Exec chairman: AirAsia still an aggressive animal, more promotions coming

Updated: Friday November 8, 2013 MYT 8:53:03 AM

Exec chairman: AirAsia still an aggressive animal, more promotions coming

BY LEONG HUNG YEE

KUALA LUMPUR: Newly-appointed executive chairman of AirAsia Bhd Datuk Kamarudin Meranun said competition is forcing his airline to “hit back aggressively”. “We may have been complacent in recent months and our yield had been slightly affected but AirAsia has always been an aggressive animal. “We are coming back with more promotions, cost reductions and new ancillary income streams,” Kamarudin said in an interview a day after he replaced Datuk Aziz Bakar as executive chairman of AirAsia. Read more of this post

Value Fund Managers Go on a Buyer’s Strike

Value Fund Managers Go on a Buyer’s Strike

By Charles Stein November 07, 2013

Wally Weitz beat 90 percent of his rivals in the past five years by buying stocks he deemed cheap. Now he says bargains are so scarce that he’s letting his cash pile up. “It’s more fun to be finding great new ideas,” says Weitz, whose $1.1 billion Weitz Value Fund (WVALX) had 29 percent of its assets in cash and Treasury bills as of Sept. 30. “But we take what the market gives us, and right now it is not giving us anything.” Read more of this post

Saudi King Needs Wahhabi Muslim Support to Modernize Country

Saudi King Needs Wahhabi Muslim Support to Modernize Country

By Glen Carey November 07, 2013

Abdulrahman al-Moshaigeh remembers leaving his mud-brick house and walking on unpaved roads to what was then the only elementary school serving Buraidah. “There’s no comparison,” says the former member of King Abdullah’s advisory Shoura Council. Since his birth in 1945, many changes have swept his hometown, the capital of Qassim province in Saudi Arabia’s conservative heartland. “Now we have more than 150 elementary schools for boys, and it’s difficult to find a girl not in school,” al-Moshaigeh says. Read more of this post

Rate revolution forces advisers to be bond kings; After Gross and Gundlach, the deluge: It’s no longer a set-it-and-forget-it core world

Rate revolution forces advisers to be bond kings

After Gross and Gundlach, the deluge: It’s no longer a set-it-and-forget-it core world

By Jason Kephart

Nov 7, 2013 @ 1:12 pm (Updated 3:51 pm) EST

Financial advisers got their first real taste of a rising interest rate environment in the second quarter and it’s led to a complete upheaval of the fixed-income landscape. The days of simply handing over a client’s fixed-income assets to a core fund, even those run by bond kings Bill Gross and Jeffrey Gundlach, seem to be over as the threat of further interest rate rises forces advisers to take the crown and rule over their own bond portfolios. Read more of this post

Over-the-Counter Stock Trading Halted in U.S. on Data Issue

Over-the-Counter Stock Trading Halted in U.S. on Data Issue

Over-the-counter stock trading was halted for three-and-a-half hours today after a malfunction prompted regulators to shut the main venue. Trading of U.S. stocks that change hands on over-the-counter markets was stopped because of a “lack of current quotation information,” the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority said. OTC Markets Group Inc. resumed trading around 3 p.m. after a “network provider issue” was resolved, Chief Executive Officer Cromwell Coulson said in an e-mail. Equities such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were paused, not companies listed by NYSE Euronext (NYX) or Nasdaq OMX Group Inc. Read more of this post

Don’t Jump Onto Europe’s Bandwagon

Don’t Jump Onto Europe’s Bandwagon

November 07, 2013

Recent stirrings of optimism about Europe’s economy have been interrupted: New jobs figures and signs of a slide into deflation have ended some premature celebrations. The region’s economic crisis isn’t over. The danger of a relapse into recession is real. The U.S. Federal Reserve and (belatedly) the Bank of Japan (8301:JP) are buying assets on an enormous scale with the aim of lowering long-term interest rates. This quantitative easing has risks, but in both cases the evidence suggests it has worked. The European Central Bank, though, has largely refrained. It bought bonds at the height of the crisis but neutralized the effect of the transactions on the money supply. It also undertook a big program of short-term lending to banks, but that’s winding down. No doubt there are legal and, above all, political impediments in the European Union to Fed-style asset purchases, but these must be overcome, and the ECB is best-placed to make the argument. Read more of this post

