Alice Han

We saw that in 2025.

Now, you could argue that, especially in the first half of the year, they did this to reserve the firepower if tariffs got really bad.

But even then, they were reluctant to deploy that in the second half of the year.

Thank you so much for your time, Hotze.

This is an increasingly important subject.

I know everyone's focused on Davos, but

We're in a sprint until March where key decisions will be made in the second largest economy in the world.

So thank you so much for sharing your time and insights.

All right, James, you know what time it is.

It is prediction time.

As you peer into the future this week, what do you see?

Well, James, just cheekily, I'd say I do feel very sorry for the Europeans, because if you recall back a couple of years ago with the PRISM scandal during the Obama administration, where European data were transferred to American authorities without European permission, and that obviously caused a fracture in the transatlantic relationship.

Now they're going to have to go through it all again with China, and it's going to be even more complex.

So I do feel very sorry for the Europeans.

So my prediction is following up on a previous prediction I made about Chinese tech companies moving more to Singapore, to Singapore wash, or at least desinitize their companies in order to go truly global, get global investors and have more of a global reach in terms of marketplace.

This is prompted by the Chinese cyber administration now looking into Manus and whether or not the Manus meta deal, basically meta buying Manus,

violates Chinese tech transfer laws.

And I have a sneaking suspicion, although I'm not entirely confident, that they may try to kill this deal or delay this deal, because this is an AI company.

I mean, it does agentech AI, so it's not directly national security dual use related.

But I sense that with AI getting even more charged as a topic in China domestically, there could be some spanners in the works, so to speak, for meta.