Daily Buzz: 22 October 2025

Top News

Trump-Putin Meeting Scrubbed

A planned summit between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin has been shelved, signaling that preparatory groundwork for the meeting found no concessions from the Kremlin on its terms for a ceasefire in Ukraine. There are "no plans" for Donald Trump to meet Vladimir Putin "in the immediate future," the White House official said tersely on Tuesday. Trump, after a phone call with Putin last week, said the two would meet in Budapest within two weeks. His peacemaking efforts in the Ukraine war have seesawed between support for Kiev and support for Moscow. Last week, Trump said he might supply Ukraine with Tomahawk long-range missiles; this week, he cooled on that idea and said Ukraine should cede territory occupied by Russian troops.

Russian attacks in Ukraine on Tuesday killed four people and left hundreds of thousands without power and many without water.

Japan Prime Minister Breaks Glass Ceiling

Sanae Takaichi, 64, a staunch conservative who likes heavy metal music, plays drums to relieve stress and modeled herself on former UK premier Margaret Thatcher, was elected as Japan's first woman prime minister on Tuesday, with her Liberal Democratic Party hoping to put scandal and public mistrust behind it. She is the fifth Japanese prime minister in five years. Her election is particularly striking because Japan has always been governed by an entrenched old guard of men. Takaichi espouses business-friendly policies, including low taxes. She must now tackle issues such as high inflation, US tariffs, a wave of anti-immigration sentiment, a declining birth rate and often fitful relations with neighbor China. The Nikkei stock index rose 0.27 percent on Tuesday.

French Ex-President Sarkozy Jailed

Former French president Nicholas Sarkozy began a five-year prison sentence – the first time a modern leader of France has been behind bars. He was convicted of conspiracy in a 2007 scheme to extend diplomatic favors to Libya in exchange for contributions to his presidential campaign. Sarkozy continues to maintain his innocence and calls his prosecution a political stitch-up. He said he will appeal his conviction, but he can't lodge the paperwork under French law until he has begun the prison term.

Top Business

China Mobile 3Q Profit Rises 1 Percent

China Mobile, one of the nation's telecom giants, said net profit in the third quarter edged up 1 percent from a year earlier to 31 billion yuan (US$4.4 billion) on a 3 percent increase in revenue to 251 billion yuan. The results were in line with analysts' forecasts. For the first nine months of the year, profit was up 4 percent at 115 billion yuan, and revenue grew 0.4 percent to 795 billion yuan. The company said mobile customers as of September 30 totaled 1 billion, with 622 million of them on the 5G network. Broadband customers totaled 329 million. China Mobile cited robust growth in its data, information, and communications technology services, with rapid expansion in AI-related revenue.

Tmall Kicks Off Double 11 Sales

Alibaba e-commerce platform Tmall said more than 80 brands, including Apple, Estée Lauder, L'Oréal, Nike and Lululemon, racked up sales of over 100 million yuan (US$14 million) in the first hour of its official launch of Singles Day shopping festival sales. Apple iPhone sales in one hour exceeded their whole first day last year. Other platforms, including Taobao, JD.com, Douyin and Meituan, are jumping into presales as e-tailers seek to boost revenue in a sluggish consumer market. The annual online shopping extravaganza, also called Double 11 because it was originally a one-day event on November 11, has expanded into a weeks-long online sales spree, the world's largest shopping festival by revenue. Sales last year totaled an estimated 1.4 trillion yuan.

Fastest Bullet Train Begins Trials

The world's fastest bullet train, China's CR450, has begun trials, clocking test speeds up to 453 kilometers an hour. The train is engineered for a commercial service speed of 400 kilometers an hour. It features a longer nose and a lower roofline, cutting aerodynamic drag by 22 percent. The CR450 will need to log 600,000 trouble-free kilometers before it is cleared to carry passengers. It is manufactured by CRRC Qingdao Sifang.