Bring Shadow Banking Into the Light

Bring Shadow Banking Into the Light

November 07, 2013

The business of banking is inherently perilous. It turns short-term savings (such as customer deposits) into long-term investments (such as mortgages and corporate loans). This is risky: If too many savers want their money back at once, the bank can’t pay. It must either liquidate its assets or freeze its accounts, either of which can trigger a broader panic. Read more of this post

Billionaire Lures Funds With Record HCL Margin: Corporate India

Billionaire Lures Funds With Record HCL Margin: Corporate India

HCL Technologies Ltd. (HCLT), a software exporter founded by Indian billionaire Shiv Nadar, is attracting funds including UTI Asset Management Co. after profit margin widened to a record. The Indian software maker has climbed 78 percent in this year’s best performance among the 50 stocks that make up the CNX Nifty Index. The stock’s consensus rating, or the average of analysts’ recommendations, is at 4.39, the highest among India’s four largest information technology companies, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. (TCS), Asia’s biggest software exporter by market value, has a rating of 3.94. Read more of this post

Goldman Bets on Modi as Credit Suisse Backs Rajan: India Credit

Goldman Bets on Modi as Credit Suisse Backs Rajan: India Credit

Global investment banks are recommending buying Indian assets on optimism a leadership change at the central bank will be followed by a new government that businesses favor next year. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. prefers stocks, saying investors are hopeful the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party under Gujarat state Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s leadership will win national elections, as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh takes the blame for the slowest growth in a decade. Credit Suisse Group AG advises buying the rupee, betting Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan will curb inflation, while Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. is positive on sovereign debt. Read more of this post

India Shoots for Mars

India Shoots for Mars

India is often accused of not asserting itself in world affairs, of being unfocused, introverted, unrealistic or just nonaligned. That may be true, but when it comes to space, India’s ambitions aren’t at all modest — and they just got bigger. On Nov. 5, the Indian Space Research Organization successfully put into Earth’s orbit an indigenous, unmanned spacecraft, the Mangalyaan (“Mars-craft”), which on Nov. 30 will begin a nine-month journey toward Mars. Read more of this post

Red Tape Holding Geothermal Back in Race to Replace Coal in Indonesia

Red Tape Holding Geothermal Back in Race to Replace Coal

By Dion Bisara on 1:34 pm November 7, 2013.
The government needs to streamline regulations and provide financial incentives for investors to boost development of geothermal energy, an industry expert has said. “Government is the single prime mover to accelerate geothermal progress,” said deputy chairman of the Indonesia Geothermal Association Sanusi Satar to reporters on Wednesday. Read more of this post

Vote-buying and ballot fraud are voters’ chief concerns about next year April’s general elections in Indonesia

Election Fraud Worries Eligible Voters: Study

By Jakarta Globe on 8:30 am November 7, 2013.
Vote-buying and ballot fraud are voters’ chief concerns about next year’s general elections, a new study by the People’s Voter Education Network has revealed. Thirty-four percent of the public were worried about the two points People’s Voter Education Network (JPPR) deputy coordinator Masykurudin Hafidz told the Jakarta Globe on Wednesday. Read more of this post

Bumi Proposes Separation From Indonesia’s Bakrie Family

Bumi Proposes Separation From Indonesia’s Bakrie Family

BEN OTTO

Updated Nov. 7, 2013 9:51 p.m. ET

JAKARTA—London-listed coal company Bumi BUMI.LN +4.79% PLC has proposed the company’s separation from Indonesia’s influential Bakrie family after months of wait, setting a shareholder vote for Dec. 4. The company said in a press release dated Thursday that shareholders would vote to sell a 29.2% stake in one of Indonesia’s largest coal companies, the Bakries’ flagship entity PT Bumi Resources, BUMI.JK +1.18% for $501 million, thus ending a relationship with the Bakries that went sour over issues of corporate governance. Read more of this post

Li Ka-shing Sells More Mainland Assets, Eyes Finnish Power Grid

Li Ka-shing Sells More Mainland Assets, Eyes Finnish Power Grid

11-07 10:37 Caijing

The latest sell came as reports say the HK tycoon is interested in purchasing Finland’s electricity distribution work, following a flurry of his investments in Europe.

