■ENERGY
Suzlon sells stake in Hansen
Suzlon Energy, India’s biggest maker of wind turbine generators, has sold a 35 percent stake in Belgian wind gearbox maker Hansen, raising US$370 million as it moves to cut debt, a statement said. The sale, reducing troubled Suzlon’s holding in Hansen Transmissions International NV to 20 percent, was announced late on Thursday by the company. Suzlon, the world’s fifth-largest turbine maker which dominates the Indian wind-generation market, purchased Hansen in 2006 for US$565 million in a deal it said had big synergies with its own wind turbine operations.
■BANKING
US Treasury to sell warrants
The US Treasury said on Thursday it would sell warrants in JPMorgan Chase and two other commercial banks acquired under a program to pump capital into the financial system. Treasury officials said they would use a “modified Dutch auction” to sell the warrants in JPMorgan, Capital One Financial and TCF Financial Corporation, over the next month. The Dutch auction methodology establishes a market price by allowing investors to submit bids at specified increments above a minimum price specified for each auction.
■INTERNET
eBay completes Skype sale
Online auction giant eBay announced on Thursday it had completed its sale of Skype to an investment group that includes the two founders of the Web communications company. The previously announced sale of a 70 percent stake in Skype for some US$2 billion had been held up by lawsuits filed by Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. Zennstrom and Friis settled the suits this month and will hold a 14 percent stake in Skype through their new company, Joltid Ltd. Fifty-six percent will be held by the investor group led by private equity firm Silver Lake Partners, while eBay will retain a 30 percent equity investment in Skype. The deal values Skype at US$2.75 billion.
■CHINA
Electricity rates go up
China raised electricity rates for businesses and industries yesterday by 5.7 percent and says more hikes are planned, as the country adjusts prices to reflect costs and promote energy saving. It was the first rate-hike since July last year, when electricity tariffs for nonresidential use rose 5 percent. Residential electricity rates have remained stable since a 1 percent hike in July 2006, but a residential rate increase is planned for early next year, China’s main planning agency said in a notice late on Thursday. Businesses will pay 0.028 yuan per kilowatt hour more as of yesterday, the National Development and Reform Commission said.
■INTERNET
New captions for YouTube
Google Inc said on Thursday it was beginning to add automatic, machine-generated captions for videos on its YouTube site. The new service is intended to make online videos accessible to the deaf and hearing-impaired. Hundreds of thousands of videos on Google sites already contain caption tracks that users have created and added manually with Google’s existing captioning service. But with 20 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, most videos on the site still lack captions. So Google is tapping into the speech-recognition technology that it uses for its Google Voice call management service to make captions an automatic feature on YouTube.
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