Economy & Markets

Shanghai Exports Rise in Quarter

Shanghai exports in the first nine months of the year rose 11.3 percent from a year earlier, with privately owned companies contributing the bulk of the growth, customs officials said on Tuesday. Shipments of electric cars, lithium batteries and solar cells led exports. On the imports side, shipments of chip manufacturing equipment jumped 33 percent. Total two-way trade in the period increased 5.4 percent to 3.34 trillion yuan (US$469 billion).

Mainland Buyers Buoy HK Housing Market

Chinese mainland homebuyers accounted for a quarter of purchases in Hong Kong residential property in the third quarter, spending HK$38 billion (US$49 billion), the South China Morning Post reported, citing figures from Centaline Property. It reported 3,797 deals involving mainland buyers in the quarter. The surge came as the mainland residential property market remained in a four-year slump triggered by developer defaults, and mortgage rates in Hong Kong declined below those on the mainland.

China Films at the Box Office

Chinese films screened overseas have grossed about US$140 million to date this year, eclipsing their 2024 total. Domestically, box office receipts so far in 2025 total 42.5 billion yuan (US$6 billon), also exceeding last year's total, according to ticketing platform Maoyan. China film industry movies accounted for nearly 90 percent of ticket sales. Among the recent releases are the historical film "The Volunteers: The Battle of Life and Death," the animated film "Three Kingdoms: Starlit Heroes."

Major Strontium Deposit Found in Jiangsu

China has found a large strontium deposit in Jiangsu Province – a discovery that could strengthen the country's supply of industrial-use metals. The newly identified deposit is estimated to hold 545,500 tons of reserves with an average grade of 49 percent, according to the Ministry of Natural Resources. Strontium is an element used in specialty ceramics, magnetic alloys and other high-tech manufacturing. Geologists also found deposits of copper, lead-zinc and pyrite near the site.

Corporate

IFlytek's AI Push Boosts Profit

Chinese tech company iFlytek reported third-quarter profit tripled to 172 million yuan (US$24 million), with revenue rising 10 percent to 6 billion yuan on strong sales of its large language model. The results beat market forecasts. The company recorded positive cash flow of 895 million yuan for the quarter. IFlytek said the performance reflects growing market adoption of its Spark large language model, which ranks among China's top AI models built on domestic computing power. For the January to September, iFlytek said its contracts for its large-language model outpaced Chinese rivals in both number and value. Research spending rose 44 percent to 3.2 billion yuan in the first nine months.

Pop Mart Eyes Big Sales Surge

Pop Mart, the Chinese maker of the popular collectible Labubu toys, said its unaudited third-quarter revenue likely surged between 245 percent and 250 percent from a year earlier, with up to a 370 percent surged in overseas sales.

China Insurers' Profit Forecasts

New China Life Insurance and two other Chinese insurers said third-quarter net profits are expected to surge between 40 percent and 70 percent, signaling that the industry may post record earnings on higher investment income flows.

DeepSeek Unveils New AI Model

China's AI startup DeepSeek, which wowed the world earlier this year with a ChatGPT-style large-language model much cheaper than global versions, released a new multimodal AI model this week that it says can handle large, complex documents with optical character recognition. The Hangzhou-based company said its new open-source DeepSeek-OCR is the result of an "investigation into the role of vision encoders" to compress text for large language models. That enables the processing of massive amounts of text without a proportional increase in computing cost.

L'Oreal Sales in China Increase

French luxury beauty products company L'Oreal posted weaker-than-expected third-quarter growth, with poor performance in North America but a 3 percent gain in China sales, its first increase there in two years. Quarterly sales overall rose 4.2 percent to 10.3 billion euros (US$12 billion) from a year earlier.

Vietnam Airline Drops Lease on China Jets

Vietnamese budget airline Vietjet has allowed its six-month lease on two Chinese-made C909 jetliners it was operating to expire without renewal, Reuters reported. The C909 are manufactured by state-owned Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China. No reason was given for the decision. The lease had been hailed as part of closer economic ties between China and Vietnam.