02/12/2025

BIZ & FINANCE TUESDAY | DEC 2, 2025

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Japanese property giants deepen push into India

Swiss billionaire calls for higher tax on rich ZURICH: A prominent Swiss billionaire has called for higher taxation of the rich as his country overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to introduce a 50% tax on inherited fortunes of 50 million Swiss francs (RM256 million) and above. Alfred Gantner, a co-founder of private equity firm Partners Group, said increasing concentration of wealth was a global problem in remarks published yesterday in Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger , which interviewed the entrepreneur last week. “It can’t be that a few people in this country have huge fortunes and others don’t know how they’re going to pay their health insurance and their rent,” Gantner, who also refers to himself as Fredy, was quoted as saying. If nothing is done to address the problem, then the “Elon Musks, Mark Zuckerbergs and Fredy Gantners will amass a whole lot more money in the next 20 years”, Gantner said. Switzerland is one of the world’s top wealth management hubs and around 2,500 taxpayers in the country have assets worth more than 50 million francs, according to Swiss tax authorities. Over 78% of Swiss voters in a referendum on Sunday rejected the proposed inheritance tax, more than polls had forecast. Gantner, who described luck as an important part of accumulating a large fortune, said inheritance taxes were not the way forward, arguing they can easily be circumvented. “We need progressive wealth taxation,” he said. “For example, one could say that above 200 million Swiss francs, taxes of 1% are due. At half a billion, it would be 1.2%, at one billion, 1.5%, and so on.” Gantner, who is pushing for Switzerland to reject an agreement that will deepen its economic ties with the European Union, appears at number 1045 in the 2025 Forbes Billionaires list with an estimated net worth of US$3.5 billion. – Reuters signaling more fundamental problems. Analysts pointed to growing competition in a crowded European market, especially from new entrants from China, and Tesla’s aging lineup. While Musk spent much of this year focused on the carmaker’s robotics pursuits and winning shareholder approval for his freshly minted US$1 trillion pay package, Tesla tried to win back buyers by launching a refreshed Model Y earlier this year. In October, it unveiled lower priced versions of its staple Model Y SUV and Model 3 sedan, with the latter not yet available in Europe. In Denmark, November registrations of the Model 3 increased by 29% to 326 cars, making it the country’s 8th most sold car. – Reuters

PARIS: Tesla’s November registrations in France and Denmark halved from a year ago, as the EV maker struggled to reverse market share losses in Europe despite the launch of a new range of its best-selling Model Y. Monthly registrations, a proxy for sales, slumped 58% in France to 1,593 vehicles sold, and by 49% to 534 cars in Denmark, where the Model Y was the 23rd most popular vehicle with 206 units sold, official data showed. Tesla’s slowdown in Europe began late last year, after its CEO Elon Musk publicly praised right wing political figures, setting off protests across the region. Musk has gone relatively quiet on politics in recent months, but Tesla’s European business has not recovered, Hiring an electrician or a plumber, for example, costs just US$2 an hour. Constructing premium office buildings of up to 20 floors costs more than US$8,000 per square metre in New York, around US$5,300 in London and $4,000 in Tokyo, but is just US$656 in Mumbai, data from real estate consultancy Turner & Townsend shows. Just as importantly, rents for premium office space have surged in India on the back of economic growth that has averaged 8% over the past three fiscal years. Mumbai’s Bandra Kurla Complex – its central business district – led growth in commercial rents for the Asia Pacific region in the third quarter with a jump of 14.2%, according to CBRE, a commercial real estate services and investment firm. That was followed by Tokyo’s central five wards which rose 10.2%, while India’s national capital region and Seoul’s central business district both climbed over 9%. Japanese firms’ preference for designing a building from scratch allows them to bring in technology not used in India. Sumitomo Realty’s first project in Bandra Kurla Complex is using a steel structure that enables very wide floor plates and thus pillar-less offices – something that Indian developers cannot do yet, said the source familiar with its strategy. The firm expects to charge a 30%- 40% premium over normal rents in the area for this design feature, the source added. JPMorgan will be a tenant in the building, according to two sources and a copy of the lease. Other Japanese developers in the Indian market include Daibiru Corp, which started with investments in office deals in two cities last year. It is now scouting for land and could even look at developing residential buildings and data centres, said Anand Jayaraman, South Asia CEO of its parent Mitsui O.S.K. Lines. – Reuters

