According to The Australian Financial Review, falling land prices on Australia's eastern seaboard are creating an opportunity for one asset class to find its place in the sun – build to rent.
The fledgling sector with just 3500 units nationally in planning and development will pick up this year as declining land prices will boost the viability of a commercial asset class hampered by a 30 per cent withholding tax and other hurdles, CBRE says in its Australia Real Estate Market Outlook 2019 report.
"Cheaper residential prices are good for people wanting to buy a house, said CBRE's Australia head of research Bradley Speers. “And it also makes build to rent more economical because if you're doing more development and say your land cost $50m, then if suddenly the land's worth $25 million, then your investment is going pay off a lot better.
"Hitherto one big difficulty with build-to-rent is that the potential returns aren't as attractive as you might get from other assets classes but this is making it more financially viable."

https://www.afr.com/real-estate/falling-land-prices-will-give-buildtorent-a-leg-up-cbre-says-20190205-h1aw0b

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​https://www.j-abc.com/jp-blog/7991789 
​

According to The Australian Financial Review, the Port of Newcastle will set up an eight-person project team this month to do initial designs for a proposed $1.8 billion container terminal with the aim of becoming a trans-shipment hub for the east coast and Asia-Pacific.
The design could reflect the desire of major operators for automated facilities capable of handling much larger ships, as the Port of Newcastle seeks to become a hub that distributes goods to other ports on Australia's east coast, locations via rail, and to other ports in the Pacific, including New Zealand.
The port has met with four of the world's six biggest global shipping lines since December and all are keen on using a container terminal in Newcastle, said chief executive Craig Carmody.

https://www.afr.com/business/newcastle-port-says-the-south-pacific-is-its-playground-20190131-h1apjj

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​https://www.j-abc.com/jp-blog/5780645 
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According to The Nikkei Asian Review, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has promised to bring 40 million overseas visitors to Japan by 2020. Now it's up to local communities to accommodate them.
More than 30 million visitors came to Japan in 2018, part of a prolonged tourism boom that has brought roughly 4.5 trillion yen ($41 billion) a year to communities across the country.
But residents are chafing at the rising prices, raucous behavior and other disturbances that come with more overseas visitors. Businesses and communities throughout Japan are taking measures to manage the influx in a safe and sustainable way ahead of the Tokyo Olympics in 2020.
In some places the revenue earned from tourism is critical. Some 40% of visitors go to the Kansai region in western Japan, netting the area more than 1 trillion yen a year in tourist spending.
Central Osaka’s uniquely designed Umeda Sky Building attracted about 1.5 million guests in fiscal 2017, three times more than in 2008 when it was named one of the top 20 buildings around the world by The Times newspaper of the U.K.
Foreigners make up 75% of the building’s visitors, and the admission fee more than doubled to 1,500 yen in March 2015 from 700 yen, in anticipation of more overseas visitors.
The increase elicited local complaints. Some Japanese say the price is too high and it keeps them from visiting the building. The number of Japanese patrons fell by more than 30% to 370,000 in fiscal 2017 compared with three years earlier.
Prices are also surging at Kuromon market, a food market renowned as the "kitchen of Osaka." High-end crab legs, for example, can cost as much as 2,000 yen a pop.
One German tourist said he did not want to spend thousands of yen on crab legs and high-end Kobe beef in the market and would rather go to a restaurant.
And while foreign visitors can bring in welcome revenue for local establishments, their behavior can pose challenges. Last autumn, Kyoto's Nishiki market started putting up signs in English, Chinese, Korean and Japanese, urging shoppers to refrain from eating while walking. The hope is to cut down on littering by the growing number of tourists.
The market’s promotion association is calling on its tenants to set up more garbage cans and dining spaces.
Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost island, is also under pressure. In 2017, tourists rented about 80,000 cars in the prefecture, a fivefold increase from five years earlier. The traffic fatality rate among foreigners driving rented cars is four times that of Japanese drivers.
Local police, in cooperation with the municipal government, set up about 400 English-language stop signs near New Chitose Airport and major tourist spots.
The growing number of foreign visitors staying in private homes is also causing trouble, with residents complaining about noise and other annoyances.
Rakuten Communications, a unit of online retail giant Rakuten, developed a system that displays “Please be quiet” in multiple languages on tablet computers in hotel rooms when noise is detected.
These challenges are not likely to disappear anytime soon. Japan needs to brace for a record number of foreign visitors as the Tokyo Olympics approach.
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https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Business-Trends/Foreign-visitors-bring-cash-and-headaches-in-Japan-s-tourism-boom

