenue increasing by more than 25% year on year. Operating profit from DTB truck body products recorded a steady year-on-year increase. At the IAA TRANSPORTATION exhibition in Hanover, Germany, the pure electric tractors and trailers (EV-RT) made their global debut, showcasing a product platform covering both construction and logistics scenarios, integrated tractor-trailer cooperative control technology and modular mobile energy-replenishment products.In terms of airport facilities and logistics equipment, fire safety and rescue equipment business, in the first three quarters of 2026, CIMC-TianDa recorded steady growth in revenue and profit. Growth in the airport business was mainly attributable to the concentrated completion of project acceptances for boarding bridges, specialized airport vehicles and aircraft ground air-conditioning systems, allowing the conversion of high-quality orders accumulated earlier. The logistics equipment business benefited from incremental demand from e-commerce logistics and airport baggage handling systems, maintaining sound revenue growth and a solid pipeline of orders on hand. Driven by the national “Two New” initiatives and supported by the expansion of the Ziegler brand in domestic and overseas markets, the fire safety and rescue equipment business recorded significant quarter-on-quarter growth in both revenue and profitability.In terms of logistics services business, in the first three quarters of 2026, CIMC Wetrans recorded steady growth in both revenue and profit amid a volatile yet overall upward container transportation market by closely tracking market changes and co-ordinating resource allocation. In the sea transportation business, gross profit increased by more than 20% through a series of initiatives including shareholding structure adjustment and integrated consolidation. The operational capabilities in Southeast Asia were upgraded iteratively to strengthen logistics capabilities for shipments from Southeast Asia to global destinations.The fundamentals of the port logistics business remained solid. The container yard in Tianjin, a joint venture of CIMC Wetrans and a leading shipping line, commenced operations. In the industrial logistics business, the cold chain business capitalised on the rotational supply cycle of imported durian and exported fresh fruits, and expanded its self-owned capacity by increasing investments in reefer containers, achieving simultaneous improvements in business scale and revenue per container. Subsidiaries in Kenya and Saudi Arabia successively put their self-operated vehicles into operation, continuously enhancing the Group’s overseas localised operating capabilities. In the air transportation business, the profitability of products contracted with airlines improved, and the “dual corridor” in the Americas took shape. The year-round scheduled charter flight between Hong Kong and Miami made its maiden voyage in early September.In terms of energy, chemical and liquid food business, in the first three quarters of 2026, CIMC Enric recorded revenue of RMB20.502 billion, representing a year-on-year increase of 6.0%, and net profit attributable to shareholders increased by 6.5% year on year to RMB817 million. Newly signed orders amounted to RMB21.937 billion in total, representing a year-on-year increase of 11.7%, and orders on hand amounted to approximately RMB33.381 billion as at the end of September, representing a year-on-year increase of 8.5%. Among the business segments, revenue of the clean energy segment increased by 11.3% year on year to RMB16.739 billion. Benefiting from the release of profits from the offshore clean energy sector, the incremental profit contribution from the COG-to-hydrogen co-production LNG project and higher demand for natural gas transportation equipment, net profit attributable to shareholders in this segment increased significantly year on year. Revenue of the chemical and environmental segment increased by 38.7% year on year to RMB2.181 billion, while newly signed orders amounted to RMB2.343 billion, representing a year-on-year increase of 45.3%. Revenue of the liquid food segment amounted to RMB1.582 billion, while newly signed orders reached RMB2.321 billion, representing a year-on-year increase of 124.1%. As at the end of September, orders on hand amounted to RMB2.953 billion, representing a year-on-year increase of 15.1%, laying a solid foundation for the long-term and steady development of the business.In terms of marine engineering business, benefiting from continued improvements in delivery efficiency and lean management, the business achieved year-on-year growth in net profit and met its high-quality development targets. In terms of market orders, new orders secured in the first three quarters amounted to US$5.7 billion, representing a significant increase as compared with US$260 million for the same period in 2025. In particular, the Company signed China’s first FPSO EPCIC turnkey contract in June, a second FLNG (floating liquefied natural gas system) EPC turnkey contract in August, and secured contracts for 4 VLCC and 12 pure car and truck carriers (PCTC) during the year. As at the end of September, orders on hand of CIMC Raffles exceeded US$10 billion, hitting a new record high. In particular, the proportion of oil and gas orders to non-oil and gas orders was approximately 2:1, which effectively eased the periodic fluctuation of the oil and gas market. In terms of capacity, in the third quarter, the offshore engineering business actively advanced the capacity expansion plan for its oil and gas base to meet the continuously growing demand in the deepwater oil and gas market. In terms of project construction and delivery, in July, “CLEANSTAR”, the fourth 7,000 CEU PCTC built for a Greek ship-owner, was successfully delivered and departed from Longkou Terminal. In August, the first ro-ro ship with 3,300 lane meters built for SMYRIL LINE was delivered on schedule; designed to withstand the complex sea conditions and extreme weather of the North Atlantic, the vessel balances high operational efficiency with low carbon emissions. In September, the topside module of the offshore substation for the Datang Hainan Danzhou 1.2 GW offshore wind power project successfully completed full-process construction and all related inspection and acceptance procedures.In terms of innovative businesses, the development of the modular data center business of CIMC Digital Energy further accelerated. Revenue for the first three quarters recorded a significant and rapid increase compared with the same period last year. In the third quarter, new orders for over 300MW of cloud computing and AI computing power data centers were signed. In the first three quarters, cumulative newly signed orders exceeded 500MW (over RMB8.0 billion), demonstrating further expansion of the business scale.The Group’s management stated: “The global economic and trade environment and energy landscape continued to evolve in 2026. CIMC Group continued to deepen its global layout strategy, leveraging technological innovation to drive the coordinated development of its two major business segments, logistics equipment and energy equipment. Looking ahead, the Group will seize structural opportunities arising from the upgrading of high-end offshore engineering equipment, the transition to green energy and the development of AI computing infrastructure. It will continue to strengthen its global delivery and integrated operating capabilities and steadily advance high-quality and sustainable development.”About China International Marine Containers (Group) Co., Ltd.The CIMC Group is a world leading equipment and solution provider in the logistics and energy industries, and its industry cluster mainly covers the logistics and energy fields, strengthening its position as a global market leader. In the logistics field, the Group still adheres to taking its container manufacturing business as the core business, based on which it has developed its road transportation vehicles business and airport facilities and logistics equipment/fire safety and rescue equipment business, supplemented by its logistics services business and recycled load business, which provide products and services in the professional logistics field. In the energy field, the Group is principally engaged in the energy/chemical/liquid food equipment business and the offshore engineering business. Meanwhile, the Group also continuously develops emerging industries and has a finance and asset management business that serves the Group itself. As a diversified multinational industrial group serving the global market, CIMC owns over 300 member enterprises in Asia, North America, Europe, Australia and other regions, including 4 listed companies, with customers and sales networks covering more than 100 countries and regions. In 2025, the Group ranked 154th on the 2025 Fortune China 500 list. For more information, please visit https://www.cimc.com/.For investor relations and media enquiries, please contact LBS Communications Consulting LimitedIR Email: cimcir@lbs-comm.comJoanne ChanTel: (852) 3679 3671Email: jchan@lbs-comm.comJoan YangTel: (86) 176 7074 8753Email: jyang@lbs-comm.com Copyright 2026 ACN Newswire via SeaPRwire.com. All rights reserved. www.acnnewswire.com

West Palm Beach, FL, Oct 29, 2026 - (ACN Newswire via SeaPRwire.com) - U.S. Polo Assn.®, the official sports brand of the United States Polo Association (USPA), with a multi-billion-dollar global footprint and distribution in more than 190 countries through some 1,200 U.S. Polo Assn. mono-brand retail stores, numerous branded websites and thousands of other points of distribution worldwide, today announced the brand's early activation of Digital Product Passports (DPPs) across product categories sold into the European Union (EU).As Europe prepares to launch the Digital Product Passport Registry, U.S. Polo Assn. has taken a proactive approach by preparing to deploy DPPs across all products sold into the EU well ahead of the mandatory compliance deadline expected in 2028 or 2029. The global sports brand has already mapped product information for millions of products, creating a scalable framework that will enhance product transparency and support compliance readiness throughout its European operations.Beyond additional transparency, the data generated through this effort will enable the brand and its consumers to make more informed, data-driven decisions. The goal is to identify opportunities for improvement across the brand's products and global supply chain, supporting continuous progress toward lower-impact and more sustainable solutions."We view the Digital Product Passport as an opportunity to give our U.S. Polo Assn. consumers and retail partners across Europe greater visibility into the products they purchase while equipping our global business with better data to make smarter decisions across our products and supply chain," said J. Michael Prince, President and CEO of USPA Global, the company that manages the multi-billion-dollar sports brand, U.S. Polo Assn. "We are proud to activate this critical product platform early while building a strong foundation that strengthens consumer trust and advances our long-term commitment to more responsible and sustainable growth.""This approach ensures our sustainability initiatives are both practical and meaningful, supporting real improvements across U.S. Polo Assn. business and supply chains," Prince added.What is a Digital Product Passport?A Digital Product Passport is a digital record that provides information about a product throughout its lifecycle. By scanning a QR code or accessing a digital record, consumers can learn more about where a product originates, the materials it contains, how it was produced, and other information that helps them make more informed purchasing decisions.The goal of DPP is to make product information more accessible, transparent, and easy for consumers to understand.Enhanced TransparencyThe European Union is moving toward requiring greater product transparency through Digital Product Passports. However, U.S. Polo Assn. believes the real opportunity lies in providing consumers more meaningful information about the products they want to experience.DPP aligns with the broader direction outlined within the brand's comprehensive sustainability strategy, USPA Life. This commitment is supported through collaborations with industry leaders such as Carbonfact, the Environmental Intelligence Platform for apparel and footwear, which processes the brand's product data and generates its Digital Product Passports, and LRQA's EiQ platform, as well as other strategic partnerships across the industry. The brand is also advancing innovative product initiatives such as the new USPA LIFE Polo Shirt debuting in Summer 2027."U.S. Polo Assn. is among the first brands to make Digital Product Passports operational, well ahead of EU requirements. With Carbonfact, they bring thousands of data points from across many different systems into one consistent, reliable environmental footprint for every product, and that same dataset powers their DPPs, generating QR codes and sharing clear, reliable product information at scale," said Marc Laurent, CEO, Carbonfact.By providing accessible product-level data through Digital Product Passports, U.S. Polo Assn. aims to enhance transparency and empower both the brand and consumers to make more informed decisions. This strategic approach supports additional ways to reduce environmental impact and advance the company's sustainability efforts in a measurable manner.Building the Foundation for the Future of RetailThe implementation of DPP will span all product categories sold into the European Union, providing a consistent framework and consumer experience for product information across U.S. Polo Assn.'s European portfolio."We believe transparency is key to a more sustainable future," said Jessica Lenhart, Director of Sustainability for USPA Global. "By helping consumers better understand the products they purchase, we can enable more informed choices and drive meaningful change.""Digital Product Passports create a new level of connection between brands and consumers, enhancing overall product transparency," adds Lenhart.With millions of products already mapped, U.S. Polo Assn.'s early activation of Digital Product Passports (DPP) represents one of the most significant product transparency initiatives undertaken by the brand to date.As consumers continue to seek greater visibility into the products they experience, U.S. Polo Assn. believes that enhanced transparency will become an increasingly important part of the customer experience.About U.S. Polo Assn.® and USPA GlobalU.S. Polo Assn. is the official sports brand of the United States Polo Association (USPA), the largest association of polo clubs and polo players in the United States, founded in 1890. With a multi-billion-dollar global footprint and worldwide distribution through more than 1,200 U.S. Polo Assn. retail stores as well as thousands of additional points of distribution, U.S. Polo Assn. offers apparel, accessories, and footwear for men, women, and children in more than 190 countries worldwide. U.S. Polo Assn.'s Global Polo Shirt Campaign, An Icon Born from the Game, is a powerful tribute to the iconic polo shirt's authentic sports origins and its evolution into one of the world's most enduring style essentials.The global sports brand sponsors major polo events around the world, including the U.S. Open Polo Championship®, held annually at the USPA National Polo Center in The Palm Beaches, the premier polo tournament in the United States. Historic deals with ESPN in the United States, TNT and Eurosport in Europe, Star Sports in India, and BeIN Sports in the Middle East now broadcast several of the premier polo championships in the world, sponsored by U.S. Polo Assn., making the thrilling sport accessible to millions of sports fans globally for the very first time.U.S. Polo Assn. has recently been named one of USA Today's Most Trusted Brands and in 2026 was ranked the top sports licensor in the world, surpassing the NFL, PGA Tour, and Formula 1, according to License Global. The sport-inspired brand has been recognized internationally with awards for global growth and sports content. Due to its tremendous success as a global brand, U.S. Polo Assn. has been featured in Fortune, Forbes, Modern Retail, WWD, and GQ, as well as on Yahoo Finance and Bloomberg, among many other noteworthy media sources around the world. For more information, visit uspoloassnglobal.com and follow @uspoloassn.USPA Global is a subsidiary of the United States Polo Association (USPA) and manages the multi-billion-dollar sports brand, U.S. Polo Assn. USPA Global also manages its subsidiary, Global Polo, which is the worldwide leader in polo sport content. To learn more, visit globalpolo.com or Global Polo on YouTube.About CarbonfactCarbonfact is the Environmental Intelligence Platform for apparel and footwear. Selected by 300+ brands, the platform helps them measure the environmental footprint of products and create Digital Product Passports at scale. Learn more at www.carbonfact.com.For Further Information, Contact:Stacey KovalskyVP, Global PR & CommunicationsPhone: +1.561.790.8036Email: skovalsky@uspagl.comJessica LenhartDirector, SustainabilityPhone: +1.561.461.8594Email: jlenhart@uspagl.comSOURCE: U.S. Polo Assn. Copyright 2026 ACN Newswire via SeaPRwire.com. All rights reserved. www.acnnewswire.com

