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World Business Quick Take

■ Scandals
Enron head pays fine
The former chief accounting officer for failed energy giant Enron agreed to pay a US$500,000 fine to settle fraud charges with the Securities and Exchange Commission, officials said Thursday. The SEC said Wesley Colwell, charged with exaggerating profits at the failed energy giant, was barred from ever serving as an officer or director of a public company as part of the agreement. Colwell did not admit or deny the charges, but has agreed to cooperate with the federal investigation into Enron, the SEC said. Enron, the one-time, high-flying energy trader is scheduled to emerge from bankruptcy as two pipeline and utility companies. Enron was the largest-ever US bankruptcy at the time of its demise.

■ Toiletries
Colgate seeks Chinese teeth
US-based Colgate-Palmolive plans to increase its share of the toothpaste market in China to 40 percent by expanding production bases in the country, state media reported Friday. "Our target is to take 40 percent of the market in China in the near future," Chester Fong, vice-president and general manager for the company's China operations, was quoted as saying by a Chinese-language news-paper. Colgate-Palmolive, the largest toothpaste supplier in China since 1999, wants to make China one of its biggest markets in Asia and outside the US. "Following the completion of our production base in [the southern city of] Guangzhou, we are going to further diversify our product lines in the Chinese market from toothpaste to other personal products," Fong said.

■ Music industry
MTV offers downloads
Viacom Inc's music video channel MTV may offer downloads of songs from its Web sites, the Financial Times reported, citing Tom Freston, chairman and chief executive of MTV Networks. The proposed legal music download service would compete with Apple Computer Inc's service and smaller companies such as Roxio Inc, the paper said. A decision by MTV to offer music downloading would signal significant backing for online music as some of the world's biggest entertain-ment companies are fighting legal battles against illegal file-sharing services, the FT said. MTV, which is viewed by 400 million people worldwide, would be in a strong position to compete against other possible contenders for the business such as Microsoft Corp and Sony Corp, the paper added.

■ Electronics
PS2 sales fall one-third
Sales of Sony Corp's PlayStation 2 in Japan fell a third in volume from a year earlier in the six months ended Sept. 28, the second consecutive half-year of decline, a researcher said. Sony, the world's No. 1 maker of game consoles, sold 1.08 million units of the three-year-old game machine this year, according to Enterbrain Inc, a game industry research house. In the same period, overall sales of game consoles in Japan declined 31 percent, Enterbrain said. Sales of Sony's rival, the Nintendo Co GameCube, rose 5 percent on the year to 319,037 units, the researcher said. Kyoto-based Nintendo, also the maker of Game Boy Advance handheld devices, said last week it will cut the price of the GameCube to ¥14,000 (US$129) in Japan effective tomorrow, down from ¥19,800. Among game software developers, Nintendo ranked top in sales volume in Japan with 3.12 million games sold, according to Enterbrain.

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