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Latest Development: On June 2, as widely expected, the governing MORENA party’s Claudia Sheinbaum was the comfortable victor of Mexico’s presidential elections, and as a result will become Mexico’s first female president on October 1. Preliminary polling – the official count does not begin until June 5 – indicates that Sheinbaum won at least 58.0%

The Latest: On May 24 2024, the Spain-based hospitality company Atzaro Group announced its plans to launch a new hotel in Cape Town, South Africa in June 2024. The Atzaro Cape Town hotel will offer seven luxury suites, as well as guided activities including hiking, whale-watching and mountain biking. The hotel will also offer excursions such as

Key View: The planned reduction in subsidies in Egypt, including a significant increase in bread, fuel, and electricity prices, will raise month-on-month inflation and push inflation up to around 30% in 2024 and 18%-20% in 2025, which will weigh on disposable incomes of the Egyptian consumer. This reduction in disposable income is expected to

The Latest: On May 28 2024, the Irish fast fashion retailer, Primark, opened its first store in Hungary after announcing plans in 2019 to expand in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). This store opening marks Primark's 17th international market and makes Hungary its sixth market in the CEE region.

Implications: Known for its competitive prices

The Latest: On May 29 2024, Merck announced the acquisition of EyeBio, a clinical-stage biotechnology company specialising in ophthalmology drug development. Under the terms of the agreement, Merck will pay US1.3bn upfront and another US1.7bn contingent on achieving certain development, regulatory and commercial milestones

Latest Development: SpaceX is set to launch its direct-to-cell (D2C) service with T-Mobile in the US in Q324, connecting T-Mobile's subscribers to Starlink satellites. The announcement is significant particularly as rival AST SpaceMobile has also inked agreements with AT&T and Verizon to deliver D2C services from its satellites. Furthermore, SpaceX

Key View

• Despite government commitments to hold the peg through the rest of 2024, we believe a one-time devaluation (as a first step towards removing the cepo) or acceleration of the crawling peg in Q4 2024 is likely. This underpins our forecast that the peso is likely to average ARS1,050/USD in 2024 and end the year at ARS1,200/USD.
• We forecast that

Key View

• Economic growth slowed according to both GDP and GVA data for Q1 2024 and we continue to forecast a 7.0% rise in GDP for FY2024/25 (April - March).
• We are seeing some improvement in the private consumption outlook, as falling inflation supports real wage growth.
• By contrast, we now expect investment growth to slow due to high interest rates.

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Key View

• We continue to forecast that Canada’s current account balance will improve from -0.7% of GDP in 2023 to around 0.0% this year, broadly in line with consensus expectations.
• Weakness in imports linked to a soft domestic economic outlook and strength in energy exports as the Trans Mountain pipeline becomes operational will drive the improvement

Key View

• The Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) of Singapore has developed a comprehensive Green Data Centre Roadmap to steer the growth of data centres in a sustainable direction, while setting a target of 300MW to be allocated in the near-term for future IT load.
• We believe it is unlikely that the initiative will rekindle large-scale