Hong Kong, Oct 29, 2026 - (ACN Newswire via SeaPRwire.com) - COSCO SHIPPING Ports Limited (“COSCO SHIPPING Ports” or “CSP” or the “Company”, SEHK: 1199), the world’s leading ports logistics service provider, today announced the results of the Company and its subsidiaries (the “Group”) for the 3 months and 9 months ended 30 September 2026. 2026 Third Quarter Results Highlights- Total throughput increased by 8.4% YoY to 42,266,553 TEU- Equity throughput increased by 8.1% YoY to 12,884,563 TEU- Revenue of the Company increased by 13.0% YoY to US$484,325,000- Profit attributable to equity holders of the Company increased by 0.1% YoY to US$82,589,0002026 9 Months Results Highlights- Total throughput increased by 8.1% YoY to 122,423,600 TEU- Equity throughput increased by 7.4% YoY to 37,376,571 TEU- Revenue of the Company increased by 12.6% YoY to US$1,389,669,000- Profit attributable to equity holders of the Company increased by 19.7% YoY to US$316,261,000FINANCIAL REVIEWCOSCO SHIPPING Ports continued to achieve steady improvements in operational quality and efficiency and leveraged an efficient and tightly-knit port and shipping network to lay a solid foundation for the sustainable development of its businesses. In the third quarter of 2026, revenue increased by 13.0% YoY to US$484.3 million while gross profit increased by 19.3% YoY to US$128.1 million, recording an increase in growth rate. The revenue for the first nine months increased by 12.6% YoY to US$1,389.7 million, gross profit increased by 12.6% YoY to US$367.6 million, and the profit attributable to equity holders of the Company increased by 19.7% YoY to US$316.3 million.OPERATIONAL REVIEWChinaFor the three months ended 30 September 2026, total throughput of the terminals in China increased by 4.9% YoY to 30,944,536 TEU (3Q2025: 29,502,970 TEU) and accounted for 73.2% of the Group’s total throughput. Total equity throughput of terminals in China increased by 4.9% YoY to 8,836,915 TEU (3Q2025: 8,422,090 TEU), accounting for 68.6% of the Group’s total equity throughput.Bohai RimFor the three months ended 30 September 2026, total throughput of the Bohai Rim region increased by 4.3% YoY to 14,119,086 TEU (3Q2025: 13,542,749 TEU) and accounted for 33.4% of the Group’s total. Total equity throughput of the Bohai Rim region increased by 3.5% YoY to 3,596,452 TEU (3Q2025: 3,475,303 TEU) and accounted for 27.9% of the Group’s total equity throughput. Driven by the increasing investment demand in artificial intelligence, exports of high-tech products recorded steady growth, contributing a 6.7% YoY increase in the total throughput of Dalian Container Terminal Co., Ltd. to 1,460,461 TEU (3Q2025: 1,368,930 TEU).Yangtze River DeltaFor the three months ended 30 September 2026, total throughput of the Yangtze River Delta region decreased by 0.3% YoY to 4,337,745 TEU (3Q2025: 4,351,648 TEU) and accounted for 10.3% of the Group’s total. Total equity throughput of the Yangtze River Delta region increased by 1.6% YoY to 1,267,657 TEU (3Q2025: 1,247,595 TEU) and accounted for 9.8% of the Group’s total equity throughput. Wuhan CSP Terminal Co., Ltd. (“CSP Wuhan Terminal”) has continued to consolidate its hub position and build a denser shipping route network. It has also continuously strengthened its port-railway cargo sourcing competitiveness, driving a 17.0% YoY increase in total throughput to 87,112 TEU (3Q2025: 74,429 TEU).Southeast Coast and OthersFor the three months ended 30 September 2026, total throughput of the Southeast Coast and Others region increased by 7.6% YoY to 1,514,882 TEU (3Q2025: 1,407,977 TEU) and accounted for 3.6% of the Group’s total throughput. Total equity throughput of Southeast Coast and Others region increased by 7.7% YoY to 1,179,290 TEU (3Q2025: 1,095,296 TEU) and accounted for 9.2% of the Group’s total equity throughput. Xiamen Ocean Gate Container Terminal Co., Ltd. launched several new foreign trade routes within the year, driving a 7.8% YoY increase in total throughput to 753,836 TEU (3Q2025: 699,553 TEU). Pearl River DeltaFor the three months ended 30 September 2026, total throughput of the Pearl River Delta region increased by 7.6% to 8,300,352 TEU (3Q2025: 7,710,996 TEU) and accounted for 19.6% of the Group’s total throughput. Total equity throughput of the Pearl River Delta region increased by 7.1% YoY to 2,225,574 TEU (3Q2025: 2,077,750 TEU) and accounted for 17.3% of the Group’s total equity throughput. Leveraging two-way trade with emerging markets such as Southeast Asia, Guangzhou South China Oceangate Container Terminal Company Limited recorded significant growth in both intra-Asia and Africa-bound routes, driving a 13.6% YoY increase in total throughput to 1,670,028 TEU (3Q2025: 1,470,426 TEU).Southwest CoastFor the three months ended 30 September 2026, total throughput of the Southwest Coast region increased by 7.3% YoY to 2,672,471 TEU (3Q2025: 2,489,600 TEU), accounting for 6.3% of the Group’s total throughput. Total equity throughput of the Southwest Coast region increased by 7.9% YoY to 567,942 TEU (3Q2025: 526,146 TEU) and accounted for 4.4% of the Group’s total equity throughput. Beibu Gulf Port Co., Ltd. has accelerated the development of the Beibu Gulf International Gateway Port and International Hub Port, driven a YoY increase in Southwest Coast region.OverseasFor the three months ended 30 September 2026, total throughput in overseas terminals increased by 19.4% YoY to 11,322,017 TEU (3Q2025: 9,478,574 TEU) and accounted for 26.8% of the Group’s total. Total equity throughput of overseas region increased by 15.6% YoY to 4,047,648 TEU (3Q2025: 3,499,958 TEU) and accounted for 31.4% of the Group’s total equity throughput. Benefiting from growing demand in the Mediterranean region, Piraeus Container Terminal Single Member S.A. (“Piraeus Terminal”) achieving a 11.4% YoY increase in total throughput to 1,090,284 TEU (3Q2025: 978,711 TEU). COSCO SHIPPING Ports Chancay PERU S.A. (“CSP Chancay Terminal”) made full efforts to improve its route network and actively build international logistics corridors, completing the “three mainlines and five feeders” route layout, further enhancing regional connectivity and driving a 24.9% YoY increase in total throughput to 139,669 TEU (3Q2025: 111,862 TEU).PROSPECTSSince the beginning of 2026, the global economic and trade landscape has continued to undergo deep adjustments, with geopolitical tensions, changes in trade policies and supply chain cost pressures intertwined. Against this backdrop, COSCO SHIPPING Ports has continued to strengthen the resilience of its global network, actively respond to the spillover effects of the Middle East situation and the challenges brought by shipping alliance restructuring, and fully leverage its synergies with COSCO SHIPPING Group and the Ocean Alliance. In the third quarter, leveraging its global layout and prudent operations, the Company sustained YoY growth in both total throughput and profit attributable to equity holders, while operating quality and efficiency improved steadily.Recently, benefiting from supply chain adjustments and strong investment in artificial intelligence, both the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) have upwardly revised their forecasts for global economic growth and global goods trade growth, with growth expected to continue in 2027. According to statistics from the General Administration of Customs of China, in the first three quarters of this year, the total value of goods imports and exports reached RMB39.94 trillion, representing a YoY increase of 18.8%. Of this, exports amounted to RMB23.2 trillion, a YoY increase of 16.4%, and imports totaled RMB16.74 trillion, a YoY increase of 22.3%. Market diversification continued to expand, with significant growth in imports and exports with free trade partners. The export structure continued to improve toward new and higher-quality products, with rapid growth in exports of high-tech products and green products. Looking ahead, although global economic and trade conditions still face considerable uncertainty, and the trajectory of the Middle East situation, energy price volatility, supply chain cost pressures and changes in trade policies will continue to affect the shipping market, the growth forecasts for the global economy and goods trade, as well as the strong momentum demonstrated by China’s foreign trade in terms of market diversification and export structure upgrading, bring positive opportunities to the port industry.In the face of opportunities and challenges, the Company will actively respond with a focus on the following three aspects. First, continuously optimize its global resource layout. We will seize opportunities in emerging markets and regional cooperation, enhance the service capabilities and risk resistance of key node ports, optimize trunk and feeder network connectivity, seek controlling stakes in strategic hub ports, and take equity stakes in key gateway ports at appropriate times, so as to build an efficient and collaborative global terminal system. At the same time, we will capture the opportunities brought by the recovery of the Suez Canal and strengthen service support and cargo sourcing capabilities at hub ports along the route. Second, deepen lean operations and synergies. We will strengthen the operational capabilities of hub ports such as CSP Wuhan Terminal, Piraeus Terminal, CSP Abu Dhabi Terminal and CSP Chancay Terminal, closely monitor the Middle East situation, and improve contingency plans and multi-route logistics corridors. We will adopt customer demand-oriented precision marketing, attract new shipping routes and extra vessel calls, deepen business linkages with the Group’s internal fleet, promote revenue growth and cost reduction, and use digital empowerment to improve terminal operating efficiency. Third, accelerate innovation-driven development. Focusing on the two main lines of “digital intelligence” and “green and low-carbon”, we will advance full-process automation of terminal operations and the application of artificial intelligence, expand the use of clean energy, participate in the construction of green fuel supply chains, cultivate new quality productive forces in the port and shipping industry, build new momentum for sustainable development, and create long-term stable returns for shareholders.About COSCO SHIPPING Ports (https://ports.coscoshipping.com)COSCO SHIPPING Ports Limited (Stock Code: 1199) is a leading ports logistics service provider in the world and its terminals portfolio covers the five main port regions and the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River in China, Europe, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, South America and Africa, etc. As at 30 September 2026, COSCO SHIPPING Ports operated and managed 395 berths at 40 ports globally, of which 245 were for containers.Building on the brand philosophy of “The Ports for ALL”, COSCO SHIPPING Ports has established its corporate mission of “Connecting Different Worlds” and is committed to maintaining a customer-centric approach to continuously improve the service and capacity of its global network and enhance the strategic positioning of key node ports and optimise logistics resource distribution. Leveraging ports as a conduit to connect global shipping services and serve global trade, the Company is dedicated to establishing a platform for mutual benefits and shared successes for all stakeholders involved with a vision of becoming “the leading global port logistics service provider with a customer-oriented focus”. Copyright 2026 ACN Newswire via SeaPRwire.com. All rights reserved. www.acnnewswire.com

SINGAPORE, Oct 29, 2026 - (ACN Newswire via SeaPRwire.com) - In a move to transform how businesses engage customers and drive revenue, Singapore-based conversational AI pioneer Aivo Asia is expanding its unified voice and chat platform into a global self-service SaaS offering.Three years ago, an insurance entrepreneur was contemplating leaving the industry after his warm leads dried up and traditional prospecting methods stopped delivering results. Today, his circumstances have changed dramatically: after adopting AI-powered lead generation from Singapore-based technology company Aivo Asia, he achieved Top of the Table (TOT) recognition - a distinction reserved for exceptional sales production. His primary challenge is no longer finding prospects, but managing an unprecedented volume of qualified leads. For Aivo Asia, stories like his demonstrate that the next chapter of artificial intelligence should be measured by the tangible business opportunities it creates rather than pure technological sophistication.The Real AI Opportunity Isn't Just AutomationAcross the global business landscape, artificial intelligence has become synonymous with digital transformation as companies invest heavily in intelligent agents to reduce manual labor. However, beneath the media hype lies a fundamental question: Is AI genuinely improving business performance, or merely adding operational complexity?For many small and medium-sized enterprises, everyday operational friction remains a persistent problem. Customer inquiries arrive after business hours, sales opportunities lapse due to delayed follow-ups, and marketing leads are lost without proper engagement. Rather than treating AI as a pure cost-cutting mechanism, Aivo Asia views conversational AI as a growth engine designed to recover these missed opportunities, extend operational capacity, and unlock revenue that would otherwise remain out of reach.When Ten Minutes Can Mean a Lost CustomerFor another Aivo customer, the primary operational bottleneck was not lead generation, but response speed. Inbound inquiries were arriving consistently, but potential clients frequently abandoned the process if the company took more than ten minutes to reply. By deploying Aivo’s conversational AI solution to automate real-time responses across digital channels, the company successfully eliminated this revenue leakage, reporting a 20% increase in inbound sales over the following year.This result underscores a critical reality in modern business strategy: companies do not always need larger advertising budgets or expanded sales teams to grow; often, they simply need to capture and convert the opportunities already in their pipeline.Rethinking Cross-Channel CommunicationFounded in Singapore, Aivo Asia specializes in conversational AI designed for customer engagement, lead qualification, and automated business operations. Recognizing that modern business communications span multiple channels - where a customer might send a WhatsApp message in the morning and make a phone call later in the day - Aivo developed its flagship platform, AISE, to unify these touchpoints.The AISE ecosystem combines AISE Chat, which automates messaging across WhatsApp and live chat, with Aivobot, an agentic voice AI designed to handle complex telephone interactions such as outbound calls, qualification, and follow-up engagement. This unified approach eliminates fragmented customer experiences across Southeast Asia's diverse linguistic and telecommunications landscape.Making Enterprise-Grade AI Accessible Without an IT DepartmentTo accelerate adoption, Aivo Asia is preparing to introduce a self-service, pay-as-you-use Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model for its platform by late 2026. Through an intuitive management console, businesses will be able to independently configure voice agents, integrate existing SIP telephony credentials, upload contact lists, and deploy outbound campaigns without specialized IT support.By pairing technical readiness with automated account activation and payment gateway integration, Aivo aims to lower the barrier to entry, allowing smaller enterprises to access enterprise-grade AI without heavy upfront capital investments.Regional Expertise with Global AmbitionsWith operations expanding across Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam, Aivo is scaling its engineering capabilities under leadership that includes Chief Technology Officer Raymond Ling, who brings over 15 years of enterprise systems experience from IBM. Founder and CEO Cedric Chua emphasizes that the company's vision extends far beyond local borders:"I have never believed that Singapore's size should determine the scale of our ambition. We may be a small nation, but we have the talent, resilience, and determination to build technology that competes with the very best in the world. At Aivo Asia, we are here to make advanced AI accessible to businesses everywhere and prove that Singapore can be a creator of world-class AI innovation, not just a consumer of it."As Aivo Asia prepares its unified SaaS platform for broader deployment, the company remains focused on proving that the true value of conversational AI lies in turning everyday customer communications into measurable growth for businesses of all sizes.About the TeamFounder and CEO Cedric Chua, CTO Raymond Ling and Business Development Director David Yap — whose shared vision for conversational AI traces back to a conversation among old ACS friends in 2019.About Aivo AsiaFounded in Singapore, Aivo Asia Pte. Ltd. is an AI technology company specializing in conversational AI, intelligent automation, and AI-powered customer engagement. Built with the vision of making advanced AI technology accessible to businesses of all sizes, Aivo Asia has evolved from developing specialized communication solutions to building AISE, its unified voice and chat platform.Today, over 1,000 businesses and independent professionals leverage Aivo’s solutions across Southeast Asia. Led by Founder & CEO Cedric Chua and CTO Raymond Ling, Aivo Asia combines deep expertise in software engineering, telecommunications, and enterprise systems to deliver practical, scalable AI tools that drive real commercial success.Media contactBrand: Aivo AsiaContact: Media teamWebsite: https://www.aivo.asia Copyright 2026 ACN Newswire via SeaPRwire.com. All rights reserved. www.acnnewswire.com

