NEWS,29.07.2013

Amazon hiring thousands of people

Amazon announced plans Monday to add 5 000 full-time jobs at 17 facilities in the United States and to hire more than 7 000 workers as it beefs up its customer-service network.
The online retail giant is creating jobs as it expands its distribution network to speed up deliveries. The facilities in 10 states across the country, from South Carolina to California.
Amazon said that more than 5 000 jobs were now available across its warehouse network, touting pay that is 30% higher than that of traditional retail stores.
"In the last year alone, Amazon opened eight fulfillment centers in the US, resulting in thousands of new jobs being added to communities nationwide," the company said in a statement.
The Seattle-based retailer also said it was currently hiring in four states for more than 2 000 jobs in its customer service network, which includes a mix of full-time, part-time and seasonal jobs.
Amazon shares fell 0.9% in morning trade in New York.

China agrees to talks on wine dispute

China and the European Union have agreed there is a "window for discussions" to try to resolve accusations that Europe is dumping wine in China, the EU's trade chief said on Monday.
The agreement is part of a deal announced at the weekend to defuse a row over dumping of Chinese solar panels in Europe, the biggest trade dispute yet between the two economies.
Responding to the EU's initial plan to impose punitive duties on solar panels, China launched an anti-dumping inquiry into European wine sales, which would lead to retaliatory duties on exporters in France, Spain and Italy.
"There is a window for discussions between the European Union and Chinese (wine) producers," EU Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht told a news conference. "The Chinese government has promised to facilitate such discussions," he said.
EU and Chinese diplomats expect the wine dispute, as well as another conflict over EU exports of polysilicon a raw material for solar panels to be dropped as a goodwill gesture.
China is the world's biggest importer of Bordeaux wines and consumption soared 110% in 2011 alone.
China's commerce ministry could not confirm any freeze to the EU wine investigation, the website associated with the Communist Party mouthpiece the People's Daily reported on Monday, citing an unnamed official.
A lawyer representing the Chinese industry association that filed the wine complaint said the firm had not received any notice on the freezing of the probe, the website www.people.com.cn said.
"The relevant investigation is still proceeding regularly," Yao Fengwen, a lawyer with Bo Heng (Beijing B&H Associates) law firm, told the site.
Germany's Wacker Chemie is the world's second biggest maker of polysilicon and would be hurt by any tariffs in China.

Foreign firms win $22.5bn Saudi contracts

Saudi Arabia has granted three foreign consortium's contracts worth $22.5bn (€16.9bn) to build a Riyadh metro, the kingdom announced at a news conference in the capital late Sunday.
The consortiums are led by US, Spanish and Italian firms.
The 176-kilometre (110-mile) six-line network is aimed at easing chronic traffic congestion in Riyadh, a city of six million people.
A consortium led by US engineering giant Bechtel Corp will construct two lines worth $9.45bn, the official SPA news agency reported.
Spanish BTP-FCC consortium will build three of the metro lines for $7.88bn, after it beat competition from South Korea's Samsung, France's Alstom and Freyssinet, and Dutch group Strukton to secure the deal.
Another line costing $5.21bn went to Italy's Ansaldo.
The lines are planned to stretch across the capital and serve the airport and the future King Abdullah Financial District.
Oil-rich Saudi Arabia also plans to invest billions of dollars in rail networks linking major cities across the vast desert kingdom.
The kingdom already has a 449-kilometre passenger line between Riyadh and Dammam in Eastern Province, with a parallel freight line linking the capital with the Gulf coast city.

Focus on emerging markets

Fickle investors have spurned emerging markets in recent weeks, but this route has obscured a more alluring vista out on the horizon.

Developing economies now account for 50% of global output and 80% of economic expansion, and are projected to continue growing far faster than developed nations. They are expected to possess an even larger share of global growth, wealth and investment opportunities in years to come.
So much so that the labels investors use to classify some of these nations will change as the developing develop and the emerging emerge into more potent economic powers.
But this long-term view has been lost on many of those who look to emerging market assets for a higher yield in the short term. Their ardour cooled when the Federal Reserve signalled it may soon ease the stimulus that has kept credit cheap, heralding higher interest rates ahead.
That was coupