KANSAS CITY — Foodservice operators are continuing to utilize limited-time menu innovations to drive consumer traffic.

For instance, P.F. Chang’s unveiled a menu collection inspired by autumn traditions in Kyoto, Japan, ranging from two duck offerings to Wagyu egg rolls. The duck items include duck wings, which are tossed in teriyaki sauce then topped with toasted sesame seeds, Fresno peppers and scallions, and duck fried rice, which combines shredded duck, a fried egg, edamame, fried shallots, kimchi, julienned vegetables, chili jam and chili-spiced butter. The egg rolls are formulated with Wagyu beef, julienned vegetables, black pepper, garlic, ginger and black garlic aioli.

“Autumn gives us the opportunity to work with deeper, richer flavors and ingredients that feel especially craveable this time of year,” said Steve Solis, vice president of culinary at P.F. Chang’s. “We challenged ourselves to reimagine familiar P.F. Chang’s favorites through unexpected seasonal pairings. The result is a menu that feels comforting and approachable but still delivers the bold flavor and sense of discovery our guests come to us for.”

CKE Restaurants Holdings, Inc. subsidiary Carl’s Jr. debuted the first product under its Burger Revolution platform, a systemwide cooked-to-order initiative, with the Angus Maximus burger. The LTO features two Angus beef patties, American cheese, sliced onions, dill pickles and special sauce.

“Carl’s Jr. has never been in the business of serving burgers that are just good enough,” said Iwona Alter, brand president for Carl’s Jr. “The Burger Revolution and our shift to a cooked-to-order process represent our commitment to raising the standard across the entire Carl’s Jr. experience. The Angus Maximus is the perfect burger to lead that charge, bringing two charbroiled 100% Angus beef patties, bold flavor and the quality and value our guests deserve.”

Paris Baguette is tapping into the sweet heat trend with two Halloween menu items. The ghost pepper chocolate marble mochi donut blends Paris Baguette’s mochi donut format with chocolate marble frosting and spice from a ghost pepper, and ghost pepper iced hot chocolate features an iced hot chocolate beverage with an infusion of heat from ghost peppers.

“This Halloween, we wanted to surprise and delight with something unexpected, the fiery kick of ghost pepper paired with rich, indulgent chocolate, while still embracing the nostalgia that makes Halloween so special,” said Cathy Chavenet, chief marketing officer of Paris Baguette North America.

For most of the past two decades, the Thailand-China relationship was defined by trade volume and Chinese manufacturing relocation. Increasingly, it is defined by something else: the transfer of Chinese technology, standards, and industrial know-how directly into the operating base of the Thai economy. The factory floors of Rayong and the boardrooms of Bangkok are where that shift is now visible, and it is reshaping what Thai competitiveness looks like for the rest of this decade.

Key Takeaways

From trade partner to technology supplier

Thailand and China established diplomatic relations in 1975, when bilateral trade barely registered on either country’s books. By 1999 it had grown to a modest $4.22 billion, and by 2008 it had climbed to $36.2 billion. What followed was an acceleration few bilateral relationships in the region can match: $126 billion by 2023, and $153 billion in 2025. Thailand’s prime minister has framed this trajectory in explicit terms, describing the country’s ambition to become a regional hub for trade, investment, and innovation, with China cast as its primary partner in that transformation. At the opening of the Thailand-China Cooperation Expo 2026, Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul went further, pushing back directly on academic criticism that Chinese capital arrives without real technology transfer by insisting there is simply “no need for classrooms” to prove the point.

The AI cooperation pivot

The clearest signal of this new phase came in July 2026, when Thailand and China held high-level talks reaffirming their comprehensive strategic partnership. Both governments agreed to deepen cooperation specifically around artificial intelligence, covering digital transformation, industrial upgrading, talent development, AI governance, cybersecurity, and applied innovation. That is a different kind of agreement than the infrastructure and trade deals that have anchored the relationship for years. It treats AI capability itself as the thing being transferred, not just the factories and ports that AI eventually runs on.

