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World Business Quick Take

■ METALS
Alcoa presses Alcan bid
US aluminum giant Alcoa Inc on Wednesday reaffirmed its hostile bid for Canadian rival Alcan Inc, saying its US$33 billion offer was "full and fair." The announcement by Alcoa came a day after Alcan rejected the offer from the US firm, amid reports that Alcan was in merger talks with the world's biggest miner, BHP Billiton of Australia, and possibly others. Alcoa chairman and chief executive Alain Belda said his company would continue to press its offer as "the most compelling choice for Alcan's shareholders." Among the other firms that have been named as possible suitors for Alcan are Brazil's CVRD and Anglo-Swiss company Xstrata.

■ METALS
Chinese mills look abroad
Four large Chinese steel mills have formed a joint investment company to explore overseas resources and escape what local experts termed foreign "manipulation" of iron ore prices, the Shanghai Securities News reported yesterday. Baosteel, China's biggest steel maker, will own 20 percent of the joint venture, with Wuhan Iron and Steel Group Corp, based in Hubei Province, holding 50 percent, the newspaper reported. The remaining 30 percent will be divided equally between Anshan Iron and Steel Group Corp and Shougang Group, the report said, giving no financial details.

■ ELECTRONICS
Plasma panel deal reached
Japanese electronics companies Hitachi Ltd and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co will supply each other with plasma display panels, the two companies announced yesterday. Matsushita, maker of Panasonic brand consumer electronic products, will start to supply Hitachi with 103-inch plasma panels this fiscal year, the companies said. Hitachi will start to supply Matsushita with 85-inch plasma panels in the year starting next April, they said. The two companies have been partners in the plasma TV business since February 2005, when they agreed to collaborate on research and development, production, marketing and intellectual property.

■ MEDIA
No kowtowing: Murdoch
Rupert Murdoch has denied allowing political pressure from Beijing to influence the running of his News Corp media empire, the Financial Times (FT) said yesterday. The charges have become a rallying cry for opposition to Murdoch's bid for control of Dow Jones and its flagship newspaper, the Wall Street Journal. In an interview with the FT, Murdoch denied bowing to Beijing when he dropped the BBC from Star TV in 1993. He also rejected assertions that Beijing had any influence in his decision to cancel publication of memoirs written by Chis Patten, the former governor of Hong Kong.

■ INTERNET
Google tests translation tool
Google Inc on Wednesday launched a test version of a translation tool that enables people to search the Internet in any of a dozen languages and have the results converted into their chosen tongue. A beta version of Google's "cross-language information retrieval" feature is online at http://translate.google.com/translate_s. The software translates queries to perform multi-lingual searches and then converts the results to a searcher's language. The languages include French, Arabic, English, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Spanish and Chinese.


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