HONG KONG, Oct 29, 2026 - (ACN Newswire via SeaPRwire.com) - Ask three education ministries in Chinese-speaking Asia what "AI in schools" means in 2026 and you will get three different answers, each of them internally coherent and each of them spending real money. In Singapore it means a guarded assistant inside a national learning platform that a Primary 4 pupil may use but a Primary 2 pupil may not. In Hong Kong it means half a million dollars handed to each school with a list of deliverables attached and a clawback clause behind them. In Taiwan it means a diagnostic engine that has been running for years, now being scaled into a four-year, eleven-billion-dollar programme.The phrase is the same. The object is not. That is worth untangling before anything else, because most of the public argument about AI in education is an argument between people who are describing different machines. One side is talking about a tutor that writes. Another is talking about a system that locates a pupil's weak point. A third is talking about software that drafts a lesson plan so a teacher goes home at six instead of nine. All three exist. None of them does the other two's job.This piece puts the three systems side by side on the same three classroom tasks, using only what each system's own operators have published about what it does. Where a system's behaviour on a task is documented, that is stated. Where it is not published, that is stated too, because the shape of what is not disclosed turns out to be the most useful thing in the comparison.What each system actually isBefore the tasks, the objects need defining, and each one carries a different governance story.Singapore's entry is the AI Learning Assistant inside the Student Learning Space, SLS, the national platform that most schools already use. It is not a chatbot bolted onto the side. It is a feature inside a space the ministry controls, which means the ministry can set who sees it and when. In 2026 the ministry named artificial intelligence one of three defining uncertainties facing the education system, alongside the geopolitical shift and climate change, and set out a four-part literacy frame: learn about AI, learn to use AI, learn with AI, and learn beyond AI. The fourth limb carries the emphasis, and its stated purpose is to guard against cognitive offloading.Hong Kong's entry is not a single tool. The Education Bureau reserved HK$2 billion from the Quality Education Fund for digital education, and about HK$500 million of it funds a three-year scheme running from the 2025/26 school year. Every publicly funded primary and secondary school that applies successfully receives a one-off HK$500,000. Applications closed on 28 February 2026. By 25 February 2026, more than 960 schools had applied, around 99 per cent of all publicly funded primary and secondary schools in the city. That is the striking number in this whole comparison: near-universal uptake of a scheme that leaves the choice of tool entirely to each school.Taiwan's entry is an adaptive learning platform that predates the current AI cycle. The ministry's platform performs learning diagnosis and uses conversational agents for teaching, producing personalised learning paths. It is being extended, not replaced. The Executive Yuan approved a programme for the 2026 to 2029 academic years with a budget of NT$11.755 billion, organised around three dimensions and six sub-programmes, and built on a published teacher and student AI literacy framework covering AI ethics, AI foundations and technology, AI-empowered teaching or learning, and AI system design.The three tasksThree tasks, chosen because they are ordinary and because together they cover what schools actually want from AI.· Task one: an upper primary pupil writing a composition, stuck on how to show rather than tell, and inclined to ask the tool to write it.· Task two: a pupil who has failed the same mathematics topic twice, where the system needs to find the specific gap and route practice to it.· Task three: a teacher preparing a science unit who needs a lesson plan and a set of assessment items by Friday.Task one: the composition, and what happens when the pupil asks for the answerThis is where the three systems separate most sharply, and where the most instructive sentence in the whole comparison sits.Singapore's ministry published a worked example. A Primary 4 English class uses the AI Learning Assistant in SLS for composition writing, working from prompts the teacher provides to get ideas on how to show rather than tell. The assistant helps refine drafts against personalised feedback. And then there is the guardrail, quoted directly: the assistant will redirect students back on track if they veer off topic and ask irrelevant questions, or if they want to be spoon-fed with direct answers.That is a designed refusal. The system is specified to decline the exact request a tired eleven-year-old is most likely to make. It is not a content filter bolted on afterwards; it is the intended behaviour of the tool on this task, and the ministry published it as such.The access rules around it are equally specific. From Primary 1 to Primary 3, schools will not assign any work that requires pupils to use AI directly. Physical hands-on learning comes first, and pupils learn that AI exists without using it for schoolwork. From Primary 4, pupils may use educational AI tools under teacher supervision, and only tools specifically designed for education. Before touching the AI features in SLS, pupils complete a basic module on AI and on those features. From Primary 4 they also begin a mandatory ten-hour coding and computational thinking programme that includes an introduction to AI, with two optional five-hour modules on generative AI and computer vision available to primary schools.Hong Kong's answer to the same task is that there is no single answer. The HK$500,000 buys devices, tools, subscriptions or services at each school's discretion, within guidelines. One school may buy a writing coach. Its neighbour may buy tablets. What the centre is building instead is a subject-facing assistant: Hong Kong Education City is building a large language model for Hong Kong primary and secondary teaching from 2026, providing AI assistants for different subjects, and the Science subject assistant is being trialled in 2026 for designing teaching plans, preparing lessons, and designing assessment items and homework. A composition tutor for upper primary is not among the published uses so far.That leaves the composition task, in Hong Kong, entirely to 960 separate procurement decisions made between March and August 2026. Nobody at the centre will be able to say what happened on task one until the reports land.Taiwan's platform is not primarily a generative writing coach, and the distinction it draws explains why. At a ministry forum in October 2026, the president of National Taichung University of Education put the contrast explicitly: general-purpose AI focuses on broad task handling and output efficiency, while the core value of educational AI lies in clear learning objectives, pedagogical principles, and safe and trustworthy design. A system built on that premise is not going to win a contest to write the most fluent paragraph. It is built to do something else, which is task two.Task two: the pupil who keeps failing the same topicHere the ranking inverts.Taiwan's platform has the longest documented history on this task. It was built to diagnose learning weaknesses quickly and precisely and to serve personalised, adaptive learning paths and content. The ministry's own account is that it improves learning efficiency and delivers on differentiated instruction. The new four-year programme adds an AI tutor for students, an AI teaching assistant for teachers, an AI decision assistant for principals, and an AI helper for parents, plus a learning analytics system that tracks learning behaviour and outcomes to feed back into teaching strategy. This is the task the platform was designed around.Singapore approaches the same task through supervised, education-specific tools inside SLS with AI-enabled features carrying built-in safety guardrails, available from Primary 4. The ministry has said theoretical knowledge alone is not sufficient and that pupils need well-designed supervised hands-on experience. What it has not published, as far as public documentation goes, is the diagnostic granularity: how narrow a gap the assistant will identify, and whether a pupil who fails fractions twice gets routed to a different practice set or merely to more of the same.Hong Kong's published position on task two is the thinnest of the three, and that is a structural consequence rather than an oversight. The grant scheme requires each participating school to implement AI-assisted teaching in at least three subjects or curriculum areas, each spanning at least two levels, and to develop at least six AI teaching examples or resources in total. Those are delivery requirements, not capability requirements. A school can satisfy all of them with tools that do no diagnosis at all.Task three: the teacher's Friday deadlineOn teacher-facing work, Hong Kong has the most concrete published output, and this is easy to miss because the grant is usually described as money for pupils.The subject assistant being trialled in Science in 2026 is explicitly for designing teaching plans, lesson preparation, and designing assessment items or homework. Alongside it, the Education Bureau states that in the 2026/27 school year it will help 300 primary and secondary schools practise AI-assisted teaching through a programme described as building communities, facilitating exchange, gathering exemplars and showcasing outcomes. The same blueprint also sets out a new series of teacher training covering AI literacy, AI plus subject, and AI leadership, with more than 40,000 digital education training places offered in the 2025/26 school year so that every teacher in a publicly funded school has the opportunity to take part.Singapore's approach to the same burden is framed as workload rather than pedagogy. The ministry has said it is using technology and AI, alongside the recommendations of a taskforce on reimagining the teaching profession, to recalibrate what teachers do, with attention to streamlining processes, strengthening support and protecting after-work hours.Taiwan frames it as capacity building with a funding line. The programme's second dimension is training cross-disciplinary teaching talent, raising teachers' ability to apply AI in teaching, establishing a smart teacher training alliance, and embedding AI teaching application into pre-service programmes. Its third dimension is data decision-making: an education big data analytics system to track learning behaviour and effectiveness and raise teachers' data literacy.The comparison, and what is not publishedTable 1: Documented behaviour of the three systems across the same three classroom tasks, 2026TaskSingapore SLS assistantHong Kong grant-funded school toolsTaiwan adaptive platformUpper primary compositionRedirects off-topic and refuses to supply direct answers; supervised from P4No central tool; school procures its ownNot a generative writing coach by designDiagnosing a repeated failureSupervised education-specific tools; diagnostic granularity not publishedNot required by scheme deliverablesExplicit weakness diagnosis and adaptive pathsTeacher lesson planning and assessment itemsFramed as workload reduction via taskforceSubject assistant trialled in Science in 2026 for plans and itemsAI teaching assistant and principal decision assistant in build Source: Education Bureau, Hong Kong 🔗, digital education blueprint; Singapore MOE Committee of Supply 2026; Taiwan Executive Yuan 🔗Table 2: Scale and money committed, by system, 2026SystemMoneyCoverageTime frameHong Kong grant schemeHK$500m of a HK$2bn reserve; HK$500,000 per school960+ schools, about 99% of publicly funded schools2025/26 to 2027/28 school yearsTaiwan AI talent programmeNT$11.755bnAll primary and secondary schools2026 to 2029 academic yearsSingapore SLS assistantNot separately disclosedNational platform, tiered by levelOngoing from 2026 Source: Education Bureau circular 221/2025 🔗; Taiwan Executive Yuan 🔗; Singapore MOE Committee of Supply 2026Two absences matter more than any row above.The first is that no system publishes outcome data. Singapore has commissioned a longitudinal study through the national research agency, with data collection due to begin in 2027, to track how children's AI use affects learning and wellbeing. That is the right instrument and it is years away. Hong Kong requires each school to file a mid-term report by 30 September 2027 and a final report by 30 September 2028, and states that failure to file or to complete the committed items can trigger a demand for full repayment of the grant. Those reports will tell the government whether schools spent the money, not whether pupils learned more.The second absence is evaluation of the refusal behaviour itself. Singapore's designed refusal on task one is the most interesting engineering decision in this comparison and nobody has published evidence that it works. Redirecting a pupil who asks for the answer is easy to specify and hard to verify at scale, and a system that redirects well in a demonstration may simply teach pupils to phrase the request differently.Design trade-offs, stated plainlyEach system bought something and paid for it.Singapore bought guardrails with centralisation. Because one ministry controls the platform, it can publish an age gate, a supervision rule, a pre-use module, and a specified refusal, and know they apply everywhere at once. The price is pace and range: primary pupils get no general-purpose AI, the toolset arrives when the ministry ships it, and a parent cannot opt a child out of an SLS tool that is part of classroom teaching, though external tools do require parental consent. The ministry's own minister addressed the contrast directly when challenged with Sweden's reversal, replying that Sweden had gone fully digital from age five and then fully back to paper, while Singapore is taking a hybrid path that keeps physical textbooks and teacher-centred instruction.Hong Kong bought speed and coverage with unevenness. Nine hundred and sixty schools deciding separately will produce far more variation than one ministry deciding once, and some of that variation will be excellent. It will also produce 960 different answers to a safeguarding question that Singapore answered once, and the scheme's enforcement mechanism is financial rather than technical: the mid-term and final reports, and the possibility of repayment. A one-off capital sum also ages badly in a field where the tools are subscriptions.Taiwan bought diagnostic depth and a sovereignty argument with a long build. The platform has years of deployment behind it, the framework is published at a level of detail the other two have not matched, and the explicit distinction between educational and general-purpose AI is a genuine design discipline rather than a slogan. The programme also states a motive beyond pedagogy: maintaining cultural and data sovereignty in the digital era, including plans for a Chinese-language self-learning platform. The price is that the most ambitious parts are unbuilt, and the budget runs to 2029.Which to pick for which situationThe comparison is only useful if it resolves into choices.· If the priority is defensible safeguarding for young pupils and you can accept a slow toolset, the Singapore model is the only one of the three that has published an age gate, a supervision requirement and a specified refusal, and applied them nationally.· If the priority is speed across a whole system and you have the money, the Hong Kong model will get tools into nearly every school within one school year. Budget for the unevenness, and for the fact that the reporting mechanism measures spending before it measures learning.· If the priority is measurable diagnosis tied to curriculum rather than generative output, the Taiwan model has the longest track record and the clearest stated design principle. It requires a national platform team and four years.What none of them has solved is the thing all three are quietly waiting on. Every system here is being deployed into schools years before any of them can say what it did to learning. The instruments that would answer that are commissioned, funded or scheduled, and the earliest results land in 2027. Until then the honest position is that three Chinese-speaking systems have made three different bets, each defensible, and the evidence to rank them does not yet exist.Data basisData as of October 2026. Comparisons are drawn from published official documentation and ministerial statements, not from direct access to any of the three systems. Where behaviour on a task is described, the source is a ministry circular, a blueprint, a parliamentary or legislative council statement, or a ministry-hosted forum. Where a capability is not published, this piece says so rather than inferring it. Money figures are as published in original currency and are not converted; they are not comparable across systems because Hong Kong's is a per-school capital grant within a larger reserve while Taiwan's is a four-year programme budget. Uptake figures are as of the stated dates and may have moved since. No outcome or attainment data for any system was available at the time of writing.Limitations· No system publishes learning-outcome results for 2026, so no claim in this piece about effectiveness is possible.· Currency and time frames differ across the three programmes; the money column in Table 2 is not a like-for-like comparison.· Hong Kong's school-level tool choices were not centrally published as of October 2026, so its row in Table 1 describes the funding rules rather than a deployed tool.Sources· Education Bureau, Hong Kong 🔗, circular 221/2025 on the grant scheme and its deliverables, December 2025· Education Bureau, Hong Kong 🔗, digital education blueprint, 2026· Hong Kong government 🔗, education minister's budget briefing, 27 February 2026· Taiwan Executive Yuan 🔗, AI talent programme approval and budget, 2026· Taiwan Ministry of Education 🔗, digital learning forum on the teacher and student AI literacy framework, October 2026· Singapore Ministry of Education, Committee of Supply 2026 debate and the 6 May 2026 parliamentary reply on AI use in schools, via MOE COS 2026 record 🔗 This article was prepared by the expert team at Global Infinity Labs, drawing on insights and data provided through its MCP data services. About Global Infinity LabsGlobal Infinity Labs is an AI innovation company specializing in MCP data services.Email: support@globalinfinitylabs.com For Media Inquiryhk@asiapresswire.com https://www.asiapresswire.com Copyright 2026 ACN Newswire via SeaPRwire.com. All rights reserved. www.acnnewswire.com

WELLINGTON, New Zealand, Oct 29, 2026 - (ACN Newswire via SeaPRwire.com) - New Zealand has one of the most successful harm reduction stories in the world. When vaping became widely available, the rate of smoking decline accelerated fivefold, according to research published in The Lancet Regional Health - Western Pacific. Adult daily smoking is now at 6.8%, a figure studied by public health experts worldwide.Regarding the next generation of innovative nicotine products (INPs), New Zealand is doing nothing. The sale of oral nicotine products (including nicotine pouches) is not permitted, except for Medsafe-approved nicotine replacement therapies. The coalition agreements at the start of this term included a commitment to reform regulation of vaping, smokeless tobacco, and oral nicotine products. The vaping reforms have been delivered; the oral nicotine reforms have not.In Jan 2025 the US FDA approved the marketing of nicotine pouches for the first time following a thorough scientific assessment. The products were found to carry a lower risk of cancer and other serious health conditions than cigarettes and the FDA has attached very strict rules to ensure that marketing is directed at adults only.In May 2026 Argentina went from prohibition to regulation. Resolution 549/2026 of the Ministry of Health ended the ban on e-cigarettes (which had been in place since 2011) and for the first time established a regulatory framework for nicotine pouches. Prior to that, the pouches had no specific legal status and were being sold without any rules.Sweden, where oral nicotine products have long been legal and regulated, now has a daily smoking rate of 3.7%, the lowest in the European Union.These are three very different political systems which have all arrived at the same conclusion: regulate pouches for adults, restrict access for the young and establish clear product standards.In NZ, nicotine pouches are illegal to sell but can be imported from overseas websites for personal use. This leaves NZ in the worst of both worlds. Adult smokers willing to switch face a confusing and unreliable route to a less harmful product. The pouches can be imported with no NZ age checks, nicotine limits, or local labelling rules.Research from the Public Health Communication Centre found awareness of nicotine pouches among 16-19 year olds rose from 23% to 36% between 2023 and 2024. The products are definitely here. The only issue is whether NZ rules apply to them or to none at all.Tetiana Rak, Chief Operating Officer of We Are Innovation, says, "New Zealand showed the world that giving smokers a regulated, less harmful alternative works. It would be a strange outcome if the country that proved the point on vaping became the one that leaves nicotine pouches in a legal vacuum. Around 300,000 New Zealanders still smoke every day. The current Government promised this reform and delivered on vaping. There is still time for it to set out a clear path on oral nicotine before the term ends, and whoever forms the next Government should pick it up from there. Either way, the job is the same: finish what was started and give those smokers one more way out."What a sensible framework could include:A minimum age of sale of 18, enforced at the point of sale and online.Limits on nicotine strength and clear product standardsRestrictions on marketing that could appeal to young peopleLicensing or notification of retailers, building on the existing system for vaping productsNew Zealand has already demonstrated that pragmatic, evidence-based harm reduction policies can accelerate progress towards a smoke-free future. Regulating nicotine pouches would be a logical next step, providing adult smokers with more alternatives while introducing safeguards to protect young people. With international examples to draw from and a commitment to reform already on the table, the path forward is clear. The question is no longer whether nicotine pouches should be regulated, but how quickly New Zealand can establish a framework that protects consumers, supports informed choices, and builds on its success in reducing smoking.ABOUT WE ARE INNOVATIONWe Are Innovation is a dynamic network of individuals and institutions who deeply believe in innovation's power to drive progress and solve the world's most pressing problems. With over 60 think tanks, foundations, and NGOs based worldwide, We Are Innovation represents the diverse voices of a global civil society committed to advancing human creativity, adopting new technologies, and promoting innovative solutions. Through our collaborative approach and cutting-edge expertise, we are driving global transformative change. To learn more about our work, visit us at https://weareinnovation.global/.Contact Informationinfo@somosinnovacion.latBeatriz Santos (CCO)SOURCE: We Are Innovation Copyright 2026 ACN Newswire via SeaPRwire.com. All rights reserved. www.acnnewswire.com