That framing matters because of how Chinese AI is actually showing up inside Thai industry. Huawei and Alibaba Cloud have effectively built the digital backbone of the Eastern Economic Corridor, supplying the 5G and cloud infrastructure that underpins everything from Laem Chabang port logistics to smart grid management. Rather than competing at the frontier-model layer the way US firms do, Chinese technology in Thailand is concentrated in applied industrial AI: optimizing logistics, managing ports, and running the automation systems inside factories. It is a less visible form of influence than a headline chip deal, but arguably a more durable one, because it embeds Chinese standards and platforms into the daily operations of Thai business.

The commercial side of this digital integration is already substantial. TikTok’s parent ByteDance has committed over 270 billion baht in long-term investment covering data infrastructure, AI processing, and SME support in Thailand, while Alibaba Cloud, Huawei, and Ant Group are embedded across e-commerce, cloud computing, and fintech at a scale no Western technology company currently matches on the ground. What began as a trade relationship is becoming a shared digital economic corridor.

Where the innovation is landing

Three sectors show most clearly where this technology transfer is concentrated: robotics, semiconductors, and electric vehicles.

In robotics, Chinese firms have stopped treating Thailand purely as a market to sell into and started treating it as a base to manufacture from. The Thai government has approved a 10 billion baht robotics investment inside the Eastern Economic Corridor, led by five Chinese technology companies building a humanoid-robot components cluster in Chachoengsao province. Alongside it, Thailand’s National Science and Technology Development Agency is co-developing robotics and automation systems directly with Chinese partners at the SMC-Siasun Innovation Center in Rayong, rather than simply importing finished hardware.

Somboon Advance Technology, one of Thailand’s largest auto parts suppliers, has already built what it calls Southeast Asia’s first fully operational 5G smart factory in partnership with Siasun and Huawei. The scale of the underlying capital flow is striking: in the first half of 2026 alone, foreign investment approvals in Thailand rose 68 percent year-on-year to nearly 188 billion baht, with China leading by number of approved businesses, 110 nationally and 69 inside the EEC specifically.

In semiconductors and advanced electronics, Thailand has attracted over $26.8 billion in investment applications across roughly 880 high-tech projects between 2023 and mid-2026, spanning chips, advanced electronics, EVs, and high-performance computing, and that figure has since surged past $30 billion as the country positions itself for next-generation chip and AI manufacturing. More than half of the world’s top printed circuit board manufacturers have now chosen Thailand as a production base.

Kris Leetavorn, director of PCB manufacturer Advanced Connection Technology, put the appeal in plain terms for firms weighing where to locate: Thailand’s electronics supply chain and “supportive state policies were critical to our investment decision.” While much of this capital is diversified across Japanese, Taiwanese, and Western firms as well, Chinese investment is a growing share of it, and Chinese companies are now the second-largest customer group in Thailand’s industrial estates after Japan.

Electric vehicles remain the most mature example of Chinese industrial transfer, though the story there is entering a more disciplined phase, with Thai regulators tightening EV market rules and drafting a Lemon Law as the first wave of Chinese-brand adoption matures into a more normal, more scrutinized consumer market.

China’s own pivot shapes what comes next

Understanding where this relationship goes next requires understanding what is happening inside China itself. In the second half of 2026, China entered what regional analysts describe as a stable slowdown, lowering its GDP growth target to a range of 4.5 to 5.0 percent, the clearest signal in three decades that Beijing is deliberately trading quantity-driven growth for quality-driven development.

The government’s stated growth engines going forward are new quality productive forces, meaning concentrated investment in AI, advanced technology, and innovation, alongside a proactive fiscal policy expanding the deficit to stimulate demand, and a regulatory push to restructure price competition in sectors like EVs and food delivery toward quality rather than volume.

That pivot has a direct bearing on Thailand. As China shifts from being the world’s factory to positioning itself as an exporter of innovation and advanced technology, the kind of capital and expertise flowing into Thailand is changing in character. It is less about low-cost assembly relocating across the border and more about mid-market Chinese firms in robotics, electronics, and AI-adjacent manufacturing setting up regional operations that assume Thailand is a genuine node in the next phase of their growth, not just a tariff workaround.

