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Metaverse Real Estate Piles Up Record Sales in Sandbox and Other Virtual Realms

Firms’ purchases of digital land in online worlds are bets that property values will rise as more people join in

The latest hot real-estate market isn’t on the scenic coasts or in balmy Sunbelt cities. It’s in the metaverse, where gamers are flocking and digital property sales are setting new records.

A growing number of investment firms are acquiring digital land in worlds such as the Sandbox and Decentraland, where players simulate real-life pursuits, from shopping to attending a concert. They are betting that individuals and companies will spend money to use virtual homes and retail space and that the value of properties will increase as more people join the worlds.

Investors’ interest in virtual real estate got a boost last month after Facebook renamed itself Meta Platforms Inc. and said it would focus on online worlds, commonly called the metaverse.

That interest reached a new peak on Tuesday when Republic Realm, a firm that develops real estate in the metaverse, said it paid $4.3 million for land in the world Sandbox, the biggest virtual real-estate sale publicized to date, according to the company and to data from the website NonFungible.com, which tracks digital land sales.

Republic Realm bought the digital land from videogame company Atari SA and the two firms said they plan to partner on the development of some of the properties.

That acquisition broke a record set just last week by a subsidiary of Canadian investment firm Tokens.com Corp., which said it paid around $2.5 million for land in the world Decentraland’s Fashion District.

“This is like buying land in Manhattan 250 years ago as the city is being built,” said Andrew Kiguel, chief executive of Tokens.com.

These virtual worlds, often created by videogame developers, include cities where a user’s avatar can stroll and shops where they can buy a new winter coat or a painting to hang on the walls of their virtual homes. These digital worlds feature apartments or lounges where users can hang out with avatars of their real-life friends. Participants pay in cryptocurrencies to gamble in virtual casinos or to indulge in more extravagant pursuits such as virtual yachts.

Real-estate investors are looking to sell homes that are close to users’ friends and virtual attractions. They are also developing retail spaces, which they hope to lease to virtual retailers for rent priced in hard currency or cryptocurrency. Ownership of land is recorded through so-called nonfungible tokens, digital identifiers that act as de facto deeds. Property sales are usually done in a cryptocurrency unique to each metaverse.

The investments can be risky. Unlike actual real estate, which tends to retain some value even during a market downturn, the value of virtual properties could fall to zero if the world they are in goes out of fashion and people stop visiting it.

Prices can also be slammed by the volatility of cryptocurrencies, said Zach Aarons, general partner of the real-estate-focused venture-capital firm MetaProp. “If I buy a building for 40 ETH, and then ethereum goes from $4,000 to $100, that’s a fundamental risk that I’m not really taking when I’m buying a piece of physical real estate,” he said.

Republic Realm is trying to reduce the risk by buying land in a number of different virtual worlds, said co-founder Janine Yorio. The company says it runs two real-world investment vehicles focused on virtual real estate and owns about 2,500 plots of digital land across 19 worlds. Ms. Yorio said she spent a decade as a real-estate investment executive, first at NorthStar Realty Finance Corp. and then at the Standard Hotels, before switching to the financial-technology industry.

The company either buys land directly from a world’s creator, or from third parties through public listings or off-market deals, Ms. Yorio said. In some cases, it decides to just sit on the vacant land and wait for it to appreciate. In others, it pays an architect to design virtual homes or malls and a game developer to build them.

As in the physical world, zoning rules limit what and where a company can build in the metaverse and, in theory at least, too much development could lead to a market glut. But unlike in the real world, metaverse buildings can defy the laws of physics by appearing to hover above the ground.

“And then we charge rent, just like a regular landlord,” Ms. Yorio said. The company employs an asset manager to deal with tenants’ complaints and change requests. Its developments include a mall, which it leases to retailers selling fashion for avatars, and a master-planned community of around 100 villas on private islands that it sold to individuals.

Tokens.com, which is publicly traded, is currently developing an 18-story skyscraper in Decentraland that it hopes to lease to lawyers or cryptocurrency exchanges, which can use the building for events or advertising.

It is looking to develop properties on the land it bought in Decentraland’s Fashion District, which it wants to rent out to fashion companies as event and retail space.

“We can create something that’s the equivalent of a Rodeo Drive or Fifth Avenue, where the Guccis and Adidases will come,” Mr. Kiguel, the CEO, said.