SAN DIEGO, Oct 28, 2026 - (ACN Newswire via SeaPRwire.com) - General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc. (GA-ASI) has partnered with Saab to perform advanced flight testing of an Airborne Early Warning (AEW) system on an Uncrewed Aircraft System (UAS). The flight testing was conducted over the past few months using a GA-ASI-produced MQ-9B carrying a Saab LoyalEye radar operating from GA-ASI's Desert Horizon flight operations facility in Southern California. The flight test demonstrated simultaneous tracking of several airborne and maritime targets at long ranges. The airborne targets tracked included multiple instrumented red fighter jets and several commercial aircraft.MQ-9B is GA-ASI's flagship UAS, offering unmatched endurance, type certification and all-weather performance. GA-ASI is discussing unmanned AEW capabilities on MQ-9B with several customers."This has been one of the most highly anticipated flight tests we have performed," said GA-ASI President David R. Alexander. "The level of customer interest in AEW capability on MQ-9B throughout the world is extremely high. It just makes sense."Historically, airborne early warning capability has depended solely on large, crewed aircraft. AEW on MQ-9B introduces a new approach, combining long endurance, persistent airborne sensing on a UAS. MQ-9B's ability to surveil large areas for extended periods expands coverage, and establishes persistent surveillance in operating environments where endurance, geographic reach, and reduced aircrew exposure are critical. Using an unmanned AEW solution also offers flexibility to perform Battle Management Command & Control (BMC2) in a distributed fashion anywhere appropriate infrastructure exists, whether that be on the ground, on a ship or on an existing manned AEW aircraft.Saab's LoyalEye AEW radar was installed on GA-ASI's MQ-9B using payload pods. The AEW system is designed to provide persistent air surveillance. On the MQ-9B, it enables operators to use AEW in areas where it previously was unavailable, enhancing situational awareness while providing greater operational reach and flexibility without risking the loss of crew."This flight test underscores Saab's commitment to evolving airborne early warning capabilities to meet future operational needs," said Carl-Johan Bergholm, Head of Saab's business area Surveillance. "LoyalEye complements existing capabilities by adding flexibility, extending reach, and enabling a more efficient use of resources in demanding environments."The AEW offering for MQ-9B will support a wide range of applications, including early detection and warning, long-range detection and tracking, simultaneous target tracking, and flexible systems integration. By combining persistent sensing with an uncrewed aircraft, MQ-9B with AEW offers operators another means of expanding airborne early warning coverage while preserving high-value crewed assets for missions where they are most needed.GA-ASI's MQ-9B models include the SkyGuardian® and SeaGuardian®, the United Kingdom's MQ-9B variant known as Protector, and the new MQ-9B STOL (Short Takeoff and Landing) configuration currently in development for naval aircraft carriers.About GA-ASIGeneral Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc., is the world's foremost builder of Uncrewed Aircraft Systems (UAS). Logging more than 9 million flight hours, the Predator® line of UAS has flown for over 30 years and includes MQ-9A Reaper®, MQ-1C Gray Eagle®, MQ-20 Avenger®, MQ-9B SkyGuardian®/SeaGuardian®, XQ-67A, and FQ-42 Vengeance. The company is dedicated to providing long-endurance, multi-mission solutions that deliver persistent situational awareness and rapid strike.For more information, visit www.ga-asi.com.Avenger, EagleEye, Gray Eagle, Lynx, Predator, Reaper, SeaGuardian, and SkyGuardian are trademarks of General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc., registered in the United States and/or other countries.Contact InformationGA-ASI Media Relationsasi-mediarelations@ga-asi.com(858) 524-8101SOURCE: General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc. Copyright 2026 ACN Newswire via SeaPRwire.com. All rights reserved. www.acnnewswire.com

SURPRISE, Ariz., October 28, 2026 - (ACN Newswire via SeaPRwire.com) - SenesTech, Inc. (NASDAQ: SNES), an innovator in rodent control, today announced that it has engaged Portland, Oregon-based Sandstrom Partners, Inc. (“Sandstrom”) as a strategic advisor with the goal of accelerating sales. To support this initiative, the Company intends to draw on Sandstrom’s “tool box” of brand development services, including market research, strategy, brand identity, package design, advertising and digital design and development. SenesTech believes that by collaborating with the Sandstrom team the Company can improve and hone its communications with potential and existing customers, thereby leading to sustainable sales growth.Sandstrom is recognized as a leader in consumer brand development, and its work has appeared in nearly every major national and international design competition. Current and past Sandstrom clients include Nike, Converse, Levi Strauss, Target, ESPN, Coca-Cola, Tazo Tea, Castor & Pollux, St-Germain Elderflower Liqueur, Bulleit Bourbon and Aviation Gin.As previously disclosed, in April of 2026, SenesTech shareholder Glenbrook Capital Management (“Glenbrook”) commissioned a strategic study by Sandstrom of the evolving worldwide rodent control market. The initial phase of this study was recently concluded and, upon presenting their results and observations to the Company’s board, Sandstrom was retained to provide deliverables to help communicate and educate consumers and business on how best to employ Evolve and ContraPest as a non-lethal prong in an intelligent strategy for rodent control.Michael Edell, President and Chief Executive Officer of SenesTech, commented, “Evolve and ContraPest represent a fundamentally different approach to rodent control. We think we have established a track record scientifically, such as by our recent success in Chicago where we documented an 88% reduction in rodent activity in an area targeted for us by Chicago. We want to earn recognition with consumers and pest management professionals by better communicating how and why our products work. We are pleased that the Sandstrom team are excited by the prospect of helping consumers and businesses ‘move the needle’ in their struggle to control rodents. Although we do not see this as an overnight effort, we hope to see traction that we can report to our shareholders.”Jack Peterson, President of Sandstrom, commented, “SenesTech has something rare in the long-established category of rodent control: a genuinely different product backed by a clear mission, namely, to get lasting results in controlling rodent populations. This mission addresses what has for the industry been an elusive goal by the prodigious reproduction cycle of rodents. We intend to stay true to the mission of interrupting that cycle while identifying and capitalizing on the trends reshaping how today’s consumers and professionals manage pests. That involves telling a compelling story whose plot is carried through every piece of communication, from the name to the package, point of sale, web and advertising.”Peterson continued, “We are impressed by SenesTech’s recent sales gains on Amazon and one of our first tasks will be to assist in retaining customers and accelerate new customer acquisition by educating customers how and why SenesTech’s solution works. This plays to our expertise in finding creative ways to engage customers that can drive brand awareness and accelerate sales. Since we are informed by the six months we spent researching the addressable market, we hope our collaboration with SenesTech can hit the ground running.”About Sandstrom PartnersFounded in Portland, Oregon, in 1990, Sandstrom Partners is a brand development company that focuses on the creation and revitalization of thought-leading brands that seek to appeal to new audiences, change the category paradigm and capitalize on emerging trends. Current and past Sandstrom clients include Tazo Tea, Bacardi Oakheart, Sonoma Cider, Castor & Pollux, Stillhouse Distilling, Miller Brewing, Converse, Brown-Forman, Diageo, Virgin Mobile, Levi Strauss, Target, ESPN, Nike, Reebok, Adidas, Coca-Cola, Pernod Ricard, St-Germain and Aviation Gin.About SenesTechSenesTech is the leader in rodent birth control and sustainable rodent population management, with a mission to support a healthier environment through the responsible management of animal pest populations. The Company’s Evolve® and ContraPest® fertility control solutions, along with its assessment and monitoring services, target reproduction to help reduce rodent populations. SenesTech serves consumer and professional markets with proven approaches that can be used independently or as part of an integrated pest management (IPM) program. For more information, visit senestech.com. Forward-Looking StatementsThis press release contains “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements regarding the anticipated benefits of the Company’s engagement of Sandstrom, the Company’s brand strategy and its expected sales growth. Such statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially, including changes in economic conditions, general competitive factors, acceptance of the Company’s products in the market, the Company’s success in obtaining new customers, the Company’s ability to execute its business model and strategic plans, and the other risks described from time to time in the Company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its Annual Report on Form 10-K and Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q. The Company assumes no obligation to update the cautionary information in this release.Investor Contact:Robert Blum, Lytham Partners, LLC(602) 889-9700senestech@lythampartners.com Company Contact:Tom Chesterman, SenesTech, Inc.(928) 233-7533investors@senestech.com Copyright 2026 ACN Newswire via SeaPRwire.com. All rights reserved. www.acnnewswire.com

Hong Kong, Oct 28, 2026 - (ACN Newswire via SeaPRwire.com) - To strengthen long-term business ties between Hong Kong, Qatar and the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council), Prof Frederick Ma, Chairman of the Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC), visited Doha, Qatar, from 24 to 27 October at the invitation of the Government of the State of Qatar. During this visit, Prof Ma met with senior officials including ministers of finance, investment and trade, as well as leaders of business organisations and financial institutions with a view to deepening business ties. He also spoke at the UN Conference Trade and Development (UNCTAD) World Investment Forum.HKTDC Chairman Prof Frederick Ma (second from right) speaks at the UN Conference Trade and Development (UNCTAD) World Investment Forum 2026, sharing the stage with senior ministersSpeaking at the Forum at a session entitled "International Investment Facilitation Policies: Creating Partnerships for Sustainable Development", Prof Ma shared how Hong Kong, as one of the world's top international financial centres, is a trusted platform for global investment and trade, connecting capital, enterprises and opportunities across Asia, the Middle East, Africa and beyond.Prof Ma said, "Despite current geopolitical volatility, I believe it is important to reach out and build important relationships to ensure long-term economic development around the world. My trip to Qatar gave me this opportunity, while the World Investment Forum presented an ideal occasion to promote the advantages of Hong Kong as the world's leading international financial centre and investment hub. Hong Kong, under the unique One Country, Two Systems arrangement, combines connectivity to the Chinese Mainland and global markets with an international business environment based on common law, the free flow of capital and global standards, is an effective platform to deepen relationships across regions to facilitate more business and investment. This is also our core mission at the HKTDC, where our network of 51 offices worldwide helps us connect people around the world to create business success."High-level meetings deepen business tiesIn addition to his speaking engagement, Prof Ma met with high-level officials including Qatar's Minister of Finance Ali bin Ahmed Al Kuwari, Minister of State for Foreign Trade Dr Ahmed bin Mohammed Al Sayed, Bahrain's Minister of Industry and Commerce Abdullah bin Adel Fakhro, senior officials from Invest Qatar and Qatar Investment Authority, and leaders from the Qatar National Bank, the Qatar Foundation, Qatar Chamber of Commerce & Industry and the Qatar Development Bank. The meetings provided valuable opportunities to strengthen relationships with key stakeholders, exchange views on the latest economic trends and investment focus on infrastructure, logistics, technology and manufacturing, while highlighting potential for strategic partnerships leveraging Hong Kong's role as a super-connector and super value-adder.HKTDC Chairman Prof Frederick Ma (left) meets with Ali bin Ahmed Al Kuwari, Minister of Finance of Qatar HKTDC Chairman Prof Frederick Ma (left) meets with Dr Ahmed bin Mohammed Al Sayed, Minister of State for Foreign TradeHKTDC Chairman Prof Frederick Ma (second from right) meets with Abdulla Mubarak Al-Khalifa, Group CEO of Qatar National Bank (second from left)Riding on the growing momentumHKTDC has been actively promoting business connectivity between Hong Kong and emerging markets through organising business missions led by the Chief Executive and senior officials of the Hong Kong SAR Government, together with enterprises from Hong Kong and the Chinese Mainland. Missions to Qatar and Kuwait in 2025, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia in 2023, and most recently Central Asia in June, have demonstrated the value of government-to-government (G2G), government-to-business (G2B) and business-to-business (B2B) collaboration in creating new opportunities for trade and investment. HKTDC also featured a special Middle East Chapter and a Middle East Zone at the Belt and Road Summit in Hong Kong in September 2026 which was attended by some 6,200 business and government leaders from over 70 countries and regions.Photo download: https://bit.ly/4idMqWMMedia EnquiriesHKTDC’s Communications & Public Affairs Department:Serena CheungTel: (852) 2584 4572Email: serena.hm.cheung@hktdc.orgHKTDC Media Room: https://mediaroom.hktdc.com/enAbout HKTDC The Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC) celebrates its 60th anniversary this year. The HKTDC is a statutory body established in 1966 to promote, assist and develop Hong Kong's trade. With over 50 offices globally, including 13 in the Chinese Mainland, the HKTDC promotes Hong Kong as a two-way global investment and business hub. The HKTDC organises international exhibitions, conferences and business missions to create business opportunities for companies, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), in the mainland and international markets. The HKTDC also provides up-to-date market insights and product information via trade publications, research reports and digital news channels. For more information, please visit: www.hktdc.com/aboutus. Copyright 2026 ACN Newswire via SeaPRwire.com. All rights reserved. www.acnnewswire.com

HONG KONG, Oct 28, 2026 - (ACN Newswire via SeaPRwire.com) - On October 28, Xunce (3317.HK) officially launched the TokenRouters platform. Positioned as a one-stop exchange, matching, and service platform for real-time AI data and specialized tokens, the platform is designed to optimize enterprise-level small models and enterprise models. It connects datasets, AI models, AI applications, and scenario libraries, making data value exchangeable and intelligent assets readily accessible.As a key product in Phase 3.0 of Xunce 's "Four-Stage Leap" strategy, the TokenRouters platform will propel the company from an AI data infrastructure provider to an infrastructure operator for the token economy. It will not only build data pipelines but also participate in establishing token circulation rules and operating value-exchange networks; its growth potential will no longer be limited to the token usage volume of individual clients but will instead be driven by the scale of token circulation across the entire ecosystem.Solving the Pain Point of "Resource Selection" in Enterprise AI: Achieving Precise Matching Between Supply and DemandCurrently, large-model technology is becoming increasingly mature, and computing power supply is gradually becoming more abundant. As a result, the bottleneck in enterprise AI implementation is shifting from "whether computing power is available" to "whether the right resources can be selected." In the past, enterprises were concerned about insufficient computing power; today, they face a different challenge: resources such as datasets, models, and applications are scattered across different vendors and platforms, making it difficult to know where to start; With numerous resources available for the same industry and task, the lack of scenario-based reference points makes matching difficult; the absence of benchmarks for data-model compatibility and application effectiveness leads to high procurement risks and a lack of trust. In short, what is missing between the demand and supply sides is not resources, but an intelligent resource exchange hub that is discoverable, comparable, trustworthy, exchangeable, and accessible.TokenRouters was created to address the issues of circulation, matching, and exchange of tokens and related smart assets.The platform brings together dispersed data, models, applications, and use cases in one place, establishing a channel for precise supply-demand matching. By enabling precise matching, it enhances resource utilization, ensuring that every dataset is visible, priced, and reusable—transforming every smart procurement process from "blind trial and error" to "precise matching." In short, whether you are a demand-side user seeking datasets, models, and applications, or a supply-side provider offering high-quality resources, you can achieve efficient connections and precise matching on TokenRouters.Within Xunce 's product portfolio, AIDP transforms raw data into high-quality datasets; TokenOS converts high-quality data into specialized tokens; TokenCloud provides computing power to support token generation and model inference; and TokenRouters enables the efficient matching, exchange, circulation, and pricing of tokens and model capabilities. These four layers of capabilities thus form a complete chain spanning from data resources to token pricing.Build a "Five-in-One" AI Resource Circulation System and Create a Closed-Loop Process Centered on Enterprise Model OptimizationIn terms of product functionality, the TokenRouters platform has established a "five-in-one" AI resource circulation system comprising "datasets, AI models, AI applications, scenario libraries, and intelligent customer service." These five modules are not simply listed side by side; rather, they are interconnected to form a closed loop around the decision-making path enterprises take—from "identifying the right scenario" to "completing the purchase."Among these, "Datasets" aggregates industry data resources and connects them to business scenarios, providing direction and a solid foundation for data selection—making the process more efficient and the application path clearer; "AI Models" aggregates industry models and connects them to business tasks, ensuring a two-way alignment between "what the model can do" and "what the business needs," thereby providing a solid basis for model selection; "AI Applications" aggregates business applications, organizing resources by industry, product type, and use case to ensure that digital and intelligent solutions are selected based on actual needs; the "Scenario Library" focuses on industry pain points and maps out AI implementation paths, helping intelligent initiatives identify the right entry points and clarify their value propositions; "Intelligent Customer Service" integrates automated Q&A with human assistance, providing expert guidance at every step to make usage inquiries more convenient and service guidance clearer.As a result, TokenRouters forms a complete closed-loop process of "Identify the Scenario—Discover Resources—Evaluate Suitability—Adapt and Validate—End-to-End Service": transforming data from a cost center into an asset center, turning models from technical black boxes into comparable commodities, converting applications from custom projects into off-the-shelf standard products, and shifting industry expertise from individual experts to reusable assets, and enables the business model to be continuously optimized based on real-world scenarios.Activating Dedicated Tokens and Enterprise Micro-Models: Moving from Data Infrastructure to a Token Exchange NetworkThe current market 's understanding of tokens largely remains at the level of invoking and measuring general-purpose large language models. General-purpose tokens primarily address general capabilities such as language understanding, common-sense question-answering, and content generation. However, for enterprises, general-purpose tokens do not equate to business productivity. When implementing AI, what enterprises truly need are capabilities that "understand industry knowledge, business rules, and scenario constraints."Dedicated tokens are different. They are created by governing, processing, and tokenizing high-quality industry data, and they embody industry terminology, business rules, process knowledge, and scenario preferences. They address business understanding challenges and can support more precise decision-making in vertical scenarios such as financial risk control, medical diagnosis, and industrial quality inspection. Generic tokens can be procured, but they rarely lead to differentiation; specialized tokens can only truly translate into enterprise-specific productivity if they are discoverable, comparable, exchangeable, and tradable.Therefore, Xunce Technology 's TokenRouters is not an aggregator of generic tokens, but rather an exchange hub for specialized tokens. With specialized tokens as its core exchange assets, the platform enables high-quality vertical-specific tokens to be discoverable, matchable, tradable, and priceable. Centering on enterprise model optimization and the training and deployment needs of enterprise-specific small models, it establishes a seamless exchange channel between data, specialized tokens, and model capabilities. This helps enterprises acquire their own, privately deployable domain-specific small models at lower costs and in shorter timeframes, transitioning from "using generic capabilities" to "possessing exclusive productive capacity."The unlocking of specialized tokens ' value is also driving enterprise micro-models from being a "nice-to-have" to becoming the "mainstream path." Centered on the training and deployment needs of enterprise micro-models, TokenRouters establishes exchange channels between data, specialized tokens, and model capabilities. This makes high-quality, vertical-specific tokens discoverable, matchable, and tradable, helping enterprises acquire their own domain-specific micro-models—which can be deployed on-premises—at lower costs and in shorter timeframes, shifting from "using generic capabilities" to "possessing dedicated productivity." This also means that the unlocking of data value no longer stops at internal enterprise governance and tokenization but extends further toward circulation and exchange across organizations, systems, and scenarios.Previously, Xunce had already formulated a clear "Four-Stage Transition" strategy: from 1.0 Data Governance to 2.0 Tokenization, then to 3.0 Token Exchange, and finally to 4.0—accelerating the training and large-scale deployment of enterprise-specific small models—to complete the full-chain closed loop of "computing power—data—tokens—models—applications."As a key product in the company 's 3.0 phase, TokenRouters represents a crucial step for Xunce in its transition from a data infrastructure builder to a token economy operator. Through this platform, the company will connect the demand and supply sides, making data value exchangeable and intelligent assets readily accessible. It aims to drive the adoption of specialized tokens and enterprise micro-models as new infrastructure for corporate intelligent upgrades, enabling every enterprise to gain exclusive productivity within the token circulation network and share in the industrial dividends of the AI era.Media contactBrand Name: XunceContact Person: Marketing TeamEmail: ir@xuncetech.com Tele: 0755-86667876Website: http://www.xuncetech.com/ Copyright 2026 ACN Newswire via SeaPRwire.com. All rights reserved. www.acnnewswire.com

