MOFCOM and eight other departments issued guidance to boost lower-tier market activity and county-level consumption, directing financial institutions to improve service quality and expand finance for lower-tier consumption and consumer commercial facility projects. The guidance supports eligible wholesale, retail and service consumption enterprises issuing bonds and pursuing listings for financing. Trade and distribution firms that meet conditions and open new county-level chain stores may apply

HKEX filing shows HSBC (00005.HK) repurchased 1.3 mln shares on Aug 14 for HK$19.9 mln.

CMB International says DeepSeek on Aug. 13 released and open‑sourced DeepSeek Harness (DSH) developer preview v0.1 under an MIT license. The firm interprets DSH as a strategic shift from the model layer to the framework layer—positioning DeepSeek as an "Android for the Agent era"—by defining a "dynamic composable Agent" runtime standard to strengthen ecosystem control and developer lock‑in. CMB notes faster domestic model iteration and a new phase of inference commercialization: first systematic price increases plus peak/off‑peak pricing by domestic leaders, which validate stronger‑than‑expected inference demand and relatively tight compute supply. That dynamic is positive for the inference compute chain (domestic chips, IDCs/cloud providers) and could enable further domestic model price rises. Competition, it says, is migrating from pure model capability to framework/application and engineering plus developer ecosystem as the new moat; monitor Zhipu (02513.HK) GLM updates, MiniMax (00100.HK) M3 Pro, Tencent (00700.HK) Hunyuan 4, Alibaba (09988.HK) Qianwen 4, and commercialization progress for Agent products and use cases.