The friction that comes with integration

None of this is friction-free, and Thai executives navigating the relationship face three intersecting risks.

The most immediate is transshipment scrutiny. In August 2026, the White House released a report titled The Great Transshipment Scam, accusing more than 40 countries, Thailand among them, of facilitating the rerouting of Chinese exports to dodge US tariffs, and warning that goods found to be illegally transshipped could face an additional 40 percent duty. White House trade office head Peter Navarro argued China has developed “extremely sophisticated” methods for rerouting goods since the first tariffs went on in 2018.

Thailand has already felt this kind of pressure directly: the United States imposed anti-dumping and countervailing duties on Thai solar cell exports in April 2025 at rates between 375 and 972 percent, a scale of penalty that signals how seriously Washington is treating the issue, and one that risks catching genuinely Thai-made goods in the same net as transshipped ones. In response, Thai authorities have tightened export compliance, requiring formal origin verification before exporters of goods like solar panels and steel products can receive the certificates needed for US customs clearance.

The second risk is currency and dependency exposure. As yuan-baht settlement mechanisms expand from bilateral trade into broader consumer finance, the US dollar’s role in Thai-China commerce could shrink faster than most treasury teams have modeled, a shift worth tracking through Bank of Thailand policy communications. Layered on top of that is a more structural dependency risk: on Chinese EV supply chains, green energy components, and rare earth materials, alongside continued pressure from cheap Chinese consumer goods competing directly with Thai producers.

The third is data and AI governance. As Chinese platforms and cloud infrastructure become embedded in Thai commercial operations, the rules governing data sovereignty, algorithmic transparency, and cross-border data flows will determine how freely that infrastructure can actually operate, and how much leverage Thailand retains over systems it does not own.

From follower to co-creator

What emerges from these threads is a Thailand that has made a strategic choice, whether or not it has been stated as bluntly as that. The country is betting that closer integration with Chinese innovation, in AI, robotics, semiconductors, and digital infrastructure, is worth the compliance costs and dependency risks that come with it. BOI Secretary-General Narit Therdsteerasukdi has started framing the agency’s objective in exactly those terms, saying the goal now is “anchoring Thailand as an indispensable co-creator of the future global supply chain,” not merely keeping pace with technology developed elsewhere.

Whether that ambition holds will depend on execution that Thailand controls more directly than the trade data suggests: how well domestic content and technology-transfer requirements attached to EEC incentives actually keep value onshore, how effectively Thai regulators manage the transshipment relationship with Washington without cutting off the investment flow from Beijing, and how much of the AI and robotics know-how arriving from Chinese partners actually diffuses into Thai firms rather than remaining walled off inside joint ventures. The capital and the technology are arriving. The next few years will show whether Thailand converts that into capability it owns, or simply into a more sophisticated version of the assembly-line role it has played for decades.

Designers Guild, the luxury home decor company founded by Tricia Guild in 1970, is closing after 56 years. Administrators from Interpath were appointed yesterday and 93 members of staff have been made redundant.

A small number of employees have been retained to assist with the wind down of the business, which had been struggling for several years.

The company sells luxury furnishing fabrics, wall coverings and bed and bathroom collections. Its flagship store was on King’s Road in London, and it produced a series of collections inspired by the interiors of royal residences including Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle.

One of its vintage overdyed rugs in slate grey could cost about £2,500, while its Milan sofa range retails for up to £6,250.

In a statement yesterday, Guild, the English interior and textiles designer known for her use of colour and pattern, said it was with “great sadness” that she and her brother, Simon Jeffreys, the chief executive, had decided to shut the business down.

“Designers Guild Ltd has been so much more than a business to me. It is my passion and my life’s work,” she said. “The brand was built over decades with an unswerving belief in the power of creative design and a constant striving to achieve only the very best.”

Guild said the last few years had brought a “succession of challenges” and that “despite the best efforts of our team and others over numerous months, we have not been able to find a way forward”. She described the outcome as a “source of huge regret and sorrow for us”.

