Germany real retail sales MoM (Sep) -2.0% vs expected +0.4%; prior +1.3%.

The State Administration for Market Regulation published three national standards for intelligent manufacturing in China’s steel sector: Intelligent Manufacturing Scrap Steel Smart Factory Design Requirements; Intelligent Manufacturing Steel Smart Factory Digital Twin System Technical Requirements; and Intelligent Manufacturing Steel Industry Multi-Base Manufacturing Resource Collaborative Control System Technical Requirements. The standards target scrap-steel plants, digital-twin systems and cross-site coordination and are intended to support a unified advanced-manufacturing technical requirements framework for China’s steel industry. They address long production processes, numerous operations and complex interfaces, and persistent issues including inconsistent design specifications across plants, duplicated system development, poor data interoperability and difficulty coordinating resources across bases. All three standards mandate a layered, decoupled architecture that defines functional roles and technical boundaries at each layer to standardize intelligent-system design and implementation.

Japan sold its fifth climate transition bond this year, raising JPY250bn (~$1.6bn). Demand was steady: bid-cover 3.84x, below May’s 4.62x but above the 3.79x average since issuances began in Feb 2024; highest accepted yield 2.2%. This was the government’s 11th transition bond and forms part of a JPY150 tln program through 2033 to channel capital into designated emissions‑reduction projects. Despite deepening reliance on fossil fuels since the conflict began, Japan remains the only government currently using the climate transition bond category.