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World Business Quick Take

■ ELECTRONICS

TI profits up 13 percent

Texas Instruments Inc (TI), the largest maker of chips for mobile phones, said on Tuesday its fourth-quarter profit rose 13 percent on strong sales of analog and digital signal processing chips. The company posted net income of US$756 million, or US$0.54 per share, compared with US$668 million, or US$0.45 per share,in the last quarter last year. Revenue rose 3 percent to US$3.56 billion from US$3.46 billion last year. Analysts polled by Thomson Financial, on average, expected earnings of US$0.52 per share on sales of US$3.58 billion. TI forecast first-quarter earnings of US$0.43 to US$0.49 per share on revenue of US$3.27 billion to US$3.55 billion.



■ CIGARETTES

New tobacco giant emerges

A new tobacco giant incorporating well-known brands Regal cigarettes and Montecristo cigars emerged on Tuesday as Britain's Imperial Tobacco won control of Franco-Spanish peer Altadis. Imperial said in a statement that Altadis shareholders overwhelmingly backed its takeover bid for Altadis worth 12.8 billion euros (US$18.8 billion). The takeover will create Europe's second-largest tobacco company, behind Altria Group's Philip Morris, making about 312 billion cigarettes a year. The combination of the world's fourth and fifth-biggest tobacco groups will bring together Imperial Tobacco brands Regal, Embassy and Davidoff, with Altadis' Montecristo and Gauloises.



■ BANKING

China monitors US crisis

China has established a taskforce to monitor the US subprime exposure held by domestic lenders as worries over the impact of the mortgage crisis intensifies, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The China Banking Regulatory Commission, the main industry watchdog, will send a team to examine the subprime holdings of China's major banks and report on a monthly basis, the newspaper said. A spokesman of the agency declined to comment on the report.



■ TOURISM

Record arrivals in Singapore

Singapore's tourism industry enjoyed a banner year last year as a record 10.3 million visitors came to the city-state, the government said yesterday. Last year's visitor arrivals was up 5.4 percent over 2006 and surpassed the Singapore Tourism Board's target of 10.2 million, the government agency said. "This is the highest annual visitor arrivals recorded for the Singapore tourism sector," the tourism board said in a statement. Tourism receipts last year also set a new milestone of S$13.8 billion (US$9.7 billion), up 11.3 percent from the year before, it said.



■ AUTOMOBILES

Ford could make more cuts

Struggling Ford Motor Co could undergo further cuts if it cannot drive more customers into its showrooms, the US automaker's chief said on Tuesday. "If demand goes down substantially more than what we are predicting, then we'll continue to restructure our business to that new demand," Ford chief executive officer Alan Mulally said. Ford, which lost US$10 billion in 2006, is in the midst of a massive restructuring plan aimed at cutting some US$5 billion in operating costs in order to return to profitability by next year. It has slashed unpopular models, announced plans to lay off some 40,000 workers and is shuttering 16 plants.
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