Hong Kong, Oct 28, 2026 - (ACN Newswire via SeaPRwire.com) - The 16th Asian Logistics, Maritime and Aviation Conference (ALMAC), organised by the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) Government and the Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC), will take place at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre on 16 and 17 November. Under the theme "Driving Inclusive Growth through Innovation and Sustainability", this year's ALMAC will bring together government and business leaders from the logistics, shipping, aviation, supply chain management and related services sectors to discuss supply chain resilience, green energy and digital transformation, as well as the latest opportunities and pathways for high-quality development. The conference topics will align with the National 15th Five-Year Plan, the HKSAR Government's first "Five-Year Plan for Hong Kong" and the latest Policy Address, with a view to enhancing Hong Kong's competitiveness and supporting sustained economic development, while reinforcing Hong Kong's position as international trade and maritime centres and an aviation hub.Jacky Chung, Associate Executive Director of the HKTDC, said: "This year's ALMAC will bring together around 80 distinguished speakers and is expected to attract more than 2,300 participants from over 40 countries and regions. The National 15th Five-Year Plan, Hong Kong's first Five-Year Plan and the Policy Address support Hong Kong's position as international trade and maritime centres and an international aviation hub to strengthen the 'four centres and one hub'. Amid continued geopolitical tensions, increasingly frequent extreme weather, and accelerating transition to sustainable development, the HKTDC will continue to align with the policies of the country and the HKSAR Government. We are committed to promoting high-value-added supply chain services and green energy development in Hong Kong, while leveraging the city’s strengths in financial, technology, arbitration and mediation and other professional services. We will also seize the opportunities arising from the Belt and Road Initiative and support Mainland enterprises in going global and exploring new business opportunities. Hong Kong's port is upgrading from a 'traditional major port' to a 'value-added port', accelerating its digital, green and smart development. We will also strengthen cooperation with ports in the Greater Bay Area and strive to become a key maritime hub connecting South China with South America. This development direction is highly aligned with the positioning of ALMAC, which will help the industry move beyond 'moving goods faster' towards 'moving goods more reliably, more sustainably and with greater value'."Jacky Chung, Associate Executive Director of the HKTDC (second left); Dr Kelvin Leung, Chairman of the HKTDC Logistics Services Advisory Committee, International Vice-President (East Asia) and Past President (Hong Kong) of The Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport (second right); Peter Hui, Chairman of the Hong Kong Shippers' Council (first left); and Sham Man Fai, Group Chief Technology Officer and Chief Operating Officer of Green Fuels and Chemicals Business, The Hong Kong and China Gas Company Limited (first right), attended today's media briefing for the 16th Asian Logistics, Maritime and Aviation Conference, where they shared the latest industry trends and highlights of the conference.Focusing on "resilience, green and connectivity" to connect global resourcesThis year's ALMAC will feature a distinguished lineup of speakers sharing the latest industry developments and exploring future opportunities. John Lee, Chief Executive of the HKSAR, will attend the conference on the second day and deliver a special address, while Professor Frederick Ma, Chairman of the HKTDC, will deliver the opening remarks on the first day. Jennifer Nordquist, Deputy Director-General of the World Trade Organization (WTO), will discuss supply chain resilience, exploring how governments and businesses can strengthen collaboration to reduce uncertainties in global trade and supply chains. She will also share how forward-looking strategies and practical solutions can promote inclusive growth, strengthen international supply chains and advance sustainable development.Exploring three key areas: supply chain development, Silk Road Maritime and green energyIn recent years, geopolitical developments, trade barriers, tariff policies, climate change, technological disruption and logistics bottlenecks have converged to create unprecedented challenges for businesses. Supply chain leaders have to transform volatility in the broader operating environment into opportunities for growth, but also transform supply chains into strategic pillars supporting resilience, inclusiveness and sustainable growth, while integrating new technologies across systems, processes and operational capabilities. ALMAC will bring together representatives from multilateral organisations and industry leaders to share forward-looking development directions and practical strategies. Speakers will include Steven Beck, Director of Trade and Supply Chain Division of the Asian Development Bank; Dr Yann Duval, Chief of Trade Policy and Facilitation Section of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific; Emmanuelle Ganne, Chief of Digital Trade and Frontier Technologies of the World Trade Organization; Evan Xue, Vice President of JD Group and Head of Asia Pacific JD Logistics; and William Lee, Head of Data Intelligence of SF Supply Chain (Hong Kong and Macau). They will explore strategies to build a more resilient, sustainable and inclusive global trading system.Strengthening connectivity through Silk Road Maritime and leveraging Hong Kong's professional services to support businesses going globalThe Silk Road Maritime Association with a focus on shipping, is the country's first international integrated logistics service brand and platform under the Belt and Road Initiative. Since its establishment in 2018, the network has expanded to 160 designated routes connecting 153 ports in 50 countries and regions, with engagement of 393 members. Silk Road Maritime has also been officially incorporated into the National 15th Five-Year Plan, continuing to inject greater certainty into the stability of global supply chains. ALMAC 2026 will for the first time host a thematic seminar on Silk Road Maritime, bringing together global expertise to highlight the platform’s role in enhancing connectivity and supply chain stability. Simon Bennett, Deputy Secretary General of the International Chamber of Shipping, will share insights on coordinated port development, overseas expansion and supply chain risk management, exploring how the Silk Road Maritime platform can deepen international collaboration and strengthen the resilience and sustainability of global supply chains.With green energy, the world accelerates its transition towards net-zero emissions, while the transformation of energy systems profoundly reshapes the business landscape and placing greater demands on corporate innovation, cross-sector collaboration and long-term commitment, with far-reaching implications for long-term economic growth. The transition also highlights the urgent need to accelerate infrastructure investment, strengthen policy support and deepen cross-sector collaboration to build more resilient green energy systems. For businesses committed to ambitious climate goals, the transition to green energy is no longer simply an option, but a fundamental pillar of sustainable development. ALMAC will bring together industry leaders including Scott Childress, Chief Sustainability Officer of UPS; Tim Lederer, Vice President of Global Aviation Regulatory Affairs and Fuel Management of DHL Express; Sham Man Fai, Group Chief Technology Officer and Chief Operating Officer of Green Fuels and Chemicals Business, The Hong Kong and China Gas Company Limited; and Junlin Yu, Vice President of Rystad Energy, to examine the latest developments and trends in green energy.Diverse forums and workshops showcase Hong Kong’s services strengthsIn addition, ALMAC will feature the LSCM Shipping Summit, the "Hong Kong's NextGen Logistician Awards 2026" Presentation Ceremony and several workshops over the two-day conference. The LSCM Shipping Summit will explore the “Port Community System" in depth, examining how the system can leverage cutting-edge technologies such as blockchain to safeguard data security, provide end-to-end visibility across supply chains and port logistics, and enhance operational efficiency for all parties.The "Hong Kong's NextGen Logistician Awards" is an annual industry award initiated by the HKSAR Government under the “Action Plan on Modern Logistics Development" and jointly organised by the Hong Kong logistics industry with the support of the Hong Kong Logistics Development Council. The awards aim to recognise and encourage young logistics professionals who have made outstanding contributions and demonstrated exceptional potential in innovative, high-end, smart and green logistics. Through the success stories of award winners, the awards also seek to enhance public understanding of the latest developments in modern logistics, encourage more young people to pursue careers in the logistics industry and support the further development of Hong Kong's logistics sector. ALMAC will also organise workshops on commercial dispute resolution mechanisms such as arbitration and mediation, artificial intelligence, green energy and youth empowerment, bringing together industry leaders to share the latest developments and opportunities in these areas.Leading logistics, shipping and aviation companies showcase the latest offeringsThe exhibition will feature close to 100 exhibitors, with dedicated zones for Supply Chain Management and Logistics Services, Maritime and Port Services and Logtech, as well as a new Green Energy Zone showcasing the latest developments in green energy and carbon-reduction technologies. The Hong Kong and China Gas Company Ltd will make its debut at ALMAC. Other industry leaders, including the Airport Authority Hong Kong, Hong Kong Air Cargo Terminals Ltd and JD.com, will also participate in the ALMAC exhibition.Several mainland government organisations and private enterprises, including the Jiangsu Logistics Industry Promotion Association, the Authority of Qianhai Shenzhen-Hong Kong Modern Service Industry Cooperation Zone of Shenzhen and the Bureau of Commerce of Guangzhou Nansha Economic and Technological Development Zone, will return to ALMAC. The Xi'an delegation will participate for the first time.Last year, ALMAC successfully organised more than 400 business-matching sessions, underscoring Hong Kong's role as a "superconnector" and "super value-adder". Business Matching sessions will continue to be offered this year, bringing together shippers and logistics service providers to foster regional partnerships and promote industry development.Photo download: https://bit.ly/4jLkkouMedia enquiriesYuan Tung Financial Relations:Louise SongTel: (852) 3428 5690Email: lsong@yuantung.com.hkTiffany LeungTel: (852) 3428 2361Email: tleung@yuantung.com.hkHKTDC’s Communications & Public Affairs Department:Dawn YuenTel: (852) 2584 4575Email: dawn.nh.yuen@hktdc.orgClayton LauwTel: (852) 2584 4472Email: clayton.y.lauw@hktdc.orgHKTDC Media Room: http://mediaroom.hktdc.comAbout HKTDC The Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC) celebrates its 60th anniversary this year. The HKTDC is a statutory body established in 1966 to promote, assist and develop Hong Kong's trade. With over 50 offices globally, including 13 in the Chinese Mainland, the HKTDC promotes Hong Kong as a two-way global investment and business hub. The HKTDC organises international exhibitions, conferences and business missions to create business opportunities for companies, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), in the mainland and international markets. The HKTDC also provides up-to-date market insights and product information via trade publications, research reports and digital news channels. For more information, please visit: www.hktdc.com/aboutus. Follow us on Follow us on @hktdc and LinkedIn. Copyright 2026 ACN Newswire via SeaPRwire.com. All rights reserved. www.acnnewswire.com