They like to roll up their sleeves,” said Singh. Despite red-tape headaches, the returns can be worthwhile. “Expected returns in the Japanese market are maybe around 2-4%. In India, you can easily expect 6-7%,” said Seiji Ota, a partner at Deloitte India who focuses on Japanese investments in the country. Ota and Singh said a number of other Japanese developers want to make their first foray into India and are assessing opportunities to develop office, retail and hotel projects. Japanese companies and funds have boosted investment in overseas real estate by a fifth this year, according to a survey by Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Research Institute conducted in September. While the US and Australia remain long-favoured markets, interest in India notably spiked, with 41% of those surveyed intending to invest, up 6 percentage points from a year earlier. One key draw for Japanese developers is India’s low labour costs.

soon-to-be operational Navi Mumbai city airport for new investment, said a senior industry source familiar with its strategy. The source declined to be named because the information was confidential. Sumitomo Realty did not respond to a request for comment. Japanese companies are far from the only overseas investors keen on Indian property. US investment firm Blackstone, for example, is India’s biggest commercial landlord, and roughly half of its US$50 billion in Indian assets are in real estate. Like Blackstone, most foreign players purchase existing assets given India’s notorious reputation for construction delays that can leave prospective tenants and buyers high and dry. Although reforms in recent years have improved construction timelines and created a new framework to resolve disputes, acquiring land can be very slow, involving much red tape. “Japanese investors are one of the few willing to take development risk.

MUMBAI: Japanese real estate developers are wading further into a tricky Indian market and more of their peers are expected to get their feet wet, drawn by rising rents in a rapidly growing economy as well as low construction costs. First case in point is Mitsui Fudosan, Japan’s biggest property developer, which forayed into India in 2020, partnering with local developer RMZ Real Estate to build an office complex in Bengaluru. Mitsui Fudosan could embark on fresh investment of ¥30-¥35 billion (RM785-RM929 million) or more in projects with either RMZ or other developers, said two sources with knowledge of the plans. Last month, members of Mitsui Fudosan’s management team were in Mumbai and the region around the capital New Delhi looking at opportunities, they added, declining to be identified as the information was private. Mitsui Fudosan declined to comment. RMZ declined to comment on the potential new investment. RMZ Real Estate CEO Avnish Singh did say, however, that Japanese developers are kicking into higher gear now that trust with local partners has been established. “The floodgates can open and have opened,” he said. Sumitomo Realty and Development, Japan’s No.3 developer which describes Mumbai as its second engine of growth after Tokyo, has committed US$6.5 billion across five projects in the city, including two sites added this year. It is also scouting for land around a premium buildings and low construction costs o Developers lured by surging rents for developed multicloud networking service on Sunday to meet growing demand for reliable connectivity the companies said in a statement, at a time when even brief internet disruptions can cause major outages. The initiative will enable customers to establish private, high-speed links between the two companies’ computing platforms in minutes instead of weeks. The new service is being unveiled a little over a month after an Amazon Web Services outage on Oct 20 disrupted thousands of websites worldwide, knocking offline some of the internet’s most popular apps, including Snapchat and Reddit. That outage will cost US companies between US$500 million and US$650

Workers walk past a construction site by Goisu Realty, the Indian subsidiary of Sumitomo Realty & Development Company, in Mumbai. – REUTERSPIC

Amazon, Google launch multicloud service SAN FRANCISCO: Amazon and Google introduced a jointly million in losses, according to analytics firm Parametrix. users of the new approach, Google Cloud said in a statement.

Tesla car registrations drop sharply in France and Denmark

AWS provides computing power, data storage and other digital services to companies, governments and individuals and is the world’s largest cloud provider, followed by Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud. Tech companies including Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon are investing billions to build infrastructure that can handle surging internet traffic with the growing demands of artificial intelligence, as the need for computing power to support these services accelerates. Amazon’s cloud business delivered robust growth in the third quarter, generating US$33 billion in revenue; more than double that of Google’s US$15.16 billion. – Reuters

The new offering combines AWS’ Interconnect–multicloud with Google Cloud’s Cross-Cloud Interconnect, to improve network interoperability, according to announcements by the two cloud providers. “This collaboration between AWS and Google Cloud represents a fundamental shift in multicloud connectivity,” said Robert Kennedy, vice president of network services at AWS. Rob Enns, vice-president and general manager of cloud networking at Google Cloud, said the joint network is intended to make it easier for customers to move data and applications between clouds. Salesforce is among the early