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https://www.j-abc.com/jp-blog/30004932670 

According to The Nikkei Asian Review, study-abroad students made up more than 5% of those enrolled in Japanese higher-education institutions in rural areas for the first time last year, Nikkei has learned.
The 39 prefectures outside of the three major urban areas of Tokyo, Osaka and Aichi hosted a total of 73,320 foreign students in 2018, or 5.4% of all students, up 0.5 percentage point from the prior year. Six prefectures boasted higher proportions of foreign students than Tokyo's 7%.
As Japan's population shrinks and remains concentrated in Tokyo, attracting students from overseas is becoming key to operations for universities and trade schools, especially in rural areas.
The proportion of students from abroad dipped after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Japan that caused the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdowns, but bottomed out in 2013 and has been rising sharply since.
Nikkei calculated the proportions by prefecture based on survey data from the Japan Student Services Organization and the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.
Gunma, a landlocked prefecture northwest of Tokyo, has shown the sharpest growth of the prefectures in question, surging to 15% -- or 6,962 students -- from just 3% in 2013. According to a Gunma official, proportions of foreign students "aren't growing too much at schools that already had them in high numbers," such as Gunma University, Jobu University and Takasaki City University of Economics.
But, the official said, a major rise took place at Nippon Academy, a school set up in 2013 by an education arm of local hotelier group Gunma Royal Hotel. The academy offers practical studies in services for Japanese hotels, traditional ryokan inns and eateries to about 500 students from abroad, mainly Vietnam and Nepal.
Another growth contributor was Tokyo University of Social Welfare, whose headquarters are located in Gunma. The university hosts about 800 foreign students, or roughly 20% of the total student body. Most are Chinese, though recently students from Vietnam and Nepal have grown to notable numbers, according to a school representative.
The second-greatest growth came from Ibaraki Prefecture, located northeast of Tokyo on the Pacific Ocean coast, where students from abroad grew to 11% of the total at 5,299 in 2018 -- up 5 percentage points in half a decade. Ibaraki's University of Tsukuba boasts one of the highest counts of foreign students in the country, and schools including Tsukuba Gakuin University have shown marked increases as well.
Studies of business and information are popular with Tsukuba Gakuin's foreign students, the school said, noting that there were more Vietnamese students than those from any other country in 2018.
Though Tokyo boasts more than 67,000 students from overseas, that makes up just 7% of the capital's overall student body. The prefecture with the highest proportion of foreign students is Oita, on the southwestern island of Kyushu, whose count of 3,733 makes up 16% of its students overall. This is largely due to the presence of Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, where about half the students come from abroad.
Foreign students made up 10% of the total for Yamaguchi Prefecture, located north of Oita on the southwest tip of Japan's main island of Honshu, at 2,715. Fukuoka and Nagasaki prefectures both beat out Tokyo with student bodies that were 8% foreign, with 13,669 and 1,954 respectively.
"In nonmetropolitan areas, where the population has declined sharply, there is an increasing movement to turn to study-abroad students to secure needed human resources," said Miki Sugimura, a professor at Sophia University familiar with the internationalization of Japan's higher education.
Most European and American countries have larger proportions of foreign students in higher education than Japan does, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Foreign-students-grow-in-universities-outside-Japan-s-big-cities
 
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https://www.j-abc.com/jp-blog/-5

According to The Australian Financial Review, Andrew Forrest's Fortescue Metals Group says it was right and the nay-sayers were wrong on the issue of heavy discounting for its lower grade iron ore products.
Fortescue pointed to the recent narrowing in the price gap between high and low grade iron ore as evidence that heavy discounting last year was part of a cycle and not a structural change in the Chinese market.