She added: “While we are closing the business, we hope the many positive and happy memories will be the ones that stay with us: the gorgeous fabrics, wonderful interiors, photoshoots in the most inspiring places around the world, daring and successful product launches, the opening of showrooms in Paris, Munich and Stockholm, the gradual growth and development of the King’s Road store.”

The company had been dealing with financial headwinds for a number of years, including Brexit-related red tape and cost pressures. Much of its customer base is in Europe.

In April 2025, Designers Guild sold its brand and design archive to the homeware retailer Dunelm. Under that arrangement, Dunelm licensed the brand and archive back to Designers Guild, which continued to trade independently under the creative direction of its founder.

Interpath had been running a sales process for several months leading up to this month, with at least one potential bidder, according to Sky News.

Rick Harrison, managing director at Interpath and joint administrator, said: “As a matter of priority, we will be supporting those members of staff who have been impacted by insolvency, while we also explore options for the company’s remaining assets, including leftover stock.”

Interpath has also handled other retail administrations this year. It was appointed to Russell & Bromley, whose brand was bought out of administration by Next in January, and is administrator to Claire’s, where administration costs are estimated at £7.2m following the jewellery chain’s second collapse.

A new report from Economic Intelligence Wales show there are more than 1,700 productivity heroes across numerous sectors.

Wales has more than 1,700 so called ‘productivity hero’ firms that are driving both productivity gains and job creation, although their number has fallen shows new research.

A report from Economic Intelligence Wales (EIW) identified 1,732 productivity heroes across Wales and drawn from numerous sectors, in 2024-25. Together, these businesses generated £6.04bn in turnover and created more than 5,200 jobs, demonstrating that businesses can improve productivity while continuing to grow employment. The findings offer practical insight for policymakers and delivery partners seeking to target support where it can have the greatest impact.

While the number of productivity heroes has fallen since a peak in 2022-23, the businesses that remain are becoming increasingly productive, the report shows.

Labour productivity increased by some 24%, rising from approximately £133,000 per employee to almost £165,000. The report highlights that productivity heroes are not confined to high-tech or knowledge-intensive industries. These businesses are found across manufacturing, construction, professional services, wholesale, hospitality and other sectors. Regardless of sector, the report finds that the most successful businesses consistently invest in three areas: a strong customer focus; developing people through leadership and skills; and embracing innovation and digital adoption.

The research also argues that identifying businesses through a productivity hero framework provides a more meaningful understanding of economic performance than measuring turnover or employment growth in isolation.

By identifying firms that are simultaneously growing turnover, employment and productivity, it offers a stronger evidence base to help inform future policy, investment and business support in Wales.

The report concludes that Wales can create more productivity heroes through targeted support focused on leadership, skills, finance, innovation and infrastructure, helping more businesses improve productivity while continuing to create jobs.

Swansea-based Zeal Innovation, which trades as Litelok is one example of the productivity-led growth highlighted in the report.

The company designs and manufactures possibly the most secure, high-security, grinder-resistant locks for bicycles and motorcycles. Since 2017, it has grown turnover per full-time employee from around £45,000 to around £350,000, with annual revenues now approaching £10m. Its growth demonstrates how innovation, investment and a strong product focus can help Welsh businesses scale while becoming more productive.

Adam Price, Cabinet Minister for Enterprise, Connectivity and Energy, said: “This research shows that Wales already has the businesses, ideas and ambition needed to build a stronger, more productive economy. Our national productivity mission is about backing that potential and turning it into higher pay, stronger firms and better opportunities in every part of Wales.

“The message from these businesses is clear: with the right support for skills, leadership and innovation, more Welsh firms can grow, create jobs and become more productive. Our new national development agency will be central to making that support simpler, sharper and more effective.”

Professor Melanie Jones, Professor of economics at Cardiff Business School and academic lead for the Wales Productivity Forum said: “Productivity growth is critical to improving the things people care about including real wage growth, business profitability, and public service delivery. Narrowing the existing and persistent 15% productivity gap between Wales and the rest of the UK will require a step change in Wales’ productivity growth.