SONDAGE EXCLUSIF - Le polémiste, qui doit se déclarer officiellement candidat à la présidentielle le 30 novembre, décroche de trois points dans notre sondage Harris Interactive à 13% des intentions de vote. Il se situe désormais loin de Marine Le Pen (19-20%) et même derrière Xavier Bertrand (14%).

Il ne pouvait guère redouter pire entrée en campagne. Éric Zemmour plonge brutalement dans notre baromètre Harris Interactive au premier tour du scrutin, en recul de trois à quatre points sur une semaine, après une série de déconvenues et un déplacement houleux à Marseille, dont l’épilogue –un doigt d’honneur adressé à une manifestante– a fini d’écorner sa stature présidentielle. Un temps proche de la barre des 20%, l’ancien journaliste du Figaro n’est plus crédité que de 13% des intentions de vote, en chute libre et désormais relégué en troisième, voire en quatrième position dans le scénario d’une candidature de Xavier Bertrand à droite.

Un décrochage fulgurant

Longtemps donné en situation de se qualifier pour le second tour, l’éditorialiste n’apparaît plus en mesure de rivaliser avec Marine Le Pen, la candidate du Rassemblement national, qui creuse l’écart avec 19% à 20% des intentions de vote et s’impose comme la principale alternative à Emmanuel Macron. "Le décrochage d’Éric Zemmour est aussi fulgurant que son ascension à l’automne, et intervient au terme d’une succession de transgressions qui, du Bataclan au doigt d’honneur, ont fini par lasser son électorat", indique Jean-Daniel Lévy, directeur général délégué d’Harris Interactive. A cet effet d’accumulation, s’ajoute un climat de défiance médiatique. "C’est la fameuse règle médiatique des 'trois L: lécher, lâcher, lyncher', pointe Jean-Daniel Lévy. Éric Zemmour, au bout de quelques semaines de campagne, en est déjà au troisième L ."

Lâché de toutes parts

Surtout, au gré des polémiques et des incartades, le sulfureux polémiste a vu la liste de ses soutiens se rétrécir. Lâché par son financier, le millionnaire Charles Gave, il a vu Philippe de Villiers prendre ses distances et le maire de Béziers, Robert Ménard, qui l’avait reçu dans sa ville en octobre, se montrer plus critique. Jean-Marie Le Pen, lui, avait déjà rompu avec l’éditorialiste le 18 novembre, estimant qu’il "n’avait pas la stature physique d’un président". Mardi 29 novembre, à la veille de sa déclaration de candidature, c’est l’un de ses soutiens de la première heure, Pierre Meurin, en charge de la structuration des réseaux zemmouriens, qui quittait le navire fustigeant "l’immaturité politique" de son ancien mentor. Dans le même temps, malgré ses tentatives, l’éditorialiste ne parvenait à décrocher le soutien d’aucune figure notable de LR ou du RN. Le prix de la radicalité…

L’officialisation de sa candidature et son premier grand rassemblement, prévu dimanche 5 décembre au Zénith de Paris, ont-ils une chance de renverser la vapeur? Le doute est de mise tant sa campagne est apparue ces derniers jours pour ce qu’elle est: une aventure solitaire. "Il ne gagnera pas avec cette équipe-là", s’avance l’un de ses amis qui s’épanche: "J’en viens presque à espérer qu’il n’ait pas ses 500 signatures… Cela lui ménagerait une porte de sortie honorable." Une confidence qui en dit long sur le doute qui s’est installé autour du candidat. Et de sa campagne.

SONDAGE EXCLUSIF - Le polémiste, qui doit se déclarer officiellement candidat à la présidentielle le 30 novembre, décroche de trois points dans notre sondage Harris Interactive à 13% des intentions de vote. Il se situe désormais loin de Marine Le Pen (19-20%) et même derrière Xavier Bertrand (14%).

Il ne pouvait guère redouter pire entrée en campagne. Éric Zemmour plonge brutalement dans notre baromètre Harris Interactive au premier tour du scrutin, en recul de trois à quatre points sur une semaine, après une série de déconvenues et un déplacement houleux à Marseille, dont l’épilogue –un doigt d’honneur adressé à une manifestante– a fini d’écorner sa stature présidentielle. Un temps proche de la barre des 20%, l’ancien journaliste du Figaro n’est plus crédité que de 13% des intentions de vote, en chute libre et désormais relégué en troisième, voire en quatrième position dans le scénario d’une candidature de Xavier Bertrand à droite.

