Turkey’s women face big problem finding work – Turkey’s men
Looking around the crowd of elegant executives gathered in Istanbul’s Lutfi Kirdar congress centre today, it would be hard to guess Turkish women were at any disadvantage in the workplace.
Clad in tiny shift dresses, slick trouser suits and soaring stilettos, members of the entrepreneurs’ network Kagider chat about business deals and diet fads over lunch at their annual summit, where panels mull women’s role in boardrooms and diplomacy.
But the picture is completely misleading. The percentage of Turkish women of employment age either working or seeking work is barely above 20 per cent – and the figure has been falling for two decades.
PetroChina in $1.5bn gas investment as China seeks to develop extra energy resources
In China’s endless drive to find new energy sources, the big overseas oil deals have won most of the deadlines, but the news today that PetroChina is ramping up investment in coal-bed methane is a reminder of the potential boom in natural gas in China.
According to Reuters, PetroChina said today that it would spend more than $1.5bn over the next three years to develop 4.5 billion cubic metres of production capacity of coal-bed methane – almost double the country’s entire capacity at the moment.
“We aim to complete capacity building by 2013 and boost actual output to that level by 2015,” Jie Mingxun, general manager of PetroChina Coalbed Methane Gas, was quoted as saying.
Changes in Indian stock exchange rules meant that would-be investors waited today until the last moment to submit bids for shares in the $590m offer from Standard Chartered Bank. But, as had been largely expected, in the end they delivered and the offer was comfortably over-subscribed.
That will be a relief to the bank and to jittery investors in global markets. The last thing they would have wanted was another unsuccessful equity offering.
India says goodbye to its phone booths
India’s mobile revolution is slowly drawing the curtains on the “yellow revolution”. The once ubiquitous yellow phone kiosks – known as Public Call Office and Subscriber Trunk Dialling – that changed the lives of millions of people in the world’s biggest democracy when they were introduced in the early 1990s, are undergoing a major makeover.
As India’s mobile market clocks up about 20m customers a month – making it the second largest globally after China, with more than 500m users – several pay phone booths in urban centres, that in the 1990s enabled migrant workers in Mumbai to keep in touch with their families in the rural areas of India for less than one rupee, are now switching businesses.
Barcap versus Credit Suisse: valuing EM assets in the global storm
The modest rally in the core global financial centres today is helping a modest recovery in sentiment in emerging markets. Not before time, says Barclays Capital, in a note entitled “don’t forget the peril, but position for the climb.”
Barcap argues that markets have “over-reacted” to the global policy environment and world financial conditions, driving down emerging markets assets further than was justified. But Credit Suisse takes a more cautious view, saying in a note that only five out of eight of its tactical indicators (mainly forward indicators of investor sentiment) are positive. The note explains, “Why emerging markets performance has been lacklustre for seven months and why this might persist over the summer.”
So, you pays your money and you makes your choice.
New York headlines
*India’s Food Inflation Slows as Singh Pledges to Cool Prices
*India train collision kills at least 65
*Orascom to open talks on Algeria mobile unit
*Foxconn says it ‘may raise wages 20%’
*India’s NSE to introduce short selling platform
*Gome chairman files appeal on sentence
*Swiss banks seek to woo back Indian depositors
*South Africa looks at port operator overhaul
*Portugal Telecom in Talks on Possible Bid for Vivo
Asian stocks were up again today, with commodities and financial stocks leading, following a US market rally Thursday after short-term concerns about sovereign debt abated. Markets were skittish on Wednesday after a report in the FT said China was rethinking its eurozone bond holdings in Europe because of the eurozone debt crisis. The People’s Bank of China denied the report, claiming it was groundless. A report in Chinese state-owned Xinhua news agency that China’s sovereign wealth fund – China Investment Corporation – would keep investments in the euro region helped to boost sentiment. Shares in Asian lenders advanced as the cost of insuring Asia-Pacific bonds from default decreased.
Ssanyong shares jump 15% on reports of Renault bid interest
Despite losing ground with Korean car buyers, Ssanyong Motor seems to be popular acquisition target for foreign automakers. No less than seven domestic and foreign companies submitted letters of intent to take over the bankrupt South Korean automaker.
Shares of the automaker shot up by the 15 per cent daily limit on Friday on reports that French automaker Renault may have joined the race to buy Ssangyong, along with India’s Mahindra & Mahindra, South Korea’s Young An Hat which owns a bus maker, and local private equity fund Seoul Invest. The deadline for binding offers is July 20th.
Further reading
From the FT,
From elsewhere,
India awaits monsoon with food price inflation at 16 per cent
Even a little relief from food price inflation will come as a huge relief for the Indian government, led by prime minister Manmohan Singh.
Figures out today show the food price index was up 16.23 per cent in the year to May 15. That is still way too high for comfort. But the pace of increase in food prices has slackened from the previous week’s annual rise of 16.49 percent.
Investors take Stanchart’s $590m Indian offer to the line
Investors are leaving their subscriptions to Standard Chartered’s landmark listing of Indian depository receipts to the very last minute.
As of noon on Friday, only 21 per cent of the $590m offering was covered, with about 240m shares on sale for a price of between Rs100 and Rs115 per share. The bank’s stock in London closed last night for the equivalent of about Rs113.50 per share. A person familiar with the offering said the slow response – the offer has been open for three days – was unsurprising and not a cause for concern for the UK-based bank.
Foxconn, the troubled Chinese company hit by a spate of suicides, is to raise workers’ salaries by around 20 per cent, in the latest development in a story that has put a spotlight on labour practices in plants that supply some of the world’s leading electronics multinationals.
As the FT’s Kathrin Hille reports from Beijing, Hon Hai Precision Industry, Foxconn’s Taiwan-based parent, announced the move today. “The raise will be different depending on the location, but it will be around 20 per cent on average,” said Edmund Ding, vice president and spokesman.
Siemens seeks fortune at the bottom of the pyramid
Siemens, the German engineering company, has always been long on emerging markets.
A bold strategy to launch tens of what it calls “base level” products in large emerging markets like India, China, Brazil and Russia has the scale of ambition the Siemens family must have felt when they built a telegraph line from London to Calcutta in 1870.
Backed by an initial €3bn investment, the aim is to design and manufacture new products in BRIC countries within three years in pursuit of market share in fast expanding economies. Siemens executives estimate that a market like India is 70 per cent “base level”, and they need to price their products appropriately to be there.
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