■TELECOMS
Zain, Bharti to start talks
Kuwait’s Zain telecom and India’s Bharti Airtel are to start talks soon after the Kuwaiti firm accepted an offer to sell its African operations for US$10.7 billion, a statement said yesterday. “Zain’s Board issued a resolution today [Sunday] to accept a proposal received from Bharti Airtel to enter into exclusive discussions until 25 March 2010 regarding the sale of its African unit for a total consideration of US$10.7 billion,” the Zain statement said. “Bharti’s proposal remains subject to due diligence, customary regulatory approvals and signing of final transaction documentation.”
■INTERNET
Japan to probe iTunes
Japanese authorities plan to summon Apple officials this week over complaints that its iTunes online store has billed customers for downloads they never made, officials said yesterday. In at least 95 cases in Japan involving five major credit card companies, iTunes customers said they had sometimes been charged thousands of dollars, they said. “We have seen such cases increasing, notably since autumn last year,” an official with Japan’s Consumer Affairs Agency said. “The damage in those cases seems to range from a few hundred yen to several hundred thousand yen,” the official said.
■WIND POWER
Mitsubishi mulls US plant
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd said yesterday it is considering building a wind turbine plant in the US, and will a make final decision after seeing how demand recovers. Mitsubishi is tussling with General Electric (GE) over wind turbine patents, with GE this month filing patent suits against the Japanese company in a US court. Mitsubishi’s plans call for a turbine manufacturing plant to be built in Fort Smith, Arkansas, with an investment cost of US$100 million
■NATURAL GAS
S Korean LNG imports drop
South Korea’s imports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) dropped about 10 percent year-on-year last month, customs data showed yesterday. South Korea, the world’s second-largest LNG buyer after Japan, imported 3.5 million tonnes of LNG last month, down from 3.9 million tonnes a year earlier, according to the Korea Customs Service. State-owned Korea Gas Corp, the world’s biggest corporate buyer of LNG and South Korea’s sole wholesaler, said on Thursday it sold 4 million tonnes of LNG last month, up 25.6 percent from a year earlier.
■ECONOMY
Indian inflation accelerates
India’s inflation accelerated to a 15-month high last month, adding pressure on policy makers to withdraw more fiscal and monetary stimulus. The benchmark wholesale-price index, measuring prices of rice, oil and manufactured products, climbed 8.56 percent from a year earlier, following a 7.31 percent gain in December, the commerce ministry said in New Delhi yesterday.
■ENERGY
Executive dies in avalanche
The head of ConocoPhillips Alaska died in a weekend avalanche while riding a snowmobile in the wilderness of south central Alaska, US media reported on Sunday. Jim Bowles, 57, the president of the company, was with a group of a dozen snowmobile riders in the wilderness area of the Kenai Peninsula when he and another man were buried and killed by the avalanche that roared down a slope. He led ConocoPhillips Alaska since November 2004 and oversaw roughly 900 employees in the state.
■ENERGY
UK considers ‘green bonds’
Britain is considering the introduction of “green bonds” offered to the public to help fund the sustainable energy industry, a newspaper reported yesterday. Ian Pearson, economic secretary to the finance ministry, told the Financial Times that he had asked officials to examine the idea of bringing in the new form of government borrowing. The bonds, which would be issued by state-backed bank National Savings and Investments, would be used to attract investors to sustainable energy production, the paper said. Their introduction would come at a time Britain is seeking new ways to finance infrastructure projects as it fights to balance the books in the wake of the worst recession for decades, it added.
■ECONOMY
Trichet berates Greece
European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet on Sunday told debt-ridden Greece to strengthen its audit procedures, saying that using unverified figures “should not have been tolerated.” “Greece must strengthen the verification of its figures,” Trichet told RTL radio. Producing badly checked statistics “should not have been tolerated and is intolerable,” he added. Greekce’s previous Conservative government has been widely accused of producing unreliable figures.
■ECONOMY
Moody’s upgrades Riyadh
Rating agency Moody’s yesterday upgraded Saudi Arabia to its second-highest level as oil earnings and a recovering economy push the government’s budget back into the black this year. Moody’s Investors Service hiked Saudi government foreign and local currency debt to Aa3 from the previous rating of A1 even as Riyadh powers ahead with its massive state spending program on schools, infrastructure and the military. “The upgrade was prompted by the continued strong state of government finances, which have largely withstood oil price volatility and the global economic crisis,” Moody’s said in a statement.
■COMPUTERS
Adobe joins LiMo alliance
US software firm Adobe and three other firms yesterday joined the wireless Linux group LiMo, underlying the growing role of the Linux computer operating system in cellphones. “There has been a step change for Linux in mobile,” Morgan Gillis, head of LiMo, said in an interview. “No other operating system now matches the vendor coverage of Linux — it is being commercially deployed by virtually all leading mobile device vendors from the largest downwards.” Google Inc used Linux to build its Android platform and Nokia rolled out its top-of-the-range model N900 using Linux Maemo.
■MACHINERY
MAN swings into net loss
The German industrial group MAN swung into net loss last year owing to exceptional items, but remained profitable on the operating level, it said yesterday. The group, which makes heavy trucks and buses along with turbo machinery and diesel engines, reported a net loss of 258 million euros (US$350 million), compared with a profit of 1.25 billion euros in 2008. MAN’s sales shed nearly 20 percent to 12 billion euros from 14.9 billion in 2008, a statement said. The group put the drop in sales down to a “massive decline in demand in the transportation sector in particular,” as truck markets crashed owing to the global economic downturn.
Taiwan’s foreign exchange reserves hit a record high at the end of last month, surpassing the US$600 billion mark for the first time, the central bank said yesterday. Last month, the country’s foreign exchange reserves rose US$5.51 billion from a month earlier to reach US$602.94 billion due to an increase in returns from the central bank’s portfolio management, the movement of other foreign currencies in the portfolio against the US dollar and the bank’s efforts to smooth the volatility of the New Taiwan dollar. Department of Foreign Exchange Director-General Eugene Tsai (蔡炯民)said a rate cut cycle launched by the US Federal Reserve
The US government on Wednesday sanctioned more than two dozen companies in China, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, including offshoots of a US chip firm, accusing the businesses of providing illicit support to Iran’s military or proxies. The US Department of Commerce included two subsidiaries of US-based chip distributor Arrow Electronics Inc (艾睿電子) on its so-called entity list published on the federal register for facilitating purchases by Iran’s proxies of US tech. Arrow spokesman John Hourigan said that the subsidiaries have been operating in full compliance with US export control regulations and his company is discussing with the US Bureau of
Pegatron Corp (和碩), a key assembler of Apple Inc’s iPhones, on Thursday reported a 12.3 percent year-on-year decline in revenue for last quarter to NT$257.86 billion (US$8.44 billion), but it expects revenue to improve in the second half on traditional holiday demand. The fourth quarter is usually the peak season for its communications products, a company official said on condition of anonymity. As Apple released its new iPhone 17 series early last month, sales in the communications segment rose sequentially last month, the official said. Shipments to Apple have been stable and in line with earlier expectations, they said. Pegatron shipped 2.4 million notebook
Businesses across the global semiconductor supply chain are bracing themselves for disruptions from an escalating trade war, after China imposed curbs on rare earth mineral exports and the US responded with additional tariffs and restrictions on software sales to the Asian nation. China’s restrictions, the most targeted move yet to limit supplies of rare earth materials, represent the first major attempt by Beijing to exercise long-arm jurisdiction over foreign companies to target the semiconductor industry, threatening to stall the chips powering the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. They prompted US President Donald Trump on Friday to announce that he would impose an additional
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