Hong Kong’s petrol prices have ranked among the highest in the world in recent years. In March 2026, for example, the posted price of unleaded petrol at Hong Kong filling stations reached as high as US$4.06 per litre, about 42% higher than Malawi, which ranked second.

With the artificial intelligence (AI) wave still in full swing, demand for compute hardware is soaring rapidly. Amid this technological revolution, Hong Kong’s import and export sector has successfully seized the opportunities of the era and shown strong growth momentum.

Not long ago, on 2 August 2026, the core provisions of the EU Artificial Intelligence Act officially came into effect: all AI-generated content must be clearly labelled, chatbots must inform users that they are interacting with AI, and companies in breach of the rules may face fines of up to €15 million or 3% of their global annual turnover.

At present, the development and application of financial technology (fintech) and digital finance are no longer confined to non-bank fintech companies and large internet platforms. In fact, traditional commercial banks, which still firmly occupy a dominant position in the market—especially many large commercial banks—have invested heavily in the development and application of cutting-edge financial technologies.

In the AI era, more and more companies are using AI to generate content and widely disseminating it online. An analysis by SEO research organization Graphite, which examined 65,000 English online articles published between 2020 and 2025, shows that the number of AI-generated articles first exceeded human-written articles in November 2024. By mid-2025, the proportion had risen to about 50%.

Recently, Trip.com, a Mainland tourism platform giant, was fined RMB 5.179 billion by Chinese regulators for suspected profiting from its market dominance, becoming a hot topic of public debate.

Since the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, with the local banking system as its anchor, granted the first batch of stablecoin issuer licences in April this year, expectations have been high for the banking sector’s participation in stablecoin issuance.

In 2026, Reddit’s data licensing agreement with Google, reportedly worth about US$60 million per year, is set to expire and come up for renewal. Together with a sister agreement signed with OpenAI around the same period, the two deals currently contribute roughly US$130 million in annualized data licensing revenue to Reddit.