Weekly Market Update - 23 September 2024

Southeast Asian Assets

Global funds are snapping up Southeast Asian assets as the prospect of interest-rate cuts and attractive valuations holds out the promise of supersized returns. Money managers have boosted positions in sovereign bonds in Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia for the past two months, and have been net buyers of Indonesia, Malaysia and Philippine equities for three months. Those inflows have helped make Southeast Asian currencies the best performers in emerging markets this quarter, while regional stocks have easily beaten their EM peers.

Source: Bloomberg

Streamlining Amazon

Amazon Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy is moving to streamline the world’s largest online retailer and cloud-computing company, cutting management layers and ordering employees to return to the office five days a week beginning in January. The shakeup echoed what some company veterans have been whispering for years: It’s become harder to get things done at Amazon. Stories of endless deliberation, unnecessary meetings and layers of approval have become commonplace at a company that fashions itself as a collection of teams charged with operating like startups. Each major organization within Amazon will be required to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by 15% by the end of March 2025, Jassy said.

Source: Bloomberg

New Pipeline

Canada’s newly expanded oil pipeline to the Pacific is opening new markets for the country’s crude in Asia while reducing flows off the US Gulf Coast, at least partly fulfilling the project’s promise of diversifying the industry’s customer base. Canadian oil producers have shipped about 28 million more barrels of crude off the country’s west coast since the expanded Trans Mountain pipeline began full operations in June than it did in the four months before that, according to data from Vortexa. Meanwhile, shipments off the US Gulf declined by 1.68 million barrels in that time.

Source: Bloomberg