HONG KONG, Oct 28, 2026 - (ACN Newswire via SeaPRwire.com) - Hong Kong's Transport Department has a number that nobody in the argument disputes. Its survey of personalised point-to-point demand puts the territory at about 880,000 passenger journeys a day. Taxis carry roughly 690,000 of them, or 78 percent. Ride-hailing carries about 190,000, or 22 percent. Those three figures are the closest thing this debate has to a shared fact, and every party has been quoting them for eighteen months.The disagreement starts one step later, at the conversion. The government has decided that 190,000 daily ride-hailing journeys should be served by no more than 10,000 vehicle permits. The platform most affected says that cap cuts its active driver pool by more than two-thirds. The taxi trade says 10,000 is too many, too fast, and should be released in batches. Three parties, one demand figure, three incompatible conclusions — and, unusually for a regulatory fight, a paper trail detailed enough to check the arithmetic.What each side committed to, in its own wordsMost coverage of this file has quoted the bill's passage and the fee schedule. The positions are more useful than the statutes, because each one contains a falsifiable commitment.SpeakerPositionWhat they saidWhat it commits them toMable Chan, Secretary for Transport and LogisticsGovernment, selling the billThe bill would "modernise our services, attract younger drivers, and provide diverse traveling options for residents"That supply expands, not just legalisesTransport and Logistics Bureau spokesmanGovernment, defending the cap10,000 permits is "a prudent, sound and appropriate approach that balances considerations regarding road resources and the public transport ecosystem"That road capacity, not demand, is the binding constraintAndrew Byrne, Uber global head of public policyPlatform, opposing the capA quota in this range is "very unusual" by the standards of London, Australia and mainland Chinese citiesThat Hong Kong is an outlier, not a normal caseNicole Lee, Uber Hong Kong public policy headPlatform, on cost"70% say the proposed insurance costs would push them off ride-hailing"That the insurance rule, not the cap, may bind firstTaxi Owners' AssociationTrade, opposing the capGovernment "must absolutely not release all 10,000 permits at once within a short period"That phasing protects incumbent incomeHong Kong commentator, Chinese Association of Hong Kong and Macao StudiesPro-establishment, against the licence classGovernment should issue more taxi licences rather than create a parallel ride-hailing permitThat the two services are substitutes, not complements Read the third and fifth rows together and the shape of the fight appears. Uber's argument is comparative: no other dense city caps ride-hailing this tightly. The taxi trade's argument is distributive: whatever the number, it should arrive slowly enough that existing drivers absorb it. Both can be true. Neither addresses the government's actual claim, which is about road space.The arithmetic the government publishedStart with the vehicles. Hong Kong has 18,163 taxis — 15,250 urban, 2,838 New Territories, 75 Lantau — carrying close to a million passengers a day. Add the 30,000-plus drivers Uber says are active on its platform, and the current point-to-point fleet is roughly 48,000 vehicles serving 880,000 journeys. That is 18.3 journeys per vehicle per day across the whole system.Now impose the cap. The fleet becomes 18,163 taxis plus 10,000 permitted ride-hailing cars, or 28,163 vehicles, for the same 880,000 journeys. That is 31.2 journeys per vehicle per day — a 71 percent increase in vehicle productivity, required immediately.ScenarioVehiclesDaily journeysJourneys per vehicleCurrent, taxis plus active ride-hailing~48,200880,00018.3Cap at 10,000 permits28,163880,00031.2Cap at 15,000 permits33,163880,00026.5 Thirty-one journeys a day is not fantasy. Hong Kong taxis already achieve about 38 per cab, because street-hailing produces short trips with almost no idle time between fares. The question is whether a pre-booked ride-hailing model can hit the same productivity. It operates differently by design: the car travels to the passenger, waits, and often deadheads back. Independent estimates put deadhead mileage for app-dispatched fleets at 25 to 40 percent of distance travelled. Street-hailing taxis cruise for fares too, but they do it while available, not while committed.So the cap is not arithmetically impossible. It requires ride-hailing to become as productive as street-hailing. That is precisely what the taxi trade has argued it should be, and precisely what ride-hailing's operating model makes difficult.The arithmetic the platform publishedUber's numbers point at a different variable: the driver pool, not the vehicle count.The company says it has more than 30,000 active drivers in Hong Kong. A 10,000-permit cap therefore removes more than two-thirds of them, and its submission to LegCo states that over 20,000 current drivers would lose the ability to earn through the platform. Its survey of 4,569 drivers found 74 percent "extremely concerned" about the quota and a further 18.5 percent "very concerned"; 41 percent said ride-hailing provides between 81 and 100 percent of household income; 76 percent expected immediate financial difficulty.Those are self-reported expectations from a platform's own user base, collected in May 2026, and they should be read as such. A survey commissioned by the party that loses most from a policy will find that the policy is unpopular. The useful part is not the sentiment, it is the structural claim underneath: that the permit is attached to the vehicle and bound to its owner, so the number of permits is a hard ceiling on the number of people who can earn.That claim is correct on the text. The owner-driver requirement means a permit holder must be the registered owner of the car they drive, a provision Mable Chan said was intended to stop permits being sublet or sold on a secondary market. It is a strong anti-rent-seeking design. It also means there is no legal way for a fleet owner to hold twenty cars and employ twenty drivers, which is how ride-hailing scales in most markets.Uber's proposed fix is a phased allocation with 80 percent of permits reserved for existing active drivers and no more than 20 percent for people who already own a car, plus quarterly reviews using 90th-percentile indicators on wait times, completion rates and fares. The trade's fix is the opposite: batch release, and a floor under ride-hailing fares so they cannot undercut taxis.The arithmetic the trade publishedThe Taxi Owners' Association's submission is the shortest and the most revealing. It asks for two things: that the 10,000 permits be released gradually rather than at once, and that ride-hailing fares be prohibited from going below taxi fares.The second request is the important one, and it is not really about fares. It is an admission about the first. If the trade believed 10,000 permits were a small number, it would not need a price floor. A price floor only matters when you expect the new entrant to win on price at equal volume. The association is asking the government to remove the one advantage ride-hailing has, which suggests it expects the volume to be there.The first request has a defensible economics behind it. Taxi plates in Hong Kong are traded assets. Anything that reduces expected earnings on a plate reduces its capital value, and a sudden release of 10,000 competing vehicles would do that in a single step. Phasing spreads the loss over time and lets incumbents exit through attrition rather than writedown. That is a legitimate transition-management argument, and the government has effectively accepted it by setting the permit regime to start in August 2027 rather than with the bill's commencement.What the trade did not supply is any figure for how many permits would be acceptable. That absence is itself a position.What the government got for the taxi trade, quietlyThe bill was not only a cap on ride-hailing. It also carried three concessions to the taxi industry that were legislated separately and are already in force, and they change the competitive picture more than the permit number will.Since 1 April 2026, taxi drivers must offer at least two electronic payment methods, one of them QR-based and one not. Five licensed taxi fleets, awarded under the fleet scheme the Transport Department introduced to raise service standards, are now operating with app-based booking. The combined driving test for taxi and ride-hailing vehicles, introduced in the same subsidiary legislation package, lets a single qualification serve both.MeasureStatusEffect on the 2027 marketTwo e-payment methods per taxiIn force 1 April 2026Removes the "no card, no app" objection to taxisFive licensed taxi fleetsOperatingGives taxis app dispatch without a platform licenceCombined taxi and ride-hailing testIn subsidiary legislationMakes driver supply fungible between the twoIn-vehicle camerasRolling outRaises the compliance floor for both modes That third row is the one to watch. If a driver can qualify once and choose between a taxi and a permitted ride-hailing car, then the 10,000 permits are not competing against 18,163 taxis for labour. They are competing inside a single 28,000-vehicle pool for the same drivers, on the same test, with the taxi option carrying no permit queue.Sixteen thousand applicants, ten thousand permitsThere is a number in this file that has received almost no attention, and it is the one that predicts what happens next.More than 16,000 people have already applied to sit the ride-hailing driver test, according to reporting from the mainland financial press on the eve of the licensing round. The permit ceiling is 10,000. Even if every permit is issued on day one — which the batch-release argument is designed to prevent — at least 6,000 people who have paid to qualify will have no vehicle to drive.That surplus has three possible destinations. It can queue for permits released in later tranches. It can move into taxi driving, which the combined taxi and ride-hailing driving test makes easier by design. Or it can exit, having sunk the cost of a course and a test into a licence class that turned out to be rationed.The government has been explicit that it is building the queue on purpose. Its requirements for platform applicants — a track record in a city of 7.5 million or more, an average of 100,000 daily orders across two cities, HK$50 million paid-up capital, HK$30 million in bank deposits and HK$30 million in credit facilities, three years of audited accounts, a permanent office and staff in Hong Kong — are not tests of whether a platform can operate. They are tests of whether it can absorb a bad year. The HK$1.2 million annual licence fee is trivial against those balance-sheet requirements. The application is a filter, and the filter is capital.Mean capacity is fine. Variance is not.Here is where the arithmetic gets more interesting than either side's talking points.At 10,000 permits, the system has enough vehicles to absorb 190,000 daily journeys on average, provided each car works a long shift. What it cannot absorb is the shape of the demand curve. Point-to-point demand in Hong Kong is brutally peaky: the morning build-up, the evening release, Friday and Saturday nights, and above all rain. Uber's rider survey found 86 percent expecting greater difficulty booking in peak hours or on rainy days. That is not a claim about average capacity. It is a claim about the tails.A fixed permit cap is a tool for managing the mean. It is the wrong tool for the tails, because the tail is served by drivers who are marginal — part-time, second-income, available on the bad night and not on the good one. Uber says 41 percent of its drivers depend on the platform for most of their household income, which implies 59 percent do not. That 59 percent is the flexible layer that covers the rain. A permit system that requires an owner-driver to buy a car and hold a permit will select for the 41 percent and eliminate much of the 59.This is the strongest version of the platform's case, and it is not the version the platform makes. Uber argues volume. The better argument is elasticity: 10,000 full-time professional drivers will deliver a very reliable Tuesday and a very unreliable typhoon.The counter-argument is equally strong. The 59 percent flexible layer is also the layer with the least insurance, the least vehicle maintenance and the weakest incentive to comply with the owner-driver rule. A regulator that wants enforcement has a reason to prefer 10,000 known drivers over 30,000 partly-known ones, and the vehicle data management system the Transport Department is building — real-time operational data from licensed platforms, used to assess performance and inform future policy reviews — only works if the population is enumerable.The question none of them answeredThree questions went unanswered in every submission I read, and they decide more than the cap does.· Insurance. Uber says 70 percent of drivers would leave if required to buy commercial third-party cover costing HK$10,000 to HK$30,000 a year, and that 84 percent prefer platform-provided blanket cover priced per trip. No party has published what the actual premium would be under a permit regime. Until someone does, the insurance rule, not the permit number, may set the real ceiling.· Vehicle age. The 12-year cap was relaxed from seven after authorities accepted that seven would squeeze supply. Nobody has published the age distribution of the current active fleet. If a large share sits at nine to twelve years, the first renewal cycle will remove cars faster than permits are issued.· The cross-hire question. The owner-driver rule forbids subletting. It does not address whether a permitted driver may work across multiple platforms. If they can, the 10,000 permits are 10,000 drivers serving the whole market and the cap bites less than expected. If they cannot, each platform's share of 10,000 becomes the number that matters, and the licence round turns into an allocation fight.The government has promised the permit quota will be revisited through subsidiary legislation. That is where these three questions will actually be settled, and none of them were in the bill.What the first licence round will showThe application window closes at noon on 30 October 2026. The licences run five years. The permit regime begins in August 2027.Between those dates, three observable things will tell you whether this framework works, and none of them is the headline permit number.The first is how many platforms apply. The capital and track-record requirements are calibrated to admit a small number of large operators and exclude everyone else. If two or three applications arrive, the regime has produced an oligopoly by design and the 10,000 permits will be divided by negotiation. If five or more arrive, the fee and capital thresholds were set too low to do the filtering job they were written for.The second is the first quarterly data release from the vehicle management system. Wait times and booking success rates by district, at peak and off-peak, are the only figures that will show whether 10,000 was right. The government has committed to using exactly these indicators for review. It has not committed to publishing them.The third is what happens to the 6,000 surplus test applicants. If they convert to taxi drivers, the policy has done what Mable Chan said it would — modernise the trade and attract younger drivers — and the taxi fleet gets the renewal it has needed for a decade. If they exit, the policy has created a queue and called it a market.The taxi trade's price-floor request and the platform's 80 percent allocation request are both attempts to control the same unknown: who holds the 10,000 permits when the music stops. The government's answer, so far, is that the market will decide within a ceiling it sets. That is a coherent position. It is not yet an evidenced one, and the evidence that would support it — insurance premia, fleet age, cross-platform rights, peak wait times — is all in the government's hands and none of it is public.Sourcing noteThe direct quotations in this article come from published statements and submissions, not from interviews conducted for it. Mable Chan's remarks were made in the Legislative Council on 15 October 2025 and reported by Hong Kong Free Press; the Transport and Logistics Bureau spokesman's "prudent, sound and appropriate" formulation appeared in the government's gazette statement on the subsidiary legislation; Andrew Byrne's "very unusual" characterisation and the 70 percent fare-increase estimate were given at a briefing in May 2026 reported by local outlets; Nicole Lee's insurance comment came from Uber's own newsroom release of its May 2026 survey; the Taxi Owners' Association's position is taken from its written submission to the LegCo bills committee, translated from Chinese.Survey figures attributed to Uber — 10,009 riders, 4,569 drivers, conducted May 2026 — are the company's own research and are identified as such throughout. The 880,000 / 690,000 / 190,000 demand split is the Transport Department's survey estimate as reported by local media; the department has not published the underlying tables. The 16,000 test applicants figure comes from mainland financial press reporting and has not been confirmed by the Transport Department.Sources· Transport Department 🔗 — Ride-hailing Vehicles: licensing regime, fees, applicant eligibility, accessed October 2026· Transport Department 🔗 — Taxis: fleet size, daily patronage, electronic payment requirement, accessed October 2026· Hong Kong Free Press 🔗 — "Hong Kong passes bill to regulate ride-hailing platforms under licensing regime", 16 October 2025· China Daily Hong Kong 🔗 — "Subsidiary bills on regulation of ride-hailing services in HK gazetted", 2026· China Daily Hong Kong 🔗 — "Hong Kong opens license applications for ride-hailing services", August 2026· Uber Hong Kong 🔗 — rider and driver survey findings, May 2026· Hong Kong Business 🔗 — "Uber says 83% expect higher fares under Hong Kong cap", 2026· HK01 🔗 — submissions by Uber and the Taxi Owners' Association to the LegCo bills committee, 2026（Chinese-language original）· Jiemian News 🔗 — "Hong Kong ride-hailing is coming: 16,000 have already registered for the test", 2026（Chinese-language original） This article was prepared by the expert team at Global Infinity Labs, drawing on insights and data provided through its MCP data services. About Global Infinity LabsGlobal Infinity Labs is an AI innovation company specializing in MCP data services.Email: support@globalinfinitylabs.com For Media Inquiryhk@asiapresswire.com https://www.asiapresswire.com Copyright 2026 ACN Newswire via SeaPRwire.com. All rights reserved. www.acnnewswire.com

Guangzhou, China, Oct 28, 2026 - (ACN Newswire via SeaPRwire.com) - The first two phases of the 140th China Import and Export Fair (Canton Fair) have concluded, but the attention surrounding Airwheel's smart rideable cabin suitcase continues to spread through buyer experiences, on-site demonstrations and international social media.Combining electric mobility, intelligent controls and travel-oriented design, Airwheel's rideable luxury suitcase products attracted buyers from different markets during the first two phases of the exhibition, with visitors taking part in hands-on riding experiences, product consultations and business discussions.Airwheel will now continue its Canton Fair showcase during Phase 3, taking place from October 31 to November 4, where the company will present its broader smart rideable suitcase portfolio to international buyers and business partners.Airwheel Phase 3 Booths: 20.2J37–38, 20.2K11–12 and 18.1K04From Exhibition Demonstrations to International Social MediaDuring Phases 1 and 2, Airwheel showcased multiple smart rideable hand suitcase models, with live riding demonstrations becoming one of the most visible experiences around the company's booths.Unlike conventional luggage, Airwheel integrates electric drive systems, riding controls and intelligent features into travel-oriented suitcase designs. For many international buyers encountering the category for the first time, the ability to ride a suitcase provided an immediate and intuitive way to understand its potential applications.Visitors could be seen testing the products around the exhibition area, turning the rideable suitcases into a distinctive presence on the show floor.The interest extended beyond the exhibition venue. Buyer-shot videos, product demonstrations and on-site interviews have continued to circulate across international social platforms, bringing additional attention to Airwheel's smart mobility products.For Airwheel, these interactions provide more than visibility. Direct conversations with buyers also offer insights into different market requirements, travel habits and potential commercial applications.Expanding the Role of the Suitcase Beyond StorageAirwheel's smart rideable suitcase concept is designed to extend the role of luggage beyond traditional storage.Equipped with electric drive systems, the products allow users to ride for short-distance mobility in environments such as airports, exhibition centers and transportation hubs, providing an alternative to prolonged walking.Depending on the model, the accompanying smart app can provide functions including riding-data monitoring, speed adjustment and lighting controls. Selected models also offer features such as cruise control, remote operation and alerts for low battery or Bluetooth disconnection.Some models include USB output for charging compatible personal electronic devices, while models supporting Apple's Find My feature can help users locate compatible luggage through Apple's ecosystem.At the 140th Canton Fair, Airwheel is highlighting the SE3SXD Full-Intelligent Electric Ai Cabin Suitcase, its flagship smart rideable suitcase.With a one-touch operation, the motorized front wheel automatically extends while the smart riding handle rises into position, allowing the suitcase to transition into riding mode through a simplified control sequence.The design reflects Airwheel's broader approach to combining mechanical engineering, electric mobility and intelligent controls within a familiar travel product.Engineering for Real-World TravelBeyond the riding experience, Airwheel's product development also considers practical travel requirements, including battery handling, luggage structure, security and storage.Airwheel Carry on Suitcae use a removable 73.26Wh lithium battery. The detachable architecture provides additional flexibility for battery handling during transportation, also feature TSA-compatible locks to facilitate applicable security or customs inspection procedures.The Boarding 20inch suitcase bodies use ABS and polycarbonate materials together with reinforced frame structures, balancing riding loads with everyday luggage protection and storage requirements.Some models incorporate larger-diameter wheels and retractable front-wheel structures to improve riding stability across different surfaces.Together, these details reflect Airwheel's effort to move the rideable suitcase category from a novelty concept toward a more practical travel product.A Portfolio Designed for Different Travel ScenariosAs consumer needs vary across markets, Airwheel has developed a broader portfolio covering cabin travel, larger-capacity journeys and family travel.SE3S Series: 20inch Smart Rideable Cabin SuitcasesThe Airwheel SE3S series, including the SE3SL Electric Suitcase, SE3SL+ Airport 20inch Suitcase, SE3SX Cabin Suitcase and SE3SXD Ai Luxury Suitcase, represents the company's core range of compact smart rideable suitcases.Most models can reach riding speeds of up to 9.9 km/h under specified operating conditions, making them suitable for short-distance movement in airports, stations, exhibition centers and similar environments.Selected higher-specification models incorporate smart app functions and Apple Find My support, combining the portability of a compact suitcase with electric riding and connected features.The range is positioned across smart cabin suitcase, electric carry-on and luxury suitcase applications, offering different configurations for different users and markets.Airwheel SE3T: 24-Inch Smart Rideable Travel Ai wheel SuitcaseFor travelers who require additional packing capacity, the Airwheel SE3T uses a 24-inch suitcase format with approximately 48 liters of storage space.Its riding speed can reach up to 13 km/h under specified operating conditions, combining larger luggage capacity with electric mobility for longer journeys and heavier packing needs.Airwheel SQ3 / SQ3S: Smart Rideable Suitcases for ChildrenAirwheel also extends its smart mobility concept into family travel.The SQ3 and SQ3S Kids suitcase are designed for children, with maximum riding speeds of 5 km/h and 6.5 km/h, respectively. Interactive entertainment features further combine travel storage with a rideable experience designed for family journeys.Together, these products allow Airwheel to address different age groups, travel distances and usage scenarios—from compact cabin luggage to larger travel suitcases and children's rideable products.Technology and International Design RecognitionBehind Airwheel's product portfolio is continued investment in intelligent mobility technology and product development.The company has accumulated more than 600 global patents, covering areas including motion control, electric drive systems, intelligent sensing and structural design. Its trademark portfolio extends across 168 countries and regions, supporting its international market development.Airwheel products have also received recognition from international design programs, including the MUSE Design Awards, French Design Awards, Asia Design Prize and iLuxury Awards, among others.For Airwheel, these achievements reflect an ongoing effort to bring together engineering, industrial design and user experience rather than treating technology as a standalone feature.About AirwheelAirwheel is an intelligent mobility brand developing smart rideable suitcases and personal mobility products for modern travel and everyday transportation.Its product portfolio combines electric drive technology, intelligent controls and contemporary industrial design to explore new possibilities in travel equipment and personal mobility.Through continued product development and international market expansion, Airwheel is exploring how familiar travel products can evolve into more intelligent, connected and adaptable mobility companions.Media ContactCompany: AirwheelContact: Media TeamEmail: Jonas@airwheel.netWebsite: https://www.airwheel.net Copyright 2026 ACN Newswire via SeaPRwire.com. All rights reserved. www.acnnewswire.com