Li Ka-shing, the richest man in Asia, has sold more of his conglomerate’s assets in the Chinese mainland while on the other hand shows increasing interest in investing in Europe. Changyuan Group, the biggest heat-shrinkable and high-polymer PTC producer in the Chinese mainland, said in a statement on Tuesday that Concord Investment Co., Ltd., its controlling shareholder, a member of Cheug Kong Group has reduced its stake by 5 percent.  Read more of this post

Forget the huddled masses: Treating immigrants as a charity case is not working: time to change course

Forget the huddled masses: Treating immigrants as a charity case is not working: time to change course

Nov 9th 2013 |From the print edition

IMMIGRATION reform in America is stuck. Blame Emma Lazarus, who wrote the 1883 sonnet anointing the Statue of Liberty a “Mother of Exiles”, urging the old world to send “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”.

Lazarus is only accidentally to blame for the partisan deadlock that grips immigration reform, raising the ghastly prospect that a broken system will remain unfixed until after the 2014 mid-term elections, and possibly the presidential contest of 2016. Lazarus wrote her poem to help raise funds for the statue’s pedestal. She ignored the stated purpose of the colossal sculpture (a French-built homage to America’s republican government) focusing instead on her concern over Jewish pogroms in Russia. Her words were almost forgotten, surviving on a plaque on an inner wall of the pedestal. They achieved fame decades after her death, as the statue became associated with the immigration station on Ellis Island and Nazi persecution made refugee policies urgently political. In 1945 the poem, set in bronze, was moved to the statue’s main entrance. Soon afterwards it was put to music by Irving Berlin. Read more of this post

China Premier Li Keqiang: “Stirring up vested interests is more difficult than stirring up one’s soul”; In China, Gov’t and Business Go Together Like Horse and Carriage – Sort of

11.07.2013 19:10

Closer Look: In China, Gov’t and Business Go Together Like Horse and Carriage – Sort of

It’s love, one entrepreneur says, but not marriage, and making progress on improving the relationship will be tricky

By staff reporter Gao Yu

(Beijing) – Premier Li Keqiang met with scholars and entrepreneurs on October 31 in the capital to discuss the economic situation. It was the third such meeting Li has held since taking office in March. Read more of this post

Domestic films set to dominate box office; This year, Chinese films accounted for 58% of box-office revenue, compared with 48.5% in 2012

Domestic films set to dominate box office

Updated: 2013-11-05 10:50

By Huang Ying ( China Daily)

Domestic movies are expected to conquer the Chinese market this year, after being beaten by importedproductions for the first time in four years in 2012, industry observers said. Read more of this post

The debate on lifting equity share control

The debate on lifting equity share control

Updated: 2013-11-07 10:37

By Wayne Xing ( chinaautoreview.com)

This year’s Global Automotive Forum held in Wuhan triggered a heated debate among automotive circles about whether China needs to relax the 50:50 equity control policy over investment by foreign automakers in whole vehicle assembly plants. Read more of this post

Zhejiang’s once-booming solar industry remains in darkness

Zhejiang’s once-booming solar industry remains in darkness

Staff Reporter

2013-11-07

Beijing has come up with several policies to support the domestic solar industry, however the sector is continuing to face difficulties, the Beijing-based China Enterprise News reports. Kaihua county in Quzhou in eastern China’s Zhejiang province is an important cluster for the domestic solar industry. The local industry grew rapidly between 2006 and 2008, reaching its peak during 2009 and 2010, seeing between 70 to 80 companies, the paper said. Read more of this post

China faces a long battle for blue skies

China faces a long battle for blue skies

(Xinhua)    20:02, November 07, 2013 Read more of this post

Chinese movie stars deny involvement in insider dealing

Chinese movie stars deny involvement in insider dealing

2013-11-07 03:45:31 GMT2013-11-07 11:45:31(Beijing Time)  Xinhua English

By Jia Xiaoguang, Sina English

Famous Chinese actress Li Bingbing and actor Ren Quan officially denied their alleged activities in an insider dealing through which they might have profited multi-millions, according to a report on November 7. Some whistle-blower posted the tip-off on the microblog service Sina Weibo yesterday. Li and Ren, described as being “in a relationship” in the post, became shareholders of Xiangyun Feilong Renewable Technology Co. Ltd through a Beijing-based fund company this June. Read more of this post

