Stocks are set to kick off the week on the front foot in Asia after strong U.S. earnings added to evidence the recovery from the pandemic is gathering speed. Currencies were steady early Monday.

Futures pointed higher in Japan, Australia and Hong Kong. U.S. futures were little changed after most major groups in the S&P 500 advanced Friday. U.S. new-home sales rebounded in March to the highest since 2006, while output at manufacturers and service providers reached a record high in April. The 10-year Treasury yield hovered below 1.6%.

SG:

Aspen (Group) has withdrawn the announcements that it had clinched a US$210 million gloves supply order from Honeywell, after the American company did not consummate the agreement by the effective date. Aspen described it as a "communication oversight between the parties" in a regulatory statement on Saturday. It explained that in the lead-up to the announcements made on April 13 about the order, its newly-formed subsidiary Aspen Glove had received what it believed to be the final agreement from Honeywell, with April 12 being what it perceived as the effective date of the agreement.

Hongkong Land opened an educational play-centre in Chongqing on Friday, as part of a US$33 million investment that will be made over the next five years to integrate edutainment with lifestyle retailing in other cities across the Chinese mainland. Called Kidzplorer, it is a science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics (Steam) oriented play-centre at The Ring, Chongqing - which is Hongkong Land's first wholly-owned commercial development project in south-west China.

Builder OKP Holdings said the group is not aware that it has been banned from or penalised when tendering for government contracts after its involvement in a viaduct collapse accident in 2017. It was addressing questions received from shareholders ahead of the mainboard-listed firm's annual general meeting by electronic means on April 26. A shareholder observed the "quite small" contracts it has clinched from the public sector, and that it has not participated in the "biggest" road building project North South Corridor since the worksite mishap.

US:

US taxi and limousine services are seeing a boom in business from customers seeking to enter Canada by land to avoid a restriction on international travel that applies only to air traffic. While both Canadian land and air travellers are required to take a test within three days of departure, and again on arrival, only those flying to canada must spend up to three days of the country's 14-day required quarantine period in a hotel.

Biden administration officials are coming under increasing pressure to lift restrictions on export of supplies that vaccine makers in India say they need to expand production amid a devastating surge in Covid-19 deaths there. Funeral pyres have lit up the night in the worst affected cities, and the country has set a global record of 350,000 new infections a day, which experts say could be a vast undercount.

The United States can immediately resume use of Johnson & Johnson's Covid-19 vaccine, top health regulators said on Friday (April 23), ending a 10-day pause to investigate its link to extremely rare but potentially deadly blood clots. The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Food and Drug Administration said the risks of experiencing the syndrome involving severe blood clots and low platelets as a result of the vaccine were very low. They found 15 cases in the eight million shots given.

Source: SGX Masnet, The Business Times, Bloomberg, Channel NewsAsia, Reuters, PSR