Un décrochage fulgurant

Longtemps donné en situation de se qualifier pour le second tour, l’éditorialiste n’apparaît plus en mesure de rivaliser avec Marine Le Pen, la candidate du Rassemblement national, qui creuse l’écart avec 19% à 20% des intentions de vote et s’impose comme la principale alternative à Emmanuel Macron. "Le décrochage d’Éric Zemmour est aussi fulgurant que son ascension à l’automne, et intervient au terme d’une succession de transgressions qui, du Bataclan au doigt d’honneur, ont fini par lasser son électorat", indique Jean-Daniel Lévy, directeur général délégué d’Harris Interactive. A cet effet d’accumulation, s’ajoute un climat de défiance médiatique. "C’est la fameuse règle médiatique des 'trois L: lécher, lâcher, lyncher', pointe Jean-Daniel Lévy. Éric Zemmour, au bout de quelques semaines de campagne, en est déjà au troisième L ."

Lâché de toutes parts

Surtout, au gré des polémiques et des incartades, le sulfureux polémiste a vu la liste de ses soutiens se rétrécir. Lâché par son financier, le millionnaire Charles Gave, il a vu Philippe de Villiers prendre ses distances et le maire de Béziers, Robert Ménard, qui l’avait reçu dans sa ville en octobre, se montrer plus critique. Jean-Marie Le Pen, lui, avait déjà rompu avec l’éditorialiste le 18 novembre, estimant qu’il "n’avait pas la stature physique d’un président". Mardi 29 novembre, à la veille de sa déclaration de candidature, c’est l’un de ses soutiens de la première heure, Pierre Meurin, en charge de la structuration des réseaux zemmouriens, qui quittait le navire fustigeant "l’immaturité politique" de son ancien mentor. Dans le même temps, malgré ses tentatives, l’éditorialiste ne parvenait à décrocher le soutien d’aucune figure notable de LR ou du RN. Le prix de la radicalité…

L’officialisation de sa candidature et son premier grand rassemblement, prévu dimanche 5 décembre au Zénith de Paris, ont-ils une chance de renverser la vapeur? Le doute est de mise tant sa campagne est apparue ces derniers jours pour ce qu’elle est: une aventure solitaire. "Il ne gagnera pas avec cette équipe-là", s’avance l’un de ses amis qui s’épanche: "J’en viens presque à espérer qu’il n’ait pas ses 500 signatures… Cela lui ménagerait une porte de sortie honorable." Une confidence qui en dit long sur le doute qui s’est installé autour du candidat. Et de sa campagne.

FT Alphaville has the answer, but we’re not sure Roman Roy does.

Fans of HBO’s acid-tongued media empire family drama Succession probably don’t care much for finance. Bar, you know, the trappings of it.

Sadly for us — or perhaps more for our close friends and family — FT Alphaville does. Lucky you guys, though.

For a while, the question of what Waystar Royco’s actual market capitalisation is has been bugging us. Before we lose you right there, it’s arguably a really an important question for the show. After all, the entire family’s opulent lifestyle rests on the business being worth something. Cruise-related warts and all. So, you wanna know roughly right?

Luckily for you, thanks to a close watch of Season Three’s episodes, including this week’s seventh, Too Much Birthday, we now have a rough idea. And, to boot, a sense of the size of Kendall’s stake.

The first clue was in the fourth episode, Lion in the Meadow. When Kendall and Logan put on a brave face to visit one of Waystar Royco’s major shareholders, Josh Aaronson, at a private island off the east coast. During a walk through the dunes, Aaronson complains he’s lost $350m, or 10 per cent, on his 4 per cent position in the company thanks to their internecine squabbling.

We’re not going to spell the maths out here, you’re all too smart for that. But that gets you to a market capitalisation of $78.8bn. Not including debt. (Which we know from earlier episodes exists in size; this is legacy media after all).

Cut to episode five, Retired Janitors of Idaho and we got a more definite idea of the valuation when, at a backstage meeting at Waystar Royco’s AGM, manchild Roman Roy reminds everyone that “we’re talking about a $85bn baby here”. So is that a $6bn rebound between episodes (a little surprising given investors don’t normally love this level of infighting), or a subtle joke from the writers that Roman doesn’t know his own company’s valuation? Or, dare we suggest, perhaps the writers aren’t keeping track? Either way, it seems we can be comfortable pegging the company’s market cap in the $80bn-ish range.

