Daily Briefing: Singapore and UN voice woes over trade tensions; Pavilion Energy buys first LNG cargo

And here's Softbank's latest investment in a Singapore-based media group.

From AP via Yahoo! Finance:

In a series of separate events in Beijing, the UN secretary-general and Singapore's foreign minister expressed their concerns about global trade tensions and rising protectionism amongst countries.

"Following remarks from his Chinese counterpart, Singaporean Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan vowed to 'double-down' on free trade and economic liberalization in tandem with China.

'This is a time in the world where the temptation to embark on unilateralism and protectionism is unfortunately rising,' Balakrishnan said.

In a separate meeting, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called China 'absolutely crucial' in the international system."

Read more here.

From Bloomberg Asia:

Singapore’s state-owned natural gas importer Pavilion Energy, brought in its first cargo of a super-chilled form of the liquefied natural gas for domestic use.

"Pavilion Energy Pte, owned by Singapore’s Temasek Holdings Pte, unloaded the liquefied natural gas cargo from the tanker Al Oraiq on Saturday. The vessel carried the fuel from Qatar, the world’s largest LNG exporter.

Pavilion last year became one of two companies, along with Royal Dutch Shell Plc, to be granted a license to import LNG into Singapore. The Asian nation sees imports of the seaborne form of the fuel as necessary to supplement possibly declining supplies via pipeline from Malaysia and Indonesia. About 95 percent of Singapore’s electricity is generated by gas-burning power plants.

Pavilion has brought in LNG cargoes to Singapore LNG Corp.’s Jurong Island terminal before, but they’ve been reloaded and shipped back out instead of being warmed into gas and fed into the local energy system."

Read more here.

From Deal Street Asia:

The early stage venture capital arm of Japan's Softbank, Softbank Ventures, invested $23.5m in Singapore-based localisation provider IYUNO Media Group. The company offers dubbing, subtitling, and media processing services, amongst others.

"IYUNO offers dubbing, sub-titling, access services, media processing, and software licensing to studios, network groups, and over-the-top providers.

'SoftBank Ventures’ investment in IYUNO specifically targets bringing localization technologies to actual industry applications, including neural machine translation and voice synthesis that can be used in the areas of audio localization or dubbing,' the announcement stated.

The Singaporean startup said it has been providing localization and post-production services to the mainstream media industry for the past 15 years across the globe. It claims it has delivered over 8,000 hours of fast-track subtitles every year to major media platforms."

Read more here.