Bamboo Innovator

Chemical Companies Rush to the U.S. Thanks to Cheap Natural Gas, powering a $100 billion investment boom in the U.S. chemical industry

Chemical Companies Rush to the U.S. Thanks to Cheap Natural Gas

By Jack Kaskey on July 25, 2013

Ships sailing north from Chile are bringing an unusual cargo to the U.S.: chemical factories. Methanex (MEOH), the Canadian company that’s the world’s largest producer of methanol, is spending $1.1 billion to disassemble two of its Chilean factories and rebuild them in Geismar, La. The first plant is scheduled to open next year. A second will be relocated by early 2016.

Scores of other companies including ExxonMobil (XOM), Chevron (CVX), and Sasol (SSL) plan to spend about $100 billion to build or expand chemical plants in the U.S., according to a tally kept by Dow Chemical (DOW), the biggest U.S. chemical maker by sales. Dow is spending $4 billion to build factories in Freeport, Tex., and reopen a plant in Hahnville, La., creating 500 manufacturing and 5,000 construction jobs. Five years ago the company was closing U.S. plants and moving production to the Middle East to gain access to cheaper raw materials and be closer to Asian markets. Read more of this post

For India’s Inflation Crisis, See Onion Prices; The onion is the preferred gauge by which many Indians measure inflation and the competence of their politicians

For India’s Inflation Crisis, See Onion Prices

By Brendan Greeley and Kartik Goyal on July 25, 2013

Apples are too expensive now, so Shilpa Gethe settles for bananas. She doesn’t have an easy substitute for onions. Gethe, 32, a housewife in the Mumbai suburb of Vashi, buys more than four pounds of onions a week. About two months ago a pound cost 10 rupees (17¢). Since then the price has doubled, she says. A 500-rupee note used to get her through a week of vegetables. Now it’s two days, sometimes less. To stick to her monthly budget, Gethe sends her husband to work with a packed lunch. “I have to put in more work,” she says. Read more of this post

Beijing takes on big beasts of global drugs industry

July 24, 2013 6:04 pm

Beijing takes on big beasts of global drugs industry

By David Pilling

Regulators are flexing their muscles with greater powers and long-dormant laws

Kill the chicken to scare the monkey is a well-known Chinese expression to describe the tactic of cracking down on the little guy in order to frighten the big beasts into stepping into line. In taking onGlaxoSmithKline, a gorilla of the global pharmaceuticals industry, Chinese authorities have gone straight for the monkey. The Anglo-American drugs company, which employs about 5,000 people in China, has become embroiled in a scandal over alleged payment of bribes to doctors in return for prescribing GSK medicines. According to the allegations, inducements to often lowly paid doctors, hospitals and government officials were funnelled through travel agencies for fictitious or overbilled travel and conference services. Read more of this post

Politics Is a Bitter Pill for Glaxo: How the Glaxo bribery scandal fits into China’s new narrative of re-crafting China’s economy as consumer driven

July 25, 2013, 8:20 p.m. ET

Politics Is a Bitter Pill for Glaxo

How the Glaxo Bribery Scandal Fits Into China’s New Economic Narrative

JOHN BUSSEY

Here’s one takeaway from the bribery scandal GlaxoSmithKline GSK.LN +0.24% is weathering in China: In Glaxo’s anguish, there’s solace for the Chinese consumer, and Beijing is glad about that. China this month accused Glaxo of bribing doctors and officials to sell the company’s drugs at higher prices. Glaxo apologized, saying it appears a small group of wayward managers was at fault, not company policy. It also said it will drop prices in China. Read more of this post

Indonesia’s Working Women Struggle to Succeed; “You have to manage everything well. But that’s why God created women — we can handle it.”

Indonesia’s Working Women Struggle to Succeed

Growing equality means a better economy for Indonesia: World Bank

By Angela Buensuceso on 12:23 pm July 25, 2013.
Ask the chief executive of one of the country’s largest banks what it takes for a woman to excel in the workplace and the answer is clear. “You have to manage everything well,” says Parwati Surjaudaja, the president director of Bank OCBC NISP. While countries in the West continue to aim for reductions in yawning pay gaps and a gradual dismantling of the glass ceiling, the developing world is, for the most part, a long way behind in building the foundations for greater female participation in the workforce. Not so in Indonesia. Read more of this post

Chinese maritime freight companies on brink of bankruptcy

Chinese maritime freight companies on brink of bankruptcy

Staff Reporter

2013-07-26

China’s Ministry of Transport is expected to introduce temporary measures to help container ship operators tide over a possible bankruptcy. The move was made public after a planned national stimulus program announced for the shipping industry last year was aborted and the National Development and Reform Commission reneged on its stance to help the industry, according to the Economic Information Daily, a newspaper published by the state-run Xinhua news agency. Read more of this post

The move out of bonds, a trickle so far, could intensify as investors hit the reset button on their portfolios.

