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World Business Quick Take

■ Textiles
China decries trade limits
China will protest Turkey's import curbs on Chinese textiles unless the Turkish government keeps its promise to negotiate the scope of the measures bilaterally, Dunya reported. The Chinese government is preparing to file a formal complaint with the WTO about Turkish restrictions, the newspaper reported, citing Yavuz Onay, president of Turkish-Chinese business council. Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul said the conflicts from can be resolved through talks, Xinhua new agency reported on Feb. 3. The Chinese government will start the complaint process if there's no concrete move by Turkey on that promise, Onay told Dunya. Turkey decided to restrict 42 categories of Chinese textiles after unions argued a flood of cheap imports would create unfair competition, Dunya reported on Dec. 24. Under a WTO agreement, a four-decade-old global textile quota system expired at the end of last year.

■ Mobile Phones
Samsung sees better profit
Samsung Electronics Co, Asia's biggest electronics maker by market value, will be able to bring profitability at its phone unit back to "a normal range" of about 15 percent of sales, helped by market share gains, an executive said. That margin fell to 3 percent in the fourth quarter partly because of investments in research and marketing. Those investments are now helping the company gain market share, said Choi Chang-soo, Samsung's head of sales and marketing at the company's telecommunications division, in an interview at a phone industry congress in Cannes, France yesterday. Suwon, South Korea-based Samsung first set the 15 percent target on Jan. 14, saying handset prices and profit margins will rise "significantly."

■ Telecoms
DoCoMo denies PHS pullout
NTT DoCoMo Inc, Japan's biggest mobile phone operator, said it hasn't decided to withdraw from the personal handy-phone business. "DoCoMo has not made any such announcement or decision," the Tokyo-based company said yesterday in a faxed statement, responding to an earlier Nihon Keizai newspaper report it will stop offering PHS service in two or three years. DoCoMo, the second-largest provider of PHS access in Japan after Willcom Inc, is losing subscribers to the service, which was developed as a cheaper alternative to other mobile phone services. "If the report is true, it's positive news because the PHS business has an operating loss every year worth several tens of billions of yen," said Yasumasa Goda, an analyst at Merrill Lynch & Co.

■ Electronics
HP says Q1 profits steady
Hewlett-Packard Co, a week after ousting famed chief Carly Fiorina, said first-quarter profit was little changed, with rising personal computer sales balancing out a fall in printer profits. Net income for HP, the world's largest printer maker, rose US$943 million, or US$0.32 a share, from US$936 million, or US$0.30, a year earlier. Sales rose 9.9 percent to US$21.5 billion, beating analysts' estimates. The company's PC unit, which was bumped to the No. 2 position by Dell Inc last year, doubled earnings as notebook sales rose. Printer profits for the quarter fell. The firm estimated its second-quarter profit at US$0.35 to US$0.37 a share on sales of US$21.2 billion to US$21.6 billion, the company said.

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