48 Chinese carmakers set for chop amid industry shakeup

48 Chinese carmakers set for chop amid industry shakeup

Staff Reporter

2013-11-07

China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) recently released a list naming 48 Chinese carmakers for their poor performance with an aim to reduce the number of car manufacturers in the country, reports the Chinese-language China Business Journal. The companies whose names were cited still have a chance to continue operating as long as they can pass an evaluation by October 31, 2015, a source told the paper. Read more of this post

Credit cards in South Korea: A swipe at profits; It is getting harder to make money from the world’s most prolific card-users

Credit cards in South Korea: A swipe at profits; It is getting harder to make money from the world’s most prolific card-users

Nov 9th 2013 | SEOUL |From the print edition

SOUTH KOREA is a notoriously competitive society. But how do those who play its fierce status games know when they have won? Probably when they are invited to apply for “the black”, a credit card issued by Hyundai Card, a subsidiary of Hyundai Motor. Cast in “liquidmetal”, a trademarked alloy suited to armour-piercing ammunition, the card is heavy. It is also rare. Only about 2,000 have been issued and only 9,999 ever will be. To qualify, a holder needs high social standing as well as high net worth. The card charges a stiff membership fee and offers a variety of benefits: members were, for example, invited to a mock Christie’s auction, featuring works flown in from New York. But the main reason people want the black card is that it is so difficult to get. Read more of this post

Pollution In China Blamed For Increasingly ‘Ugly’ Sperm Counts

Pollution In China Blamed For Increasingly ‘Ugly’ Sperm Counts

TOM PHILLIPS, THE TELEGRAPH 5 MINUTES AGO 0

Shanghai doctor tells local newspaper that two thirds of the city’s semen stocks are below World Health Organisation standards, as concerns over China’s toxic environment grow

Shanghai’s semen is facing an unprecedented crisis with experts labelling pollution as one of the “major culprits” for the mega-city’s increasingly dismal sperm quality, Chinese media claimed. Only one-third of the semen at Shanghai’s main sperm bank meets World Health Organisation standards, the Shanghai Morning Post reported on Thursday. Read more of this post

If You Think China’s Air Is Bad …Drinking water has become a casualty of rapid industrialization

November 7, 2013

If You Think China’s Air Is Bad …

By DAMIEN MA and WILLIAM ADAMS

For visitors, China’s water problem becomes apparent upon entering the hotel room. The smell of a polluted river might emanate from the showerhead. Need to quench your thirst? The drip from the tap is rarely potable. Can you trust the bottled water? Many Chinese don’t. What about brushing your teeth? Measured by the government’s own standards, more than half of the country’s largest lakes and reservoirs were so contaminated in 2011 that they were unsuitable for human consumption. China’s more than 4,700 underground water-quality testing stations show that nearly three-fifths of all water supplies are “relatively bad” or worse. Roughly half of rural residents lack access to drinking water that meets international standards. Read more of this post

China eyes adopting international law to spark life into trade zones

China eyes adopting international law to spark life into trade zones

Tue, Nov 5 2013

By Saikat Chatterjee and Michelle Chen

HONG KONG (Reuters) – China is considering the use of international law in a big push to get free trade zones up and running to promote the use of the yuan in global trade, which could challenge Hong Kong longer term as the main offshore center for the currency. Sources said Chinese leaders have been discussing the adoption of an international legal system in the free trade zones (FTZs) for the first time to help lure foreign companies, although views are varied. Read more of this post

Investing in Koreas’ Kaesong: Who Dares?

Investing in Koreas’ Kaesong: Who Dares?

By Giles Hewitt on 1:25 pm November 6, 2013.

Seoul. For a foreign investor, there must be safer bets around than a project run by two countries that are technically at war, permanently at odds, and rarely on speaking terms. But only a few months after being threatened with a pre-emptive nuclear strike by North Korea, South Korea is pushing hard for overseas involvement in the joint industrial zone the two rivals operate in Kaesong. Read more of this post