July 25, 2013, 3:22 p.m. ET

Bonds Could Get Swept Away by the Flow

Move Out of Bonds Could Intensify as Investors Hit Reset Button on Their Portfolios

JUSTIN LAHART

Investors’ love affair with bonds is going through a rough patch. If they don’t make up soon, things could get really rocky. With the Federal Reserve signaling that it will begin reining in its Treasury and mortgage-bond purchases later this year, the fixed-income arena has become a less-than-happy place. Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s index of U.S. corporate and government bonds fallen 3.8% since the start of May. Investors have noticed, pulling a net $78 billion from bond mutual funds in the seven weeks ended July 17, according to Investment Company Institute estimates. Read more of this post

Reality Bites for Siemens and ABB: Two of Europe’s Largest Industrial Companies Are Signaling All’s Not Well With the Global Economy

July 25, 2013, 12:09 p.m. ET

Reality Bites for Siemens and ABB

Two of Europe’s Largest Industrial Companies Are Signaling All’s Not Well With the Global Economy

ANDREW PEAPLE

If optimism about the global economy is steadily building, some of Europe’s largest industrial companies didn’t get the memo.

Siemens SIE.XE -5.98% shocked investors Thursday afternoon by revealing it won’t meet its target of a 12% margin on earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization by the end of its fiscal-year 2014, a key management aim. The German engineer’s shares slumped 6%. Swiss peer ABB‘s ABBN.VX -3.08% shares dropped 3.1% after a downbeat first-half earnings statement showed its order book declining across the globe. The message is clear: The economic climate for such companies is still very challenging. The question is which one is better placed to cope. Read more of this post

Gold Smuggling Takes Off in India; Curbs on Imports Aim at Supporting Rupee; The Case of the Golden Staples

July 25, 2013, 2:01 p.m. ET

Gold Smuggling Takes Off in India

Curbs on Imports Aim at Supporting Rupee; The Case of the Golden Staples

BIMAN MUKHERJI and ARPAN MUKHERJEE

NEW DELHI—A fishing boat slid into the southern Indian coastal village of Kodikkarai late one evening in mid-June, carrying a cargo from Sri Lanka: a stack of gold bars weighing more than 40 pounds. Four men jumped off the boat and headed for waiting Jeeps. Unfortunately for them, government sleuths were there, tax officials say, nabbing the men before they could sell the gold in the nearby city of Chennai, a trading hub for the precious metal. Read more of this post

Thai Broken Rice: Bangkok’s splashy, costly subsidy scheme has been ineffective at helping poor farmers.

July 25, 2013, 12:34 p.m. ET

Thai Broken Rice

Bangkok’s splashy, costly subsidy scheme has been ineffective at helping poor farmers.

DAVID WALTER

Ask farmers in the village of Ban Laitung what they think of the Thai government’s rice subsidy scheme, and they tell you that actually, please, they’d prefer it if Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra stopped buying up rice harvests at prices 50% above market levels. In this corner of Isaan—Thailand’s poor northeastern region—Ms. Yingluck’s “rural development” scheme has not significantly improved residents’ lives. Read more of this post

New Zealand Dairy Giant Fonterra Has Troubles Away From Home; Seeking Solutions, Head of Unit Gets Down to Basics: Mucking Out Stalls

Updated July 25, 2013, 7:10 a.m. ET

New Zealand Dairy Giant Fonterra Has Troubles Away From Home

Seeking Solutions, Head of Unit Gets Down to Basics: Mucking Out Stalls

ROBB M. STEWART

MELBOURNE, Australia—One freezing evening in June, the new boss of Fonterra Cooperative Group Ltd.’s FCG.NZ +0.27% Australian unit began an unusual fact-finding mission. She stayed overnight on a farm in Gippsland, in Australia’s Victoria state, to help discover what had gone wrong in one of the New Zealand dairy giant’s biggest markets. As if in an episode of “Undercover Boss,” a reality-TV show in which the heads of some of America’s biggest companies slip anonymously into front-line jobs, Fonterra’s Australian managing director Judith Swales rose at dawn to milk some 200 cows in temperatures hovering near zero degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit). Ms. Swales—who as a child had often joined her milkman father on his morning rounds in Yorkshire, in the north of England—had plenty to think about as she ended the morning mucking out the dairy shed. Read more of this post