So what about the size of Kendall’s stake? Well in the most recent episode, via a birthday card that reads (what else?) “cash out and f**k off”, Logan makes an offer to buy out his son’s stake in Waystar Royco for $2,015,708,009. Two whole yards.

Here’s a screenshot of the term sheet:

Run the numbers with the $80bn valuation, and assuming no premium on the buyout offer (a big if), and Kendall owns about 2.5 per cent of Waystar Royco. Which, if you imagine 10 per cent was split equally among the four children, sort of makes sense right?

Anyway, there you have it — an answer to a question very few, if any, asked. Glad to be of service.

The brand is targeting combined sales for fragrances and fashion of 1 billion euros by 2025.

PARIS — Paco Rabanne has opened a flagship on Avenue Montaigne in Paris, signaling parent company Puig’s ambitions for the brand, which is targeting sales of 1 billion euros by 2025.

While the bulk of that sum will be generated by the label’s fragrances, including bestsellers such as XS and 1 Million, its fashion division has been growing at a strong clip, and launched online sales in China with the opening of a digital flagship on Alibaba’s Tmall Luxury Pavilion.

Driven by creative director Julien Dossena’s acclaimed online shows during lockdown, the label’s fashion revenues are expected to rise 20 percent in 2021 compared with 2019, after jumping 200 percent between 2018 and 2019.

While Puig does not provide revenues for individual brands, the Spanish beauty and fashion company ended 2020 with a net loss of 70 million euros, versus a gain of 226 million euros in 2019. It aims to surpass 3 billion euros in combined sales in 2023 and to reach 4.5 billion euros in 2025, versus 1.54 billion euros in 2020

With the store at 39 Avenue Montaigne, Rabanne is crossing a threshold. The 1,650-square-foot boutique is across the street from fashionable eatery L’Avenue, a favorite of celebrities, and opposite Dior’s historic flagship, which is set to reopen soon after two years of renovations.

“This is about restoring the brand’s credentials and giving it the retail showcase it deserves,” Bastien Daguzan, general director of Paco Rabanne fashion, told WWD. “It’s a fantastic location in terms of foot traffic, a great opportunity for us and also a strong signal to the industry, because we’re in the midst of incredible brands.”

While the target is for the store to become profitable within three years, it will also play a key role in driving e-commerce sales, which account for 60 percent of fashion revenues at Rabanne. This figure is far above the luxury sector average, estimated at 22 percent in 2021, according to consulting firm Bain & Co.

Rabanne inherited the store from its fellow Puig brand Nina Ricci, which opened the location in 1979 and shuttered it in April as part of its pivot to a digital-first strategy. While Rabanne sits in a lower price bracket than its neighbors on the upscale street, Daguzan believes the strategy fits with the Space Age brand’s iconoclastic history.

“Opening Paco Rabanne on Avenue Montaigne, with our positioning, is yet another way to challenge the codes of the industry,” he said.

The flagship is designed to be less conceptual and more experiential than its existing store on Rue Cambon. Designed by an in-house team, the 1970s-style interior contrasts silver accents with soft colors, like a terra-cotta carpet and a custom island in butterscotch resin and marble by award-winning Dutch designer Sabine Marcelis.

A room is dedicated to heritage styles, with racks strung with the brand’s signature 1969 chainmail handbag and mannequins displaying vintage looks, including a minidress made of aluminum sheets, from the spring 1967 haute couture collection, similar to the one famously worn by French singer Françoise Hardy.

A screening room at the back, meanwhile, allows visitors to sit in a truncated vintage Jaguar car while surrounded by images from the “Time Out” fall 2021 campaign film starring French actress Adèle Exarchopoulos.

The store will host various capsule collections, activations and exclusives, such as color-gradient 1969 bags, which look like they have been spray-painted. It carries Dossena’s capsule line with Japanese graphic designer Tsunehisa Kimura, which will make way in January for a collection created with the estate of Op Art pioneer Victor Vasarely.

The brand took advantage of the disruption induced by the coronavirus pandemic to reduce its rhythm to two collections per year, timed to the pre-collections season in January and June.