Ref: https://www.afr.com/business/fortescue-boosts-shipments-as-new-higher-grade-product-hits-the-mark-20190131-h1aoev

If you want to read this article in Japanese, please see the following link:
​https://www.j-abc.com/jp-blog/4114151 
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According to The Nikkei Asian Review, Japan's once-buoyant real estate market has seen a sharp pullback in foreign buying, sending property deals falling by a third in the second half of 2018.
Property transactions declined 34% on the year to a six-year low of 1.72 trillion yen ($15.78 billion) in the six months ended December, according to the Tokyo-based Urban Research Institute.
Foreign buying, which made up more than 30% of all transactions a year earlier, tumbled 90% on the year to 91.9 billion yen. Relatively low prices had made Japanese real estate an attractive asset compared with property on other markets, but that perception has changed.
"We haven't been able to buy very many properties recently," said an executive at the Japanese arm of a U.S.-based real estate fund. The number of properties on the Japanese market began to decline in the second half of 2018, and those that were on sale were too pricey, this person said.
A real estate broker reports that Tokyo waterfront condominiums that Chinese investors had bought up aggressively are now up for sale. With China's economy slowing, making the government clamp down tighter for fear of capital outflows, Chinese money appears to ebbing from once-brisk overseas real estate deals.
Japan's property deal drought is particularly noticeable at the high end.
Last year's most expensive purchase, excluding sites for development, was the roughly 150 billion yen acquisition of the Shiba Park Building in Tokyo's Minato Ward by a group of investors. This was well below the big deals seen in 2017, when China's Anbang Insurance Group bought about 200 rental condominium buildings from U.S. investment group Blackstone for roughly 260 billion yen.
Analysts say already-high Japanese property prices have less room to rise than before. Investment returns based on rental income have fallen to the low 3% range, and "few investors will accept any lower returns," said Hiroshi Okubo, head of Japan research for real estate services group CBRE.
Meanwhile, Japanese financial institutions have grown more cautious about lending for property deals in the wake of a loan scandal at Suruga Bank, which was found to have exercised lax oversight in a home-share investment scheme. A Bank of Japan gauge of financial institutions' lending attitude toward real estate and big corporations fell to 20 in December from a near-term peak of 29 in March 2017. A lower reading indicates a tougher stance on lending.
With buyers wary of paying too much, "the weakness in the deal environment looks likely to continue in 2019," said Shigeo Hirayama, an executive at the Urban Research Institute.

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Markets/Property/Foreign-buyers-slam-brakes-on-Japanese-real-estate-deals

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​https://www.j-abc.com/jp-blog/-34 
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According to The Nikkei Asian Review, Rakuten, one of Japan's leading e-commerce platforms, said Friday it will start delivering packages via drones in sparsely populated areas during the fiscal year beginning in April, now that the country has eased regulations on such flights.
"We will make regular deliveries during the 2019 fiscal year in underpopulated areas and the like," said Hideaki Mukai, general manager of Rakuten's drone business department. The company is in the process of selecting prospective locations for what could be the first service of its kind in Japan.
On Friday, the virtual mall operator conducted a trial in Chichibu, a city north of Tokyo surrounded by mountains. The drone traveled 3 km to deliver barbecue equipment to a hypothetical customer who lives within the mountainous terrain.
The drone operator simply entered the location into a tablet -- the rest of the roughly 10-minute flight was automated. Rakuten's prototype is capable of carrying a maximum of 2 kg and traveling up to 15 minutes.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. Holdings assisted with the trial by installing weather sensors on power transmission towers and near electrical lines. Such real-time data as wind speeds and directions are transmitted to the drone via the tablet to ensure a safe flight.
Japan currently forbids drone flights in urban areas and everywhere at night. Drone operation was once limited to unpopulated areas and within the pilot's line of sight. But regulations were relaxed last September, expanding the range of flight. In addition to Rakuten, Japan Post Holdings is also testing drone deliveries.
PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates that the commercial use of drones, including package deliveries, could potentially develop into a global market of $127 billion. Amazon.com and China's JD.com are some of the e-tailers pioneering the innovation.
In Japan, the drone business is expected to total 371.1 billion yen ($3.38 billion) in fiscal 2024, or seven times the scale in fiscal 2017. Starting next fiscal year, requirements will be relaxed for drones used to inspect tunnels, bridges and other infrastructure -- a move expected to stimulate demand.
"In labor-scarce Japan, drones that can conduct work that eliminates the need for people will be in demand," said Hiroaki Ohta, president of Autonomous Control Systems Laboratory, the startup that supplies Rakuten with drones. ACSL, which went public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange's Mothers market last month, develops machines with control systems that do not rely on GPS. Along with drones specialized for logistics and inspections, ACSL also offers management systems.
But drone-based deliveries will likely be too expensive for the scattered, mostly elderly population that makes up the targeted customer base. Involvement of the public sector will likely be needed.

