■ Finance
MBNA stalking Egg
MBNA Corp, the world's second-largest credit-card issuer, is in talks to buy Prudential Plc's 79 percent stake in the UK's No. 1 Internet bank, Egg Plc, the Sunday Telegraph said, citing bankers familiar with the deal. An agreement, which may be announced within two weeks, is likely to value Egg at about £1.4 billion (US$2.49 billion), the paper reported. The shares closed at £1.55 in London on Friday, valuing the company at £1.27 billion. MBNA's acquisition of Egg would boost the Wilmington, Delaware-based company's expansion in Europe that began in the 1990s in the UK and included the £289 million purchase of Abbey National's credit card business, according to the paper.
■ Nuclear Power
Toshiba, GE sign deal
Japan's Toshiba Corp has formed an alliance with General Electric Co in a bid to win a nuclear power plant contract in the US, Nikkei English News reported. The two companies will conduct a feasibility study on installing one of the most advanced reactors used in Japan and have filed for permission to the US Department of Energy, the report said, without saying where it obtained the information. The US suspended the construction of nuclear power plants after an accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in 1979. The administration of US President George W. Bush is supporting the construction of nuclear power plants in an effort to lower oil dependency from the Middle East, the report said.
■ Jewelry
Amazon challenging Zale
Zale Corp, the largest North American jewelry retailer, may be hurt by competition from Amazon.com Inc, which has recently started selling jewelry, Barron's reported in its "Up and Down Wall Street" column. Douglas Kass, a hedge fund manager at Seabreeze Partners LP, has sold Zale shares short, making a bet that their price will drop. While he has no problems with Zale's management or merchandise, he said Amazon may harm traditional jewelry retailers, Barron's said. Amazon seeks to undercut jewelry retailers' prices, Barron's said. Jeff Bezos, chief executive officer of the Internet retailer, said his company would be able to save consumers money because its costs for buying, handling and shipping jewelry "aren't much higher than those of selling a book." He said conventional jewelry stores sometimes mark up items as much as 100 percent.
■ Cars
Thai exports rising
General Motors Corp, Honda Motor Co and other automakers in Thailand exported 43 percent more automobiles in the first quarter from a year earlier on rising demand in Australia and Southeast Asia. Overseas sales of pickup trucks, sedan cars and other vehicles in the January-March period rose to 73,609 units from 51,449 in the same period a year earlier, according to the Thai Automotive Club, a Bangkok-based trade group making up most of the country's automakers. The export value rose 43 percent to 32.4 billion baht (US$810 million), according to the club's data. Honda Motor, Japan's No. 3 automaker by sales and also the world's biggest motorcycle maker, said on Saturday that exports of its automobiles, motorcycles and power engines from its plants in Thailand rose 51 percent in the first quarter to 13.5 billion baht on rising demand from Australia and Asia.
A subsidiary of a Hong Kong-based company that has lost control of two critical ports on the Panama Canal said it is seeking US$2 billion of compensation in damages from Panama over its “illegal” takeover of the ports. Panama Ports Co, a unit of Hong Kong’s CK Hutchison Holdings (長江和記實業), on Friday said in a statement that it is demanding the sum under international arbitration proceedings that it had already started. The Panamanian government last week seized control of the Balboa and Cristobal ports on each end of the Panama Canal, after the country’s Supreme Court declared earlier that a concession allowing
DETERRENCE: With 1,000 indigenous Hsiung Feng II and III missiles and 400 Harpoon missiles, the nation would boast the highest anti-ship missile density in the world With Taiwan wrapping up mass production of Hsiung Feng II and III missiles by December and an influx of Harpoon missiles from the US, Taiwan would have the highest density of anti-ship missiles in the world, a source said yesterday. Taiwan is to wrap up mass production of the indigenous anti-ship missiles by the end of year, as the Chungshan Institute of Science and Technology has been meeting production targets ahead of schedule, a defense official with knowledge of the matter said. Combined with the 400 Harpoon anti-ship missiles Taiwan expects to receive from the US by 2028, the nation would have
POSSIBILITIES EMERGE: With Taiwan’s victory and Japan’s narrow win over Australia, Taiwan now have a chance to advance if South Korea also beat the Aussies Taiwan has high hopes that the national baseball team would advance to the World Baseball Classic (WBC) quarter-finals after clinching a crucial 5-4 victory over South Korea in a nail-biting extra-inning game at the Tokyo Dome yesterday. Boosted by three home runs — two solo shots by Yu Chang (張育成) and Cheng Tsung-che (鄭宗哲) and a two-run homer by Stuart Fairchild — the triumph gave Taiwan a much-needed second victory in the five-team Pool C, where only the top two finishers would advance to the knockout stage in Miami, Florida. Entering extra innings with the game tied at four apiece, Taiwan scored
MISSION OF PEACE: The foreign minister urged Beijing to respect Taiwan’s existence as an independent nation, and work together to ensure peace and stability in the region Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) yesterday rejected Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi’s (王毅) comments about Taiwan, criticizing China as a “troublemaker” in the international community and a disruptor of cross-strait peace. Speaking at a news conference on the sidelines of the Chinese National People’s Congress, Wang said that Taiwan has always been a territory of China and that it would be impossible for it to become its own country. The “return” of Taiwan to China was the natural outcome of the Chinese people’s resistance against Japan in World War II, and that any pursuit of independence was “doomed
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