Toilet-Tissue ‘Desheeting’ Shrinks Rolls, Plumps Margins; If it seems like the toilet paper runs out more quickly, it might not be your imagination. “Desheeting” reducies the number of sheets on a roll or in a tissue box

Updated July 24, 2013, 9:39 p.m. ET

Toilet-Tissue ‘Desheeting’ Shrinks Rolls, Plumps Margins

Improved Product Means Fewer Sheets Needed to ‘Get the Job Done,’ Company Says

SERENA NG

Kimberly-Clark Corp. KMB +0.65% recently rolled out new Kleenex tissue that it says is 15% “bulkier.” It’s also stingier. Each box has 13% fewer sheets than before. Consumer products makers call this “desheeting”—reducing the number of sheets of toilet paper or tissues in each package while holding retail prices constant. Earlier this week, Kimberly-Clark executives told analysts that they expect the practice to benefit the company’s consumer-tissue unit in the second half of the year. Companies, particularly in the food business, have long shrunk packages as an alternative to hiking prices in the face of higher raw-material costs. Cereal boxes and bags of chips have in many cases become lighter over the years in what the food industry refers to as taking “weight out.” A regular Snickers bar now weighs 1.86 ounces, down from 2.07 ounces in the past, which Mars says was done to cut calories to 250 per bar. Tropicana Pure Premium orange juice is now sold in 59 ounce bottles, versus 64 ounce cartons prior to 2010. Read more of this post

GSK, corruption and the Byzantine world of Chinese politics

GSK, corruption and the Byzantine world of Chinese politics

Jul 25, 2013 12:54pm by Jamil Anderlini

Everything in China is political, even when it might not be. A series of seemingly unrelated corruption scandals in China all share a common thread that has got the political class in Beijing very excited and boosted speculation that an elite power struggle is under way within the ruling Communist party. The connections seem tenuous at first but spend enough time in the Byzantine world of Chinese politics and the logic starts to appear compelling. Read more of this post

World’s Tallest Skyscraper Remains a Hole in Chinese Ground

World’s Tallest Skyscraper Remains a Hole in Chinese Ground

Ground was broken for the world’s tallest skyscraper in an empty field in China’s Hunan Province last weekend. It was a festive and audacious occasion: the Broad Group, developer of the Sky City project, promised to build 202 floors stretched over 838 meters (2,749 feet) in a mere 10 months, using pre-fabricated modular, stackable pods that require less energy and materials than traditional construction methods.

The joy was short-lived. Read more of this post

Singapore’s CapitaLand to Alter Home Sizes to Tackle Curbs; “The fact that they are similar plots and that they are planning about 40 percent more units means they are thinking of downsizing units”

CapitaLand to Alter Home Sizes to Tackle Curbs: Southeast Asia

CapitaLand Ltd. (CAPL), Singapore’s biggest developer, may alter the size of its apartments as it seeks to improve affordability to combat government measures aimed at curbing speculation and lowering prices.

The developer sold 139 residential units in the island-state in the three months ended June, 31 percent fewer than in the same period last year, it said yesterday as it forecast “headwinds” in the near term with the housing curbs. Read more of this post

China Cuts Capacity in Some Industries to Reshape Economy

China Cuts Capacity in Some Industries to Reshape Economy

China ordered more than 1,400 companies in 19 industries to cut excess production capacity this year, part of efforts to shift toward slower, more-sustainable economic growth.

Steelmaking, ferroalloys, electrolytic aluminum, copper smelting, cement production and papermaking are among areas affected, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said in a statement posted on its website yesterday. Excess capacity must be idled by September and eliminated by year-end, it said. Read more of this post

Bond Vigilantes Burn Sao Paulo to Whip Inflation: Brazil Credit

Bond Vigilantes Burn Sao Paulo to Whip Inflation: Brazil Credit

Protesters who forced authorities to cut bus fares last month in Brazil’s largest demonstrations in two decades are helping inflation ease to the slowest in almost three years, providing an unintended boon to the nation’s bondholders.

