Bamboo Innovator

Chinese Regulators Crack Down on Cartoons to address violent programming content

October 14, 2013, 9:24 PM

Chinese Regulators Crack Down on Cartoons

Chinese cartoon “Pleasant Goat and the Big Big Wolf” hasn’t been so pleasant as of late, according to the country’s TV regulators. China’s State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television called out the popular cartoon, which made headlines earlier this year for episodes containing violent scenes, and the regulator said Saturday in a statement that it plans to outline new content standards for TV animation to address violent programming content. Read more of this post

Why the World’s Cheapest Car Flopped; No-Frills Tata Minicar Gets Chrome, Sound System, Higher Price to Boost Appeal

Why the World’s Cheapest Car Flopped

No-Frills Minicar Gets Chrome, Sound System, Higher Price to Boost Appeal

SEAN MCLAIN

Oct. 14, 2013 1:55 p.m. ET

MUMBAI—When the Tata Nano, a stripped-down minicar priced at around $2,000, was introduced in 2009, it was marketed as a car that would transform the way aspiring consumers in India and other developing countries got around. But the low-cost automotive revolution fizzled. Selling poorly at home and with exports drying up, the Nano has become a cautionary tale of misplaced ambitions and a drag on sales and profit at Tata MotorsLtd. 500570.BY +1.34% , India’s fourth-largest auto maker and the owner of Jaguar and Land Rover luxury vehicles. Read more of this post

Kinh Do Corp., Vietnam’s biggest listed confectionery maker, may expand into noodles, cooking oils and sauces within three years as it seeks new products to weather slowing economic growth

Kinh Do Looks to Noodles as Vietnam Growth Slows: Southeast Asia

Kinh Do Corp., Vietnam’s biggest listed confectionery maker, may expand into noodles, cooking oils and sauces within three years as it seeks new products to weather slowing economic growth. “Our existing products are still somewhat seasonal in that we sell a lot during the holidays and a lot less during the regular time of year,” Chief Financial Officer Kelly Wong said in an interview at a Kinh Do office in Ho Chi Minh City. “We want to sell products that people eat more regularly.” Read more of this post

Coal Slump Leaves Aussie Port Half-Used and Bank Lenders at Risk

Coal Slump Leaves Aussie Port Half-Used and Bank Lenders at Risk

Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. (ANZ) and Westpac Banking Corp. are among lenders risking losses on $3 billion of loans backing a coal port in Australia that will be twice its required size. Wiggins Island Coal Export Terminal Pty, the group comprising the unfinished project’s owners, including Glencore Xstrata Plc (GLEN) and Wesfarmers Ltd. (WES), in 2011 borrowed the debt from 19 banks, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. When the port in the state of Queensland begins shipping in early 2015, only about half of its 27 million metric tons of initial annual export capacity will be used after a slump in coal demand, forecaster Wood Mackenzie Ltd. estimates. Read more of this post

Global public opinion poll reveals an increasingly negative view of China

Global public opinion poll reveals an increasingly negative view of China

Monday, 14 October, 2013, 12:00am

Kate Whitehead life@scmp.com

China could do with an image makeover, judging by the increasingly negative perceptions of the country revealed in a global public opinion poll

First up the good news for China: around the world people increasingly see the country as an emerging superpower, or indeed a superpower already. The bad news? They don’t much like China. Public opinion, especially in the US, towards China is at an all-time low. Read more of this post

Norway fund blacklists Malaysia’ WTK, Tan Ann and 3 others for taking part in activities that damage the environment or for being linked to child labour

Updated: Tuesday October 15, 2013 MYT 7:56:26 AM

Norway fund blacklists Malaysia’ WTK, Tan Ann and 3 others

PETALING JAYA: Norway has excluded five companies from the investments of the nation’s sovereign wealth fund, the world’s largest, for taking part in activities that damage the environment or for being linked to child labour, Bloomberg reported. Local timber firms WTK Holdings Bhd and Ta Ann Holdings Bhd were excluded alongside China’s Zijin Mining Group and Peru’s Volcan Cia Minera SAA. Read more of this post

Business Trusts Gain Fans in Hong Kong; Hong Kong is home to just two business trusts, a fraction of the 15 in Singapore

Oct 14, 2013

Business Trusts Gain Fans in Hong Kong

By Prudence Ho

Hong Kong is poised to take a big step forward as a destination for business-trust listings in the region, with an electricity company and a hotel operator aiming to raise up to US$6 billion before the year is out. So far, Hong Kong is home to just two business trusts, a fraction of the 15 in Singapore, the dominant regional market for such listings. But tycoon Li Ka-shing’s plan to carve out and list the Hong Kong electricity assets from Power Assets Holdings Ltd. in the city, if successful, could be the biggest initial public offering in Asia this year, according to Dealogic data. Read more of this post

Stewart Cowley, the Bond-Fund Manager Who Can’t Stand Bonds; Convinced Bonds Are Due to Plummet, Fund Manager Bets Against Them

Stewart Cowley, the Bond-Fund Manager Who Can’t Stand Bonds

Convinced Bonds Are Due to Plummet, Fund Manager Bets Against Them

TOMMY STUBBINGTON and NEELABH CHATURVEDI

Updated Oct. 14, 2013 5:01 p.m. ET

Stewart Cowley manages $1.5 billion in the Old Mutual ODMTY +0.54% Global Strategic Bond Fund. One place he generally avoids investing that money: bonds. Mr. Cowley doesn’t hold conventional U.S. Treasury bonds. He doesn’t hold traditional U.K. gilts. He doesn’t hold Japanese government bonds. “I’m the bond manager who doesn’t like bonds,” he says, sitting in the modern London headquarters of Old Mutual Global Investors, a unit of Old Mutual PLC, which is a venerable City institution with roots going back to 19th-century Cape Town, South Africa. Read more of this post

