Mexico scrambles to contain egg crisis
Why did the Mexican chicken cross the road? Because it was planning to cash in on a boom in egg prices, of course.
On Wednesday, the first shipment of a total of some 400,000 metric tons of eggs was underway in an effort to reduce prices that have more than doubled in a matter of weeks. Continue reading »
Chavez: a bolivar bond for state workers
Fresh from a rather embarrassing episode with irate state workers on Monday, Hugo Chávez, unperturbed, was back wooing his constituents on Wednesday, singing and dancing in a way that only he can.
Now in full campaign mode, with presidential elections little more than six weeks away, he ceremoniously baptised one of the bolivar-denominated bonds launched that are intended to pay overdue debt to for retired public sector workers by dousing one of them with a beaker of crude oil. Continue reading »
Anglo-Codelco: truce at last?
By Jude Webber in Buenos Aires and Helen Thomas in London
No more dispute over Disputada? It looks like Codelco, the world’s biggest copper miner, and Anglo American are dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s of a deal to end their bruising tug-of-war over the Anglo American Sur unit in Chile, formerly known (ironically) as The Disputed One. Continue reading »
Tapping Ukraine’s IT potential
By Graham Stack of of business new europe (bne)
Ukraine’s IT outsourcing sector has exploded over the last 10 years to top $1bn in 2011, capitalising on the strong science schools inherited from the Soviet Union.
Looking to the future, the sector has the potential to become a real force for Ukraine’s modernisation if it can meet some challenges. Continue reading »
The internationalisation of the renminbi is reaching deep into Africa.
This month the central banks of Nigeria and Tanzania joined their counterparts on other continents in adding renminbi to their reserves. Together they bought bonds worth Rmb 500m in a Rmb2.5bn three-year issue from the China Development Bank, the Chinese state development lender. Continue reading »
What price Brazil’s real? 2 per US dollar will do nicely
For much of this year, the Brazilian real has been one of the world’s worst-performing currencies. That largely served Brasilia well: it wanted a weaker real to help boost the slowing Brazilian economy. Lately, though, the real has been clawing back lost ground; during the first half of August, it even outperformed its Latin American peers.
But this week the central bank decided it had had enough. After a lengthy market absence, it intervened on Tuesday to stop the currency from strengthening further. The magic number it seemed to be defending? About 2 reals to the dollar. Continue reading »
S African platinum: mine unrest spreads
Labour unrest in African mining isn’t stopping at the Lonmin Marikana mine where South African police last week shot dead 34 strikers.
Anglo American Platinum , the world’s largest producer of the precious metal, said on Wednesday that it had received a demand for a pay increase from its South African workers, while a trade union said miners at Royal Bafokeng Platinum‘s Rasimone site were blocked from reporting to work by colleagues, Reuters reported. With Marikana still largely strike-bound, the threat of further lost production in platinum looms large – and could extend to gold and other commodities. Continue reading »
Tata Steel ‘raising $4.7bn’ for new plant
A century after it last built a new plant, Tata Steel – India’s largest and Europe’s second-largest steelmaker – plans to raise around $4.7bn in order to build a new plant.
Bloomberg reported Wednesday that Tata may pay an 11.25 per cent interest rate, while the syndicated project-finance loan may be disbursed in phases over a period longer than eight years. Continue reading »
New York headlines
* Rongsheng suffers after China slowdown
* Soco seeks to push ahead with DRC expansion
* Fed probes RBS over dealings with Iran Continue reading »
Corporate watch: Croatian shoemaker in need of repair
By Guy Norton of bne
Shoemaker Borovo was once 
the second largest company in Yugoslavia, employing 23,000 people, producing 23m pairs of shoes, 580,000 tyres and 12,500 tonnes of rubber goods a year, all exported around the globe.
Based in Vukovar, Croatia, it survived the city’s 1991 bloody siege, despite suffering damage totalling an estimated €300m. Now it is facing another battle for its existence, this time in the face of an onslaught of cheap imports from Asia. Continue reading »
Further reading: piling up
Wednesday’s picks from the BB team: South Korea’s household debt is piling up, and is now higher than the US’s before the subprime mortgage crisis; Meles Zenawi’s death causes concerns about stability; the ANC’s moral authority slips further; is the Vietnamese government targeting the country’s tycoons? Plus, how growing numbers of Chinese university graduates face underemployment. Continue reading »
India energy crisis: import gas, says BCG
After the humiliation of last month’s power cuts, India faces the tricky conundrum of how to keep its lights on in future. The answer? Import gas, and lots of it, at least if a report out on Wednesday from Boston Consulting Group is to be believed. Continue reading »
Hong Kongers lose art of doing nothing
Sometimes it is better to just do nothing – that’s a lesson Hong Kong investors ought to take from the first half of the year.
The territory’s financial players have been pulling money out of some reasonably well-performing sectors in the first six months of 2012 and have backed instead some pretty duff choices, according to an analysis of off-shore investment flows by Royal Skandia. Continue reading »
Vietnam: nervous after banker’s arrest
Vietnamese investors are still waiting to see the implications of Tuesday’s arrest of millionaire businessman Nguyen Duc Kien. And while they wait, they worry.
After a 4.7 per cent drop on Tuesday, the VN Index lost a further 1.6 per cent on Wednesday, pulled down by plunging shares in the banking sector. Kien’s bank, Asia Commercial Joint Stock Bank, went limit down, falling 6.6 per cent, after the same limit-down loss on Tuesday. With a lot of concern in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi about the health of the banks, the market may have further to fall. Continue reading »
Relief for Apple as labour monitors recognise reforms at Foxconn
Apple fans can sleep a bit easier while they’re waiting on line this autumn to upgrade to the iPhone5.
The independent auditor of Foxconn, the Apple supplier, says that the Chinese group that made headlines with a slew of worker suicides has cleaned up its act substantially, at least in some of its factories. Continue reading »
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