Yields on the government’s fixed-rate notes due in 2023 dropped 0.74 percentage point through today since reaching a 15-month high of 11.63 percent on June 21. The decline was more than three times as fast as comparable Mexican bonds as data published on July 19 showed consumer prices in Brazil rose 0.07 percent in mid-July from the prior month, the slowest increase since August 2010. Read more of this post

Brazil’s Batista Loses Billionaire Status as Debts Mount

Brazil’s Batista Loses Billionaire Status as Debts Mount

Eike Batista, ranked as the world’s eighth-richest person last year, is no longer a billionaire after Mubadala Development Co. opted to convert an investment in his Brazilian companies into debt.

Batista’s EBX Group Co. owes $1.5 billion to Mubadala after the Abu Dhabi sovereign-wealth fund restructured a $2 billion investment, said three people with knowledge of the deal. The fund no longer has equity in EBX, which paid back $500 million after renegotiating earlier this month, said two of the people, asking not to be named because terms are private. Read more of this post

Ma Rules Out Driving Down Taiwan Dollar as Growth Slows

Ma Rules Out Driving Down Taiwan Dollar as Growth Slows

Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou ruled out driving down the Taiwan dollar to boost exports following the currency’s rally against the yen and said the government still aims for growth of at least 2 percent this year.

A decline in the Taiwan dollar would push up prices of imported commodities and hurt the livelihood of the island’s people, Ma said in an interview at his presidential office in Taipei today. Japan, which competes with the island as an exporter of electronics, was able to depreciate its currency because of entrenched deflation, he said. Read more of this post

Singapore’s largest instant-coffee maker Super is seeking its first acquisition in a decade as it battles Nestle for a bigger share of the market in Southeast Asia and China

Super Plans Deal to Rival Nestle Among Asia Coffee Drinkers

Super Group Ltd. (SUPER), Singapore’s largest instant-coffee maker, is seeking its first acquisition in a decade as it battles Nestle SA (NESN) for a bigger share of the market in Southeast Asia and China.

“We are building our war chest for acquisitions,” Darren Teo, Super’s head of corporate strategy and business development, said in an interview on July 23. “Organically, the company is doing well, but we are looking at ways we can expand faster. We are at the right time of the growth story.” Read more of this post

You don’t know as much about bonds as you think you do

You don’t know as much about bonds as you think you do

By Allan Sloan, senior editor-at-large July 25, 2013: 5:00 AM ET

Don’t feel bad if you weren’t aware of the recent plummet in long-term bond prices. Most everyone else missed it too.

FORTUNE — We hear lots of talk about the bond market these days. So let me ask you a simple question: Do you think you’d notice if a key bond-market segment took a one-day hit equivalent to a 600-point drop in the Dow? Answer: No, you wouldn’t. How do I know that? Because when such a drop took place recently, almost no one outside of a few bond experts noticed. Read more of this post

Why Chinese Companies Lack Homegrown Luxury Brand Power

July 25, 2013, 9:56 a.m. ET

Why Chinese Companies Lack Homegrown Luxury Brand Power

WEI GU

Chinese companies build iPads, high-speed trains and world-class telecom gear, but they can’t seem to make their own fancy handbag.

It’s true that global giants from Prada 1913.HK +1.27% to Apple source goods from China, but it is difficult to name a single Chinese brand that is known for its quality products. That’s true not just in luxury, but also in automobiles, smartphones and home appliances. Read more of this post

Toronto Bankers Feel Pain From Mining Slowdown

Toronto Bankers Feel Pain From Mining Slowdown: Corporate Canada

The downturn in the mining industry is beginning to ripple through brokerage firms and investment banks in Canada.

One small brokerage firm, Fraser Mackenzie Ltd., closed earlier this year. Casimir Capital Ltd., a closely held investment bank, has cut jobs on its mining team and is shifting its focus to energy companies. Read more of this post

Indian Billionaires Paying 10% for Cash Shows Muddled RBI

Billionaires Paying 10% for Cash Shows Muddled RBI: India Credit

Just when India’s biggest stimulus package in a decade was close to paying off, a cash crunch engineered by the central bank to shore up the rupee has pushed borrowing costs for leading companies back above 10 percent.

Billionaire Anil Ambani’s Reliance Capital Ltd. sold three-month commercial paper at 10.35 percent this week, compared with the 8.95 percent it paid for one-year funds in June. Three-month CP yields surged 249 basis points this month to a 16-month high of 10.91 percent yesterday, data compiled by Bloomberg show. Similar U.S. rates were at 0.23 percent. Read more of this post