WEYBRIDGE, UK, Oct 28, 2026 - (ACN Newswire via SeaPRwire.com) - DataTracks, a software and services provider for regulatory reporting, has extended its BEPS Pillar Two filing support to Australia and New Zealand. Groups with Australian entities can now prepare and validate their GloBE Information Return (GIR) and the Australian Taxation Office's (ATO) Combined Global and Domestic Minimum Tax Return (CGDMTR) on DataTracks Oxbow, with lodgment carried out by a registered Australian tax agent partner.The service comes ahead of 31 December 2026, when multinational groups with a 30 June year end, the standard balance date in Australia, must lodge their first Pillar Two returns with the ATO. For many of them it will be the first time the global minimum tax moves out of modelling and provisioning and into an actual filing. In the first global filing cycle, DataTracks completed close to 500 Pillar Two filings for more than 160 clients across 10+ jurisdictions.DataTracks is listed by HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) as a commercial software supplier for UK Pillar Two returns and GloBE Information Returns."The first cycle showed us where Pillar Two filings come under pressure. It is in the last few weeks before a deadline, when a schema has changed, an identifier has been reused or an access request is still waiting. Australia has more of those moving parts than most, with its own forms, its own lodgment channels and a notification that has to agree with what was filed overseas. Groups headquartered in the UK, Europe and India, and their advisers, have asked us to support their Australian lodgments, and we are now doing that," said Saurabh Satija, VP Sales, UK & Ireland and Global Head, BEPS & Pillar Two, DataTracks.Why Australia Is DifferentAustralia applies the full Pillar Two suite. Its income inclusion rule and domestic minimum tax have applied since 1 January 2024, and its undertaxed profits rule since 1 January 2025. An Australian subsidiary therefore carries obligations of its own, wherever its group files the GIR.Those obligations look different from the European returns most groups filed in the first cycle. The ATO sets out four lodgment requirements, made through two separate returns. The GIR is lodged on its own as an XML file. The other three sit in one form, the CGDMTR, which combines the Foreign Lodgment Notification (FLN), the Australian IIR/UTPR Tax Return (AIUTR) and the Australian DMT Tax Return (DMTR). Where the GIR is filed overseas, the FLN is how the Australian entities tell the ATO where it was filed. A GIR is required even where the top-up tax is nil.The ATO is also exact about the file itself. Every GIR lodged in Australia must carry the Bulk Business Document Message (BBDM) wrapper, and its message and document identifiers must follow the OECD schema rules. A "successfully submitted" message does not mean the return has been accepted: the ATO validates it afterwards, and a GIR with critical errors has to be corrected and lodged again. Where a group wants to use a tax agent that is not already linked to its ATO account, it has to request the account and role by secure mail before the agent can be nominated, which adds time the group does not control.The calendar leaves little room. Groups with a 31 March year end were due to lodge their first returns by 30 September 2026. Groups with a 30 June year end follow on 31 December 2026, and calendar-year groups already in scope lodge for their second year by 31 March 2027, on the shorter 15-month window that applies after the first year."My advice to any group with Australian entities is to sort out access early," Satija added. "If your lodging agent is not already linked to your ATO account, that request goes by secure mail and sits outside your hands. For 30 June year ends, with the first deadline on 31 December, that is where the timetable is most likely to slip, and the GIR and the FLN cannot be deferred."How the Service WorksThe group or its adviser completes the GloBE computation. The data is entered in a jurisdiction-specific template and checked in Oxbow against more than 200 validation rules and the current ATO specification, with any error traced back to its source cell before lodgment.Oxbow then builds the GIR in the OECD XML schema with the ATO's BBDM wrapper and identifier rules applied, and prepares the CGDMTR data alongside it. DataTracks' registered Australian tax agent partner lodges both, and the ATO's validation outcome is recorded for each entity.During the first cycle, when regulators were still finalising validation rules, DataTracks updated the platform weekly so that filings were made against current logic. It has also filed UK Overseas Return Notifications, which serve a similar purpose to Australia's FLN.New ZealandNew Zealand has taken a different route. It has not introduced a qualified domestic minimum top-up tax, and instead applies an income inclusion rule and undertaxed profits rule from 1 January 2025, with a domestic income inclusion rule for fiscal years beginning on or after 1 January 2026. The GIR is filed with Inland Revenue in the OECD XML format through myIR, unless a foreign-headquartered group files it in a jurisdiction that will exchange it with New Zealand and notifies Inland Revenue. The designated New Zealand constituent entity then files a multinational top-up tax (MTT) return, which Inland Revenue expects to open in myIR in April 2027. DataTracks prepares and validates the New Zealand GIR, including Inland Revenue's rule that message and document identifiers begin with the designated entity's IRD number, for the group or its New Zealand tax agent to file in myIR. It will support the MTT return once it opens.AvailabilityAustralian lodgment support is available now. New Zealand GIR preparation and validation is also available now, with support for the MTT return to follow when Inland Revenue opens it in April 2027.About DataTracksDataTracks is a software and services provider for regulatory reporting. Over 20 years it has served more than 30,000 clients across 25+ countries and delivered more than 450,000 regulatory reports, with support for filings in 35+ jurisdictions, including the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Ireland, Singapore, Malaysia, South Africa and India. Its core solutions cover SEC XBRL and iXBRL filing, HMRC iXBRL and Companies House filing, ESEF and UKSEF reporting, and cross-border tax reporting for CbCR, FATCA/CRS and BEPS Pillar Two through DataTracks Oxbow. DataTracks is listed by HMRC as a Pillar Two software supplier and holds ISO 27001, ISO 9001 and an independently audited SOC 2 Type II report.Media ContactKailash ChandrasekarVP & Global Head, MarketingDataTracksMedia Relations: mediarelations@datatracks.comPhone: +44 20 4514 5352https://datatracks.com/ukDataTracks Global Private Limited is headquartered in Singapore, with UK operations run by DTracks Limited, Belgrave House, 39-43 Monument Hill, Weybridge, KT13 8RN.SOURCE: DataTracks Global Private Limited Copyright 2026 ACN Newswire via SeaPRwire.com. All rights reserved. www.acnnewswire.com

ROMEOVILLE, IL, Oct 27, 2026 - (ACN Newswire via SeaPRwire.com) - Formerra, a leader in performance materials distribution, announced an increase to its transportation surcharge to address continued cost escalation in the freight and logistics market. Beginning November 2, 2026, a surcharge of $450 per delivery will apply to all shipments across North, Central, and South America.Costs in the freight and logistics market have increased steadily as the industry navigates higher operating costs, tighter capacity, and a shortage of qualified drivers. At the same time, diesel prices reached an all-time high in September."Freight costs across the Americas remain elevated, and we do not expect these pressures to ease in the near term," said Tom Kelly, Formerra CEO. "The adjustment helps offset market pressures beyond our control while enabling us to maintain the dependable service our customers count on from Formerra."Customers should contact their Formerra representative for more information.About FormerraFormerra is a preeminent distributor of engineered materials, connecting the world's leading polymer producers with thousands of OEMs and brand owners across healthcare, consumer, industrial, and mobility markets. Powered by technical and commercial expertise, it brings a distinctive combination of portfolio depth, supply chain strength, industry knowledge, service, leading e-commerce capabilities, and ingenuity. The experienced Formerra team helps customers across multiple industries to design, select, process, and develop products in new and better ways - driving improved performance, productivity, reliability, and sustainability. Delivering Solutions. Enabling Success. To learn more, visit www.formerra.com.Media ContactJackie MorrisFormerraMarketing Communications Managerjackie.morris@formerra.com+1 630-972-3144SOURCE: Formerra Copyright 2026 ACN Newswire via SeaPRwire.com. All rights reserved. www.acnnewswire.com

Hong Kong, Oct 27, 2026 - (ACN Newswire via SeaPRwire.com) - On October 27, 2026, CanSino Biologics Inc. (HKEX: 06185; SSE: 688185) released its third-quarter financial report for 2026. For the nine months ended September 30, 2026, the company reported revenue of approximately RMB 882 million, an increase of 27.40% year-on-year. Net profit attributable to shareholders reached approximately RMB 16.29 million, an increase of 12.82% year-on-year. Net loss attributable to shareholders excluding non-recurring gains and losses narrowed by 45.72% year-on-year to approximately RMB 44.98 million.The growth reflects years of investment in R&D, portfolio development and commercial infrastructure. As innovative products reach the market and the product lineup continues to broaden, CanSinoBIO is gradually building a business driven by multiple complementary products. At the same time, its five core technology platforms continue to support innovative R&D and cross-field collaboration, laying the groundwork for long-term development.Successive Launches of Innovative Products: Commercialization Enters a Multi-Product PhaseFor an innovative vaccine developer, the ability to consistently translate R&D achievements into commercial products is an important measure of its capacity for growth. With several innovative products approved and entering the market, CanSinoBIO is moving from a focus on commercializing its core products toward a new phase of development across a broader, complementary portfolio.The third quarter of 2026 brought several important commercial milestones. In August, Tripecia(R) (DT3cP), the Company’s adsorbed diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (acellular, three component) combined vaccine for infants, received the Certificate of Batch Release for its first batch, allowing market supply to begin. As China's first approved three-component acellular pertussis vaccine, Tripecia(R) further diversifies the Company’s innovative product portfolio and provides another product to support its expansion in the domestic vaccine market.CanSinoBIO is also continuing to build out its DTaP vaccine portfolio. Td5cp Adolescent and Adult, Tetanus, Reduced Diphtheria and Pertussis (Acellular, Five Components) Combined Vaccine, had previously been granted priority review, and its New Drug Application (NDA) was accepted by China's NMPA in August. If approved, the vaccine could complement Tripecia(R) by serving different age groups, further extending the Company’s immunization portfolio across the life course.Also in August, Tetcia(R), the Company’s adsorbed tetanus vaccine, received marketing approval, broadening its portfolio for active immunization in adults. CanSinoBIO has granted Grand Life Sciences Group exclusive commercialization rights for the product in Greater China, drawing on its partner’s market network and promotional capabilities to expand coverage. This differentiated commercialization arrangement gives the Company additional options for bringing its R&D achievements to market more efficiently.Alongside new launches, the Company continues to develop the market potential of its established core products. Menhycia(R)(MCV4), Asia’s first quadrivalent meningococcal conjugate vaccine, is currently approved in China for children aged three months through six years. In July 2026, a supplemental application to extend the eligible age range to three months through 17 years was accepted for review, with the potential to reach a broader population.In pneumococcal vaccines, CanSinoBIO continues to advance domestic market access for iPneucia(R)(PCV13i), its 13-valent pneumococcal polysaccharide conjugate vaccine. Its 24-valent pneumococcal polysaccharide conjugate vaccine (PCV24) has entered Phase I/II clinical trials, with participant enrollment progressing across study cohorts. The marketed vaccine and follow-on candidates form a staggered product lineup that supports the Company's continued work in pneumococcal disease prevention.Together, new product approvals and the start of market supply, efforts to broaden the eligible populations for existing vaccines, and continued development of follow-on candidates are creating a more diversified portfolio with products progressing through successive stages of development.Together, new product approvals and the start of market supply, broader eligible populations for existing vaccines, and continued development of follow-on candidates are creating a more diversified and better-sequenced product portfolio.A broader portfolio offers the potential for additional revenue streams while extending market coverage and enabling commercial synergies among products. This is helping the Company build a more stable and sustainable commercial foundation.International Expansion Advances from Market Access to Multi-level PartnershipsAs domestic commercialization accelerates, international operations are also becoming an important avenue for CanSinoBIO to expand its growth opportunities.In recent years, the Company’s international strategy has gradually evolved from product exports to encompass overseas registrations, local manufacturing, technology transfer and joint development. Internationalization is therefore no longer simply about bringing products to overseas markets; it is about combining technical, manufacturing and commercial resources to explore a more sustainable path to growth in global markets.In meningococcal vaccines, Menhycia(R) received registration approval in Argentina in June 2026, following approval in Indonesia in December 2024. These registrations provide a broader foundation for entry into different regional markets.Overseas partnerships for pneumococcal vaccines are also advancing. Drawing on its distinct advantages in manufacturing processes, product quality and clinical data, together with established local partnerships, CanSinoBIO supplied PCV13i products to its Indonesian partner in the first half of 2026. The supply supports subsequent local manufacturing and potential future supply to the national immunization program, helping to prevent pneumococcal disease in children locally. CanSinoBIO has also signed a letter of intent (LOI) with AGP Limited in Pakistan to explore opportunities for iPneucia(R) in the local market.Through overseas registrations, local partner networks, technology transfer and local manufacturing, CanSinoBIO is gradually establishing international business models tailored to the needs of different regional markets. These efforts could create broader opportunities for its long-term development.Five Core Technology Platforms Support Innovation and Future ExpansionWhile commercialization across multiple products and international expansion demonstrate CanSinoBIO’s current business capabilities, its steadily built core technology platforms provide an important foundation for sustained innovation and future growth.The Company has established five core technology platforms covering adenovirus-based viral vectors technology, synthetic biotechnology, protein structure design and virus-like particle (VLP) assembly, mRNA and LNP technology, and formulation and drug delivery technology. Together, they form an R&D system spanning different technological approaches.For an innovative vaccine developer, technology platforms enable core technologies, research experience and manufacturing expertise to be accumulated and applied across programs. This supports ongoing product innovation and the exploration of new R&D directions in response to technological advances and market needs.As biopharmaceutical technologies evolve more rapidly and competition intensifies, the ability to sustain innovation and pursue new applications is becoming an important measure of long-term competitiveness.CanSinoBIO’s mRNA collaboration during the third quarter of 2026 offers a further indication of the potential applications of its technology platforms. On August 25, the Company announced that its subsidiary, CanSino (Shanghai) Biologics R&D Co., Ltd., had signed a strategic cooperation framework agreement with deepGeneAI (Hangzhou) Biotechnology Co., Ltd. for the joint development of personalized mRNA therapeutic cancer vaccines. The proposed collaboration targets global markets, focusing on gastrointestinal solid tumors and rare tumors. It would combine CanSinoBIO’s expertise in mRNA delivery, formulation, R&D and manufacturing with deepGeneAI’s AI-driven tumor neoantigen discovery and design capabilities to explore the development of personalized therapeutic cancer vaccines.The Company’s work in its established areas of technological expertise has also continued to receive professional recognition. In September 2026, CanSinoBIO announced that its project on key technologies for polysaccharide–protein conjugation and industrial-scale production had received a third prize in the Chinese Preventive Medicine Association’s 2025 Science and Technology Awards. The award reflects the Company’s sustained investment in core technology development and industrial applications.In international industry collaboration, CanSinoBIO also participated in the 27th Annual General Meeting of the Developing Countries Vaccine Manufacturers Network (DCVMN), where the Company discussed opportunities with international peers in joint R&D, technology transfer, local manufacturing and global vaccine access.From improvements to existing products and continued development of innovative R&D programs to collaboration across fields, the five core platforms are becoming an important source of support for CanSinoBIO’s continued innovation and future expansion.As More Innovations Reach the Market, the Path to Long-Term Growth Becomes ClearerCanSinoBIO’s operating and business progress in the first nine months of 2026 points to an increasingly clear development path. Continued approvals and market launches are broadening the product portfolio and building commercial capabilities. At the same time, international expansion and multi-level industry cooperation are advancing in parallel, creating further opportunities for business development.Behind these developments, the capacity for sustained innovation provided by the five core technology platforms creates a broader range of possibilities for future product development, technology partnerships and exploration of new fields. As commercialization advances across multiple products and international operations expand, the value of CanSinoBIO’s years of R&D investment is gradually being realized. By combining innovation across its technology platforms with product commercialization and international expansion, the Company is building a more diversified set of growth drivers and opening new opportunities for sustainable long-term development. Copyright 2026 ACN Newswire via SeaPRwire.com. All rights reserved. www.acnnewswire.com