Its ready-to-wear is divided into four pillars: iconic looks, like the sequined chain disc Sparkle dress, with prices ranging from 990 euros to 3,500 euros; the runway collection, consisting of Dossena’s more avant-garde designs; activewear, and easy wear, its main commercial collection, priced from 290 euros to 1,290 euros.

“It’s important today to have a brand with a single creative backbone around which specific lines can revolve. We’re thinking about maybe repositioning the activewear, because it’s complementary, but perhaps it can have an existence of its own,” said Daguzan.

Rabanne is also mulling whether to turn the Rue Cambon boutique into a single-category store. Meanwhile, it has transferred its short-lived boutique on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, opened in 2020, to another Puig-owned brand, Carolina Herrera.

Daguzan does not anticipate further brick-and-mortar openings anytime soon, preferring to focus on the brand’s wholesale network, which generates more than half of its revenues online. Rabanne has 350 points of sale worldwide, including some 15 shops-in-shop in department stores.

Likewise, any return to physical runway shows must serve an online audience first. “It must be transmitted, seen and understood by the consumer at the same time that it is shown to the press. Today, this is one of the fundamentals of creating a show,” Daguzan said.

Despite the brand’s strong digital focus, it’s betting the Avenue Montaigne store will be a magnet for customers seeking the kind of glamorous evening wear that Dossena showcased in his fall 2021 collection. “It’s a playful brand for going out,” said Daguzan. “As soon as lockdowns are lifted, sales soar.”

Stéphane Bancel foresees ‘material drop’ in current jabs’ effectiveness, sending stocks and oil prices lower

The chief executive of Moderna has predicted that existing vaccines will be much less effective at tackling Omicron than earlier strains of coronavirus and warned it would take months before pharmaceutical companies could manufacture new variant-specific jabs at scale.

Stéphane Bancel said the high number of Omicron mutations on the spike protein, which the virus uses to infect human cells, and the rapid spread of the variant in South Africa suggested that the current crop of vaccines may need to be modified next year.

“There is no world, I think, where [the effectiveness] is the same level . . . we had with [the] Delta [variant],” Bancel told the Financial Times in an interview at the company’s headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

He added: “I think it’s going to be a material drop. I just don’t know how much because we need to wait for the data. But all the scientists I’ve talked to . . . are like, ‘This is not going to be good’.”

The Moderna chief executive’s comments come as public health experts and politicians have tried to strike a more upbeat tone about existing vaccines’ capacity to confer protection against Omicron.

On Monday, Scott Gottlieb, a director of Pfizer and former commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration, told CNBC: “There’s a reasonable degree of confidence in vaccine circles that [with] at least three doses . . . the patient is going to have fairly good protection against this variant.”

Joe Biden, US president, subsequently said Omicron was “a cause for concern, not a cause for panic,” adding that the government’s medical experts “believe that the vaccines will continue to provide a degree of protection against severe disease”.

However, Bancel said scientists were worried because 32 of the 50 mutations in the Omicron variant are on the spike protein, which current vaccines focus on to boost the human body’s immune system to combat Covid.

Most experts thought such a highly mutated variant would not emerge for another year or two, Bancel added.

The Moderna chief’s predictions rattled investors in Asia on Tuesday, with equities and stock futures dropping and crude prices losing ground.

In Japan, the benchmark Nikkei 225 index swung to a loss of as much as 1.1 per cent following the FT’s report. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index was 2.3 per cent lower. S&P 500 futures erased initial gains to tip US stocks to drop almost 1 per cent, while the FTSE 100 was set to shed 1.2 per cent at the open in London.

Concerns over the variant drove traders to seek safety in bonds, pushing the yield on 10-year US Treasuries down 0.05 percentage points, while in commodities markets, Brent crude, the international oil benchmark, reversed course to be down almost 2 per cent at $72.04 a barrel.

“With [Bancel] saying the vaccines may not be as effective, that’s caused renewed uncertainty — hence the outside market moves you’re seeing now,” said Mansoor Mohi-uddin, chief economist at the Bank of Singapore.

Mohi-uddin added that while investors were not pricing in a more serious disruption to the global economy from Omicron, it could take weeks for a clearer picture to emerge. “The view is still that it’s going to be a temporary hit, rather like [the Delta variant] turned out to be.”