Professor Mark Hart, deputy director of the Enterprise Research Centre, and lead author of the report, said: “Productivity Heroes demonstrate that businesses do not have to choose between creating jobs and improving productivity. These firms are successfully achieving both, making them important to Wales’ long-term economic performance. Better understanding what they are doing well can help create more of them.

“Our research shows that the strongest-performing businesses invest just as much in leadership, workforce development and organisational culture as they do in innovation. By understanding what sets these firms apart, we can better identify the practical support that enables more businesses to grow, improve productivity and create sustainable employment.”

Giles Thorley, chief executive of the Development Bank of Wales, said: “This research provides valuable evidence about the businesses helping to strengthen Wales’ economy and, crucially, what enables them to succeed.

“As a trusted delivery partner, our role is to turn that evidence into practical support. Working alongside Welsh Government, we can help ensure ambitious businesses have access to the finance, leadership support and investment they need to improve productivity, retain value in Wales and create long-term economic impact.

“The productivity hero framework gives us a clearer understanding of where support can have the greatest impact, helping us translate evidence into practical action that builds a stronger, more productive Welsh economy.”

John Hurst, chair of FSB Wales said: “As small business owners, action on productivity needs to be practical, accessible and reflect the day-to-day realities of starting and growing a business. Real progress means creating an environment that supports investment and giving founders the know-how to unlock extra value from what we already have, whether that’s adopting new tech, rethinking how we use skills within the business, or making better use of our space.

“Proposals for a new development agency offer a vital chance to cut through a fragmented system and deliver the direct, grounded support that delivers successful Welsh firms.”

EIW is a collaboration between the Development Bank of Wales, the Enterprise Research Centre at Warwick Business School, Cardiff Business School, Bangor Business School and the Office for National Statistics. It provides independent economic intelligence to help improve understanding of the Welsh economy and support evidence-led decision making.

The US Federal Reserve on Thursday proposed new rules for issuers of dollar-backed cryptocurrency tokens known as stablecoins, taking another step towards implementing the regulatory framework established by last year’s GENIUS Act, according to Reuters.

The proposals would establish requirements for payment stablecoin issuers that are supervised by the Federal Reserve, including rules on reserves, capital and risk management. The Fed said the framework is intended to carry out responsibilities assigned to it under the GENIUS Act.

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Stablecoins to be fully backed by reserves

Under the proposed rules, Fed-supervised payment stablecoin issuers would be required to fully back their tokens with permitted reserve assets. These would include short-term US Treasury bills and other high-quality, liquid assets, according to the Federal Reserve.
The requirement is designed to ensure that issuers maintain sufficient assets to support the value of stablecoins issued under the federal framework.

Capital requirements for issuers

The proposal would also introduce standardized capital requirements for stablecoin activities. The requirements are intended to address credit and operational risks associated with payment stablecoin issuance.
Also Read | US stocks: S&P 500 ends nearly flat as US-Iran talks help stocks pare lossesThe Fed would additionally establish risk-management standards for supervised firms involved in stablecoin activities.

Rules for banks holding stablecoin reserves

The proposed framework would extend beyond stablecoin issuers to Fed-supervised banks that safeguard assets backing the tokens.

The rules would establish requirements for banks that provide custody services for stablecoin reserves and clarify which stablecoin-related activities Fed-supervised banks would be permitted to conduct.

Path for banks to issue stablecoins

The Fed is also proposing a separate application process for Board-supervised banks seeking approval to issue their own payment stablecoins.

Banks applying under the framework would have to provide information including a business plan and financial details. The proposal would also establish procedures covering appeals, hearings and final decisions on applications, according to a report by Reuters.

60-day public comment period

The Federal Reserve will accept public comments on the proposed rules for 60 days after their publication in the Federal Register.

The proposals represent a key step in putting the GENIUS Act’s federal stablecoin framework into practice and defining how banks and other supervised institutions can participate in the growing digital-asset payments market.

(Disclaimer: Recommendations, suggestions, views and opinions given by the experts are their own. These do not represent the views of The Economic Times)