No Payoff in Coca-Cola’s Thirst for Growth; It May Be High Time to Question Where the Drinks Company Is Putting Its Emphasis

October 14, 2013, 7:03 p.m. ET

No Payoff in Coca-Cola’s Thirst for Growth

It May Be High Time to Question Where the Drinks Company Is Putting Its Emphasis

SPENCER JAKAB

Coca-Cola KO +0.37% Zero is popular with soda drinkers, but zero isn’t flavor-of-the-month with shareholders. Coca-Cola Co.’s stock is flat over the past 12 months. But don’t expect the drinks giant’s management to accentuate the negative when third-quarter results are unveiled Tuesday. In its Vision 2020 goals, Coca-Cola seeks to double unit sales to three billion servings a day from 2009 levels. But achieving this would require a growth rate of nearly twice that. Read more of this post

Daniel Yergin: Why OPEC No Longer Calls the Shots

October 14, 2013, 7:26 p.m. ET

Daniel Yergin: Why OPEC No Longer Calls the Shots

The oil embargo 40 years ago spurred an energy revolution. World production is 50% higher today than in 1973.

DANIEL YERGIN

Forty years ago, on Oct. 17, 1973, the world experienced its first “oil shock” as Arab exporters declared an embargo on shipments to Western countries. The OPEC embargo was prompted by America’s military support for Israel, which was repelling a coordinated surprise attack by Arab countries that had begun on Oct. 6, the sacred Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur. Read more of this post

How Mongolia Brought Nomads TV and Mobile Phones

How Mongolia Brought Nomads TV and Mobile Phones

In global development, as in business, delivery can determine failure or success. The windswept steppes of Mongolia, among the world’s harshest environments, have become a testing ground for how best to deliver something increasingly important to Earth’s entire population: electricity. The conditions in rural Mongolia are forbidding. Winter temperatures on the steppes regularly drop to minus 30 degrees Celsius (minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit). Over a barren landscape three times the size of France, there are no paved roads. About a quarter of the country’s 2.8 million people herd goats and yaks. They shelter in traditional felt tents known as gers, as they have for thousands of years. Read more of this post

Is Japan Starting a Sovereign Wealth Fund?

Is Japan Starting a Sovereign Wealth Fund?

Years of currency manipulation by Japan’s Ministry of Finance has left it with $1.27 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, most of which are invested in low-yielding U.S. Treasury bonds. Following an account in Japan’s Nikkei newspaper, Bloomberg News reported that the ministry is planning to outsource management of some of this money. Details about the plan are thin. Still, it could mark the first step toward the creation of a Japanese sovereign wealth fund that invests for profit. Read more of this post

Black Market Radios Even Too Pricey for Portuguese Bemoaning Tax

Black Market Radios Even Too Pricey for Portuguese Bemoaning Tax

Portuguese construction worker Carlos Marques lost his job in 2010 and a year later his unemployment money ran out. So he began peddling everything from old car radios to shoes to scratch a living. “When I first started, business was booming,” Marques, 46, said as he hawked pans, radios and speakers at the Feira da Ladra, or “Thieves Market,” once a medley of sights and smells from Portugal’s colonial history and now the hub of Lisbon’s underground economy. “Now I’m struggling as most of my clients have lost their jobs or spent most of their income on taxes.” Read more of this post

Paris Luxury Property Lures Overseas Rich as French Flee Taxes

Paris Luxury Property Lures Overseas Rich as French Flee Taxes

When a 44 million-euro ($59 million) Parisian townhouse near the Champs-Elysees was snapped up just six weeks after it was put on the block, Charles-Marie Jottras knew the city’s luxury property market was turning around. The chairman of broker Daniel Feau, an affiliate of Christie’s International Real Estate, says the firm found a Qatari buyer for the 19th-century mansion that features a dozen bedrooms on three floors, a terrace with a panoramic view of Paris, a swimming pool and a 1,000 square meter garden. Read more of this post

Record Thai Rice Hoard Expanding Global Supply Glut: Commodities

Record Thai Rice Hoard Expanding Global Supply Glut: Commodities

Rice stockpiles in Thailand, once the world’s biggest exporter, are expanding to a record as a government program to buy production spurs farmers to plant the most crops ever and add to a global glut. Reserves in Thailand will increase 24 percent to 15.5 million metric tons in 2013-2014 as global output rises 1.7 percent to an all-time high of 476.8 million tons, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates. The price of 5-percent broken Thai white rice, an Asian benchmark, will drop 12 percent to $390 a ton by April, a five-year low, according to the median of eight trader and analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg. Read more of this post

Central Banks Gaming Out U.S. Default as Deadline Nears

Central Banks Gaming Out U.S. Default as Deadline Nears

Central banks have begun making contingency plans on how they would keep financial markets working if the U.S. defaults on the world’s benchmark debt. Policy makers discussed possible responses when they met at the International Monetary Fund’s annual meetings in Washington over the weekend, said officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks were confidential. The discussions continued as policy makers headed home. Read more of this post

De Beers Squeezes Diamond Buyers Who Flip Gems: Chart of the Day

De Beers Squeezes Diamond Buyers Who Flip Gems: Chart of the Day

De Beers is driving margins on its diamond output higher by squeezing out buyers who sell rough stones instead of polishing them, consulting firm Gemdax says. The CHART OF THE DAY shows how the biggest diamond company has offered buyers a narrower discount to secondary cash-market prices in the two years since Chief Executive Officer Philippe Mellier was appointed, according to data compiled by Gemdax. The difference shrank to an average 1.1 percent from 5.5 percent. De Beers traditionally sells stones at a discount to so-called sightholders, who cut and polish gems before selling them on. Read more of this post