Moderna and Pfizer have become the vaccine suppliers of choice for most of the developed world due to the high effectiveness of their jabs, which are based on messenger RNA (mRNA) technology.

In August, Moderna announced that people vaccinated with two doses of its jab “maintained antibodies through six months, including against variants of concern such as the Delta variant”.

But studies suggested that the company’s vaccine was less effective at preventing outbreaks of Delta than earlier strains of the virus.

A Stanford University study of a Delta outbreak at a California prison published last month found that Moderna’s jab was 56.6 per cent effective against infection — substantially lower than the level in studies conducted before the emergence of the variant, the researchers said.

Moderna and Pfizer are now working on new vaccines to target the Omicron variant, which the World Health Organization has said poses a “very high risk”.

Bancel said data indicating how existing vaccines performed against the Omicron variant, and whether it caused severe disease, should become available within two weeks.

But he said it would take several months before an Omicron-specific vaccine could be produced at scale, and suggested there might be a case for giving more potent boosters to the elderly or people with compromised immune systems in the meantime.

“[Moderna] and Pfizer cannot get a billion doses next week. The maths doesn’t work. But could we get the billion doses out by the summer? Sure,” said Bancel, who predicted Moderna could make a total of 2bn-3bn doses in 2022.

But he said it would be risky to shift Moderna’s entire production capacity to an Omicron-targeted jab at a time when other variants were still in circulation.

Bancel also hit out at critics who have accused vaccine makers of not doing enough to support rollouts in developing countries such as South Africa, where only a quarter of the population is fully inoculated, according to Johns Hopkins University.

“This was mostly a policy decision by the rich countries. In the US, we were told we had no choice but to give 60 per cent of our output to the US government. That was not a Moderna decision, that was a US government decision,” he said.

Bancel also said there was a surplus of jabs earmarked for Africa and that 70m Moderna vaccines were sitting in warehouses because Covax, an international body tasked with supplying low-income nations, or individual governments had not taken delivery of them.

“We are running out of space,” he said. “It’s because either they don’t have customs documents, or they don’t have fridge space, or because the ability to get doses in arms is a challenge.”

Official PMI data show slight expansion in November after 2 months of contraction

Chinese manufacturing activity increased slightly in November, as power supply shortages eased and commodity prices stabilised to help boost output after two consecutive months of contraction.

The official manufacturing purchasing managers’ index was 50.1 for November, just above the threshold that separates expansion from contraction.

The world’s second-biggest economy has been buffeted in recent months by a property sector downturn and energy shortages that showed signs of abating in November, as Beijing eased a crackdown on developers and intervened to control fuel prices.

Thermal coal futures traded on the Zhengzhou Commodity Exchange at Rmb1,040 ($163) on Tuesday, down from a high of Rmb2,301 last month. The price stabilisation has helped ease power shortages that partly caused the manufacturing PMI to hit its lowest level in October since February last year.

Chinese regulators have also eased pressure on property developers by loosening credit controls and allowing more bond issuance in the past two months. The latest relaxations saw the gauge for the construction industry in the non-manufacturing PMI jump 3.9 per cent.

But analysts warned that China still faced significant economic challenges.

Jian Chang, chief China economist at Barclays Investment Bank, said the Chinese economy would “continue to see headwinds” from “a more significant contraction in property sales”, its zero-Covid policy and increased pressure to meet climate commitments in the coming year.

Shanshan Song, China economist at HSBC, said that more targeted support from Beijing was still needed, pointing to shrinking employment and underperforming small business activity.

The official data put greater emphasis on big state-owned enterprises. Large and medium-sized manufacturers on average reported an expansion in activity, but activity for small manufacturers continued to contract.

The November PMI benefited from a 7.4 per cent increase in production in the manufacturing sector. The other main sub-indices — new orders, raw material stores, workers employed and supplier delivery times — all remained below the 50-point threshold.

An increase in the monthly gauge of sector activity in November is common, with China’s Golden Week holiday at the beginning of October reducing the number of working days in the month.

The official data were released a day before a private manufacturing PMI reading from Caixin, which tends to put greater emphasis on smaller businesses.

Separately, South Korea’s industrial output in October fell at its fastest pace in almost a year and a half, official data showed, because of global supply chain disruptions that have hit factories across Asia’s fourth-biggest economy.

Finance minister Hong Nam-ki also warned that the new Omicron coronavirus variant could exacerbate supply chain problems.