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Rakuten-s-package-delivery-drones-to-take-flight-soon

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​https://www.j-abc.com/jp-blog/4093130 
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JFE Steel Corporation announced that Byerwen Coal Pty Ltd, a joint venture company in Queensland, Australia between JFE Steel and QCoal Pty Ltd, has shipped its first cargo of hard coking coal produced from the Byerwen Coal Handling and Preparation Plant (CHPP), bound for its West Japan Works.
The development of the Byerwen mine, which is located in the north-east of Queensland, has progressed since the Queensland State Government granted mining leases in April 2017 and the production of hard coking coal from the CHPP started at the end of 2018.
The Byerwen mine produces hard coking coal which is necessary for high quality metallurgical cokes. The coal from the mine has a great market competitiveness due to the vast resources and favourable mining condition that allow for a large-scale open cut operation.
Together with QCoal, JFE Steel will work to develop the mine and provide a stable, long-term supply of coking coal, which is expected to help reduce volatility in the coking coal market.

http://www.jfe-steel.co.jp/en/release/2019/190123.html

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​https://www.j-abc.com/jp-blog/jfeq-coal 
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According to The Nikkei Asian Review, the number of foreigners working in Japan reached a record high of 1.46 million, rising twofold over the past five years as the country grapples with a labor shortage, government data showed on Friday.
The figure as of October 2018 represents a 14% increase from the previous year and the sixth consecutive annual gain, according to data released by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare.
China topped the list with nearly 390,000 workers in Japan as of October, accounting for 27% of Japan's foreign employees.
Vietnam ranked second, at over 310,000 and 22% of the total. The Philippines followed with around 160,000 workers, or 11%. Vietnamese workers rose the most in percentage terms, with an increase of 32% over the past year.
The largest share of Japan's workers from overseas -- more than 430,000, or 30% of the total -- ply their trade in manufacturing. Other sectors, such as retail as well as food and beverage service, contributed about 14% to 17% of the total.
Though the number of foreign workers has increased rapidly, they still make up a small share of Japan's total workforce at just 2%.
Japan's serious labor shortage has left the government scurrying to create a framework to boost the number of foreign workers and ease the strain on employers.
A foreign worker law that takes effect in April lets the country formally accept blue-collar workers from abroad and give them a pathway to permanent residency. This likely will prompt even more foreigners to choose Japan as an employment destination. The government estimates that up to 340,000 foreign workers could enter Japan in the five years after the law takes effect.
Though the law will allow additional overseas workers in agriculture, nursing and 12 other sectors, issues such as ensuring adequate working conditions for these employees have yet to be resolved.
Concerns remain over Japan's health care system and its ability to accommodate immigrants and their families. The government is trying to ensure that foreign workers will be able to do their jobs while being integrated into their communities.
Meanwhile, Mitsubishi Motors, Panasonic and two other companies were forced to cancel so-called technical trainee internships on Friday. The internships allow companies to hire foreign workers at low salaries. However, the companies were found to have treated these laborers inappropriately by leaving them in charge of work that they were not authorized to do under the program.

https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Japan-Immigration/Foreign-workers-in-Japan-double-in-5-years-hitting-record

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​https://www.j-abc.com/jp-blog/524835583 
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According to The Australian Financial Review, Coles will spend close to a billion dollars over the next six years fitting out huge state-of-the-art automated warehouses in Sydney and Brisbane to be developed by Goodman Group.
The shuttle and conveyer belt technology within the new 66,000 square metre high bay warehouses – the size of about nine soccer pitches laid side by side – will be developed by German automation specialist Witron and will require very little human involvement, a growing trend globally within the industrial sector as retailers seek greater efficiencies in their supply chains.
Coles has budgeted to spend $950 million over the next six years on the new distribution hubs which will replace five manually-operated smaller warehouses. It will also recognise a $146 million pre-tax provision in its 2019 interim results for the cost of redundancies and exiting existing leases.

https://www.afr.com/real-estate/commercial/development/coles-puts-1b-into-stateoftheart-sydney-and-brisbane-distribution-centres-20190124-h1affm

If you want to read this article in Japanese, please see the following link:
​https://www.j-abc.com/jp-blog/9416577
​