Hong Kong, Oct 27, 2026 - (ACN Newswire via SeaPRwire.com) - Hengrui Pharma ("Hengrui" or "the Company") today announced its financial results for the first nine months of 2026. During this period, Hengrui reported revenue of RMB24.41 billion, representing a year-over-year increase of 5.26%. Product sales revenue was RMB21.48 billion, up 2.52% year-over-year. Net profit attributable to shareholders of the Company was RMB6.92 billion, up 20.38% year-over-year.Innovative drug sales reached RMB13.87 billion, representing a year-over-year increase of 17.05% and accounting for approximately 64.59% of total drug sales. Non-oncology innovative drug sales also recorded strong growth, reaching RMB4.01 billion, up 75.36% year-over-year, and accounting for approximately 28.88% of total innovative drug sales. R&D investment totaled RMB7.15 billion, of which RMB5.42 billion was expensed.In the third quarter of 2026, Hengrui reported revenue of RMB8.95 billion, up 20.55% year-over-year, and net profit attributable to shareholders of the Company of RMB2.46 billion, up 88.92% year-over-year.Pipeline and Regulatory HighlightsIn the third quarter of 2026, Hengrui continued to advance its R&D pipeline in China, obtaining seven innovative drug or indication approvals comprising two Class 1 innovative drugs and five new indications for marketed innovative drugs.Seven marketing applications were also accepted for review by the Center for Drug Evaluation (CDE) of China’s National Medical Products Administration, covering oncology, metabolic and cardiovascular diseases, immune system diseases, and neuroscience. Notably, the Company made multiple advancements across the GLP-1 class product pipeline. The new drug applications (NDAs) for HRS-7535 tablets, an oral small-molecule GLP-1 receptor agonist, for glycemic control in adults with type 2 diabetes mellitus and for long-term weight management in adults have both been accepted for review. The NDA for ribupatide injection, a GLP-1/GIP dual receptor agonist for glycemic control in adults with type 2 diabetes mellitus, has also been accepted for review.In addition, a total of 35 clinical trial approvals were obtained. Two products have been granted Breakthrough Therapy Designation by the CDE.Global Partnerships and Business DevelopmentIn the first nine months of 2026, the Company recorded revenue of RMB2.78 billion from the out-licensing of innovative drugs, up 31.12% year-over-year. Hengrui also received a total of RMB4.34 billion in cash from upfront and milestone payments under collaboration agreements, primarily comprising the US$600 million upfront payment from Bristol Myers Squibb.On September 29, Hengrui entered into a license agreement with Novo Nordisk (Novo) for HRS-1596, a phase I-ready glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor (GLP-1R) and gastric inhibitory polypeptide receptor (GIPR) dual agonist, with potential for once-weekly oral dosing. Under the terms of the agreement, Novo will obtain exclusive rights to develop, manufacture and commercialise HRS-1596 globally, excluding the Chinese mainland, the Hong Kong SAR, the Macao SAR and Taiwan Region. The potential total value of the agreement is up to US$2.6 billion contingent on the achievement of applicable development, regulatory and commercial milestones. This includes a US$300 million upfront payment. In addition, Hengrui is eligible to receive royalties based on net sales of HRS-1596 within the licensed territory. The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026.Scientific RecognitionSince the start of the second half of 2026, multiple research findings on Hengrui's innovative drugs have been presented at international academic conferences and published in academic journals. More than 60 studies involving 21 innovative drugs were selected for presentation at the European Society for Medical Oncology Congress 2026, including Phase III studies of two innovative antibody-drug conjugates selected for Proffered Paper presentations. Research in non-oncology areas was also presented at major international congresses, including the Annual Meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes and the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology Congress, among others.OutlookLooking ahead, Hengrui will continue to advance its innovation and globalization strategy, further pursuing its dual-growth strategy across oncology and chronic diseases. Guided by its patient-focused philosophy, Hengrui remains committed to bringing more innovative medicines to patients worldwide. Copyright 2026 ACN Newswire via SeaPRwire.com. All rights reserved. www.acnnewswire.com

Hong Kong, Oct 27, 2026 - (ACN Newswire via SeaPRwire.com) - The 28th Hong Kong International Lighting Fair (Autumn Edition), organised by the Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC), opens today and runs for 4 days, from 27 October to 30 October, at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre. The 11th Hong Kong International Outdoor and Tech Light Expo opened yesterday and runs until 29 October at AsiaWorld-Expo.HKTDC Associate Executive Director Silas Chu said: "As the lighting industry is evolving rapidly, the twin lighting fairs this year are held under the theme "Beyond Illumination", highlighting key industry trends related to smart connectivity, healthy living, immersive spatial experiences and sustainability, and showcasing cutting-edge lighting solutions to global buyers. The fairs attract some 3,000 exhibitors from more than 20 countries and regions, alongside international professional organisations and industry experts who share insights into the latest developments. By building an international trade and technology exchange platform, the fairs connect global buyers with industry players and foster the sustainable development of the lighting industry."The 28th Hong Kong International Lighting Fair (Autumn Edition) and the 11th Hong Kong International Outdoor and Tech Light Expo are open. Together they form a global lighting event showcasing the latest products from some 3,000 exhibitors representing more than 20 countries and regions.He added that the twin lighting fairs are international in scope. Besides exhibitors from Hong Kong, the Chinese Mainland and Taiwan, the fairs also welcome exhibitors from the Asia-Pacific region, including Australia, India, Korea and Singapore, as well as from Europe and America, including Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Mexico and the United Kingdom. The fairs gather exhibitors who have participated in landmark projects around the world and won international awards, as well as major industry alliances in global smart lighting and IoT such as the Connectivity Standards Alliance, the DALI Alliance, the SILA-EMN Alliance, the Zhaga Consortium and, making its debut at the fair, KNX, the global standard for smart building and home automation. Together with their member companies from around the globe, these alliances jointly demonstrate the smart lighting ecosystem.A highlight of the Autumn Lighting Fair, the Hall of Connected Lighting features some 70 leading local and international brands, including Dimon, a local company which has participated in the Hong Kong Palace Museum project, Inventronics and TUYA from the Chinese Mainland, Viso Systems from Denmark, Casambi from Finland, and Signify from the Netherlands. The zone also features immersive lighting installations and application-based displays. For example, Casambi brings an Artisan Cafe concept space to the fair, while Viliya creates an immersive mirrored art installation, Mirrorverse.The Hall of Connected Lighting features some 70 leading local and international brands, as well as immersive lighting installations and application-based displays.Signify collaborates with the Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 Team to present a racing simulator experience and also displays Philips Skylight, which simulates natural light environments and adjusts light according to human circadian rhythms by integrating two major health-focused lighting technologies (VitaUp and BioUp) to create a healthier and more comfortable indoor lighting experience.Another signature zone, the Hall of Aurora, features some 500 renowned brands offering high-quality lighting products. Local exhibitors include Prosperity Lamps & Components whose products have been featured in the FIFA World Cup stadium and the Museum of the Future in Dubai, and Profiled Group which participated in Casa Batlló in Barcelona and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. Chinese Mainland brands include General Lighting Electronic which participated in the Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy, and Alpha Lighting which participated in the Madame Brasserie restaurant at the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Other international brands include Lival from Finland, Cupower from Germany, and Beghelli from Italy.The Hall of Aurora gathers some 500 renowned brands offering high-quality lighting products.The Autumn Lighting Fair always keeps pace with industry trends. This year it expands its product range and launches the new LED Display Solution Zone to build an LED commercial display ecosystem. This zone features the latest high-resolution LED screens, transparent displays, flexible panels and immersive visual systems, creating new visual experiences for retail spaces, event experiences, smart cities and architectural projects. Other featured zones include Commercial Lighting, Residential Lighting and LED Essentials.The Autumn Lighting Fair launches the new LED Display Solution Zone to build an LED commercial display ecosystem.This year, the Hong Kong International Outdoor and Tech Light Expo features three major zones, including Smart Pole and Solution; Outdoor, Industrial and Technical Lighting; and Landscape and Architectural Lighting. In addition to displaying lighting product applications in smart cities, industrial and professional scenarios, it has also added photovoltaic and energy storage solutions to help cities improve energy efficiency.The Outdoor and Tech Light Expo features multiple product zones displaying a variety of outdoor and professional technical lighting solutions for commercial and industrial applications.During the two fairs, numerous seminars and forums are being held, inviting industry leaders to analyse market and product trends.Two fairs showcase new trends in lighting- Various award-winning exhibitors and design products gather under one roof Local representatives include first-time exhibitor Ledman Hong Kong (Booth: 5B-D02), which introduces the LEDHUB Smart Conference Solution, integrating large-format display, video conferencing and collaboration functions into a single platform. This solution won the 2025 TITAN Innovation Awards Gold Award and has been adopted by leading institutions including the University of Hong Kong, the University of Warwick and Fudan University. Ledman Hong Kong also presents the QS Series IceScreen LED Display, which was deployed at the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games. Another local exhibitor, Hongkong Sunricher Technology (Booth: 1D-C30), displays their Desktop Wizard. The product won the Red Dot Design Award, the iF Design Award and the German National Design Award. It replaces traditional lighting remote controls that often require complex operations and commands, as well as wall switches limited by fixed installations, to provide a more flexible and space-efficient home control solution. - Finnish exhibitor Ledil Oy (Booth: GH-P21) showcases their LEDiL - STRADA reflector, the winner of the German Innovation Award 2025. This product offers precise beam control and excellent glare control with a glare rating of G6 and a threshold increment TI as low as 1%. Even when equipped with protective glass, its optical efficiency can reach about 90%, helping to create efficient, energy-saving and visually comfortable lighting solutions. Chinese Mainland brand Zhongshan SUFN Lighting Technology Co Ltd (Booth: 1A-B24) presents REIZ II, which won the iF Design Award 2024 and Contemporary Good Design Award 2022. This product adopts an innovative convection cooling structure and concealed shift mechanism, improving heat dissipation efficiency by approximately 15%, and increasing light output by around 30%. Its dual anti-glare optical design with UGR≤6 supports a wide range of lighting applications, including downlighting, adjustable accent lighting and wall washing.- Green energy and energy-saving solutions support sustainable development According to GEP Research, it is expected that the global photovoltaic lighting market will reach US$18.5 billion in 2026, a year-on-year increase of 14.2% compared to US$16.2 billion in 2025. Outdoor and Tech Lighting Expo exhibitor Lansine Intelligent (Zhongshan) Energy Storage Technology Co Ltd (Booth: 8-F28) brings their LX-LC01 energy storage power station and foldable solar panel series, which are green power solutions specially designed for off-grid applications, outdoor camping, emergency backup power, as well as small-scale and residential energy storage. Auroras InnoTech Guangdong Co Ltd (Booth: 8-D21) showcases their Woodpecker Series & Architectural Pathway Light product which features a unique vertical architectural form, renewable solar energy and warm natural finishes, creating a modern outdoor space that blends with nature. The exhibitor also displays street lighting solutions applied at the Dubai Expo. Hishine Group Ltd (Booth: 8-E27) presents its Hi-Robot 1300W Stadium LED High Mast Light, which features a hexagonal anti-wind structure, a large cooling area, excellent heat dissipation performance and a service life exceeding 100,000 hours. These lights are waterproof, reduce power consumption by 70%, and have been installed in the Jaime Morón León Olympic Stadium in Colombia.- Smart lighting meets the needs of various scenarios According to a survey by Fortune Business Insights, the global lighting fixtures market size is projected to grow from US$142.52 billion in 2026 to US$221.39 billion by 2034, exhibiting a CAGR of 5.7% during the forecast period. Public demand for smart lighting systems is rising. Autumn Lighting Fair exhibitor Zhongshan Tauras Technologies Co Ltd (Booth: 1E-G35) displays a three-in-one integrated dimmable power supply designed for home bathroom applications, combining a high-efficiency switching power supply, a mirror defogging film and an intelligent touch dimming system in a single unit. It is suitable for humid and dusty environments and meets users' lighting and visual needs in different scenarios. Yndlux Lighting Co Ltd (Booth: 3B-B05), selected as a national high-tech enterprise, brings its independently developed 5272 linear module light. It can meet the lighting and design needs of different customers and places through an intelligent control system and the diverse selection of module styles.Multiple exchange and thematic events to discuss market trendsThe twin lighting fairs are hosting a series of thematic events with heavyweight international lighting organisations. For the Autumn Lighting Fair today at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, "Award-Winning Illumination - Highlights from the IES Illumination Awards", jointly organised with the Illuminating Engineering Society (IES) for the first time, invites winners of the prestigious "IES Illumination Awards" to share insights into the artistic and technical evolution of lighting design. On the same day, "Innovative Lighting Design Forum", under the theme "Treasures of Light: Artistic Brilliance Beyond Exhibitions", features three lighting design maestros who have participated in internationally renowned projects to share the latest trends.For the first time, the Autumn Lighting Fair will partner with Women in Lighting (WIL) to host "Circularity in Lighting Design" tomorrow (28 October), where several prominent female designers in the industry will discuss sustainable lighting design and how the circular economy concepts are being applied.Another key event "Connected Lighting Forum", co-organised with the Shanghai Pudong Intelligent Lighting Association, will be held on the same day on 28 October. Under the theme of "Healing Light for the Future: Illuminating Emotional Well-being", it will explore the development of intelligent and human-centric lighting technologies for emotional health and share case studies on the use of light to heal the body and mind.At AsiaWorld-Expo, the Outdoor and Tech Light Expo today is hosting "Smart Tech Integration in Outdoor Lighting", exploring how AI-driven outdoor lighting technology can be applied to today's smart cities.Running concurrently from 26 to 29 October, the Outdoor and Tech Light Expo and Eco Expo Asia at AsiaWorld-Expo, together with the Autumn Lighting Fair at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre (HKCEC), provide a dynamic platform for cross-sector business opportunities. Free shuttle bus services will be provided between the HKCEC and AsiaWorld-Expo from 26 to 29 October.Under the EXHIBITION+ hybrid model, exhibitors and buyers can also meet online through the Click2Match business matching platform in addition to attending the physical fair. The online fairs run from 19 October to 6 November, facilitating business expansion both online and offline. Hong Kong International Outdoor and Tech Light Expo Hong Kong International Lighting Fair (Autumn Edition) Date 26 - 29 October 2026 (Mon-Thu) 27- 30 October 2026 (Tue-Fri) Opening hours 26 October 2026: 10:30 am - 6pm 27 - 28 October 2026: 10am - 6pm 29 October 2026:10am – 5pm 27 - 29 October 2026: 9:30am – 7pm 30 October 2026: 9:30am - 4pm Venue AsiaWorld-Expo Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre Media registration AsiaWorld-Expo East Lobby Hall 1C Concourse, HKCEC, or at the HKTDC Media Centre (G/F, HKCEC, 1 Expo Drive, Wan Chai) Media Centre Room 108, Hall 8 Side Entrance, AsiaWorld-Expo HKTDC Media Centre Website hkotlexpo.hktdc.com hklightingfairae.hktdc.comPhoto Download: https://bit.ly/4zVvwDQMedia enquiriesPlease contact the HKTDC's Communications and Public Affairs Department:Christy LeeTel: (852) 2584 4369Email: christy.wn.lee@hktdc.orgDawn YuenTel: (852) 2584 4575Email: dawn.nh.yuen@hktdc.orgJane CheungTel: (852) 2584 4137Email: jane.mh.cheung@hktdc.orgThe HKTDC's Media Room: http://mediaroom.hktdc.com/enAbout HKTDCThe Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC) celebrates its 60th anniversary this year. The HKTDC is a statutory body established in 1966 to promote, assist and develop Hong Kong's trade. With over 50 offices globally, including 13 in the Chinese Mainland, the HKTDC promotes Hong Kong as a two-way global investment and business hub. The HKTDC organises international exhibitions, conferences and business missions to create business opportunities for companies, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), in the mainland and international markets. The HKTDC also provides up-to-date market insights and product information via research reports and digital news channels. For more information, please visit: www.hktdc.com/aboutus. Copyright 2026 ACN Newswire via SeaPRwire.com. All rights reserved. www.acnnewswire.com