■ Mobile PhonesMotorola doubles CEO's pay
Motorola Inc, the world's second-biggest maker of mobile phones, more than doubled chief executive Christopher Galvin's pay last year, when it lost US$2.49 billion and its shares fell 42 percent. Galvin, 53, received US$2.8 million in salary, bonus and other compensation last year, Motorola said in an annual proxy filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. A year earlier, he was paid US$1.29 million in salary, bonus and other compensation. Galvin and four other Motorola executives received bonuses because the company returned to profitability in the second half of the year, spokeswoman Jennifer Weyrauch said.
■ Finance
Argentina to lift freeze
The Argentine government is set to start lifting a controversial banking freeze on long-term certificates of deposit, Economy Minister Roberto Lavagna said Thursday. He said the measure, expected to be signed later Thursday, would initially target certificates of up to 42,000 pesos (US$14,500), which would be repaid partly in pesos and partly in bonds. Later certificates of up to 100,000 pesos (US$34,500) will be repaid and after that those above that amount, Lavagna said at a news conference, adding that the process should take four months. In December, Argentina lifted the much-reviled freeze on most banking accounts, but continued to restrict access to the fixed-term certificates, which total about 12 billion pesos (US$4 billion).
■ Steel
Japan blasts US tariffs
Japan assailed US steel tariffs in a report yesterday, warning that the EU and developing countries such as China are retaliating by erecting trade barriers of their own. The Trade Ministry's annual report comes days after the WTO ruled that the US violated global trade rules when it imposed tariffs on steel last year to give its domestic industry time to recover from a downturn. "US safeguards triggered widespread protectionism in the trade in steel," said the report, which outlines the ministry's policy for the coming year. "The spread of abuse and misuse of anti-dumping measures is observed on the part of developing countries including China, India, Indonesia, and Thailand," it said, referring to taxes to protect domestic goods from overly cheap imports.
■ Music
Sony cuts workforce
Sony Corp's music subsidiary was to begin cutting an estimated 1,000 workers, or 10 percent of its worldwide workforce, yesterday in a move expected to save the company US$100 million a year, the Wall Street Journal said in an article posted on its Web site. The cuts under chairman Andrew Lack are part of a much larger reorganization at Sony Music Entertainment, a unit of the world's second-largest consumer-electronics maker, the report said. About two-thirds of the cuts will be outside the US, with a third coming from the company's manufacturing division, the report said. "There were a lot of separate entities which had developed their own support structures that created a lot of overhead," Lack told the newspaper. The reorganization is intended to "get the company looking at itself as one company that makes music, distributes it, sells it and markets it with one set of eyes, not eight sets of eyes."
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