■INVESTMENT
Nomura eyes Lehman Bros
The president of Japan’s biggest brokerage house, Nomura Holdings, said the company was considering buying a stake in troubled US investment bank Lehman Brothers, a report said yesterday. The move would be part of a plan to spend more than ¥200 billion (US$1.9 billion) on investment in US and European financial institutions, Kenichi Watanabe said in an interview in the Yomiuri Shimbun. Lehman “is one of the candidates in which we plan to invest,” Watanabe said without elaborating.
■LABOR
Strike on at Boeing
Despite a 48-hour contract extension, negotiations between Boeing Co and Machinists union officials have failed and the union declared: “The strike is on!” The Machinists bargain for about 25,000 aircraft assembly workers in the Puget Sound area and about 2,000 more in Wichita, Kansas, and Portland, Oregon. Picket lines went up in Wichita early yesterday and West Coast machinists were due to walk out at 12:01am PDT (7:01 GMT).
■ECONOMY
Indonesia turns to deficit
Indonesia recorded its first current account deficit in almost three years for the second quarter of this year as oil prices increased. Southeast Asia’s biggest economy turned to a US$1.5 billion deficit in its current account in the three months to June, from a US$2.3 billion surplus in the first quarter, the nation’s central bank said in a statement dated Friday. Indonesia’s trade surplus narrowed as growth in non-oil exports slowed, while its oil trade deficit widened.
■MINING
Vale breaks ground in Peru
Brazilian mining company Vale broke ground on Friday on a US$479 million phosphate mine in Peru, becoming the second Brazilian company to announce a major investment there this week. Vale’s Bayovar mine, set to open in 2010 in the northern province of Piura, will produce about 3.9 million tonnes of phosphate a year, Companhia Vale do Rio Doce SA announced in a statement. The mine has 238 million tonnes of phosphate reserves, which are mostly used to produce phosphate fertilizers. The investment will turn Peru into an exporter of phosphorous rock and eventually of phosphate fertilizer, Peruvian President Alan Garcia said at the inauguration ceremony.
■AVIATION
Bank denies Alitalia rumor
The bank overseeing the relaunch of Italy’s ailing national airline Alitalia denied a report on Friday that it had offered a stake of between 10 percent and 20 percent to Air France-KLM, the ANSA news agency said. “There is absolutely no basis” to the report in the French daily La Tribune, the agency quoted a spokesman for the Intesa Sanpaolo bank as saying. La Tribune had said Intesa Sanpaolo offered the stake in secret and “held out the possibility that Air France-KLM could become the majority shareholder in five years’ time, in 2013,” according to an unsourced report.
■LABOR
Unionists paralyze exports
Staff from Ivory Coast’s coffee and cocoa marketing body BCC have launched an unlimited strike over back pay that is paralyzing exports, an official for the BCC said on Friday. “The unionists have ransacked” the hall dealing with export operations, leading to a “paralysis” in the coffee-cocoa trade, senior BCC official Kouassi Konan said. Konan said the strike had no connection with an ongoing corruption probe that has implicated many top BCC executives.
DOLLAR CHALLENGE: BRICS countries’ growing share of global GDP threatens the US dollar’s dominance, which some member states seek to displace for world trade US president-elect Donald Trump on Saturday threatened 100 percent tariffs against a bloc of nine nations if they act to undermine the US dollar. His threat was directed at countries in the so-called BRICS alliance, which consists of Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates. Turkey, Azerbaijan and Malaysia have applied to become members and several other countries have expressed interest in joining. While the US dollar is by far the most-used currency in global business and has survived past challenges to its preeminence, members of the alliance and other developing nations say they are fed
LIMITED MEASURES: The proposed restrictions on Chinese chip exports are weaker than previously considered, following lobbying by major US firms, sources said US President Joe Biden’s administration is weighing additional curbs on sales of semiconductor equipment and artificial intelligence (AI) memory chips to China that would escalate the US crackdown on Beijing’s tech ambitions, but stop short of some stricter measures previously considered, said sources familiar with the matter. The restrictions could be unveiled as soon as next week, said the sources, who emphasized that the timing and contours of the rules have changed several times, and that nothing is final until they are published. The measures follow months of deliberations by US officials, negotiations with allies in Japan and the Netherlands, and
Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團) yesterday said it expects any impact of new tariffs from US president-elect Donald Trump to hit the company less than its rivals, citing its global manufacturing footprint. Young Liu (劉揚偉), chairman of the contract manufacturer and key Apple Inc supplier, told reporters after a forum in Taipei that it saw the primary impact of any fresh tariffs falling on its clients because its business model is based on contract manufacturing. “Clients may decide to shift production locations, but looking at Foxconn’s global footprint, we are ahead. As a result, the impact on us is likely smaller compared to
TECH COMPETITION: The US restricted sales of two dozen types of manufacturing equipment and three software tools, and blacklisted 140 more Chinese entities US President Joe Biden’s administration unveiled new restrictions on China’s access to vital components for chips and artificial intelligence (AI), escalating a campaign to contain Beijing’s technological ambitions. The US Department of Commerce slapped additional curbs on the sale of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and chipmaking gear, including that produced by US firms at foreign facilities. It also blacklisted 140 more Chinese entities that it accused of acting on Beijing’s behalf, although it did not name them in an initial statement. Full details on the new sanctions and Entity List additions were to be published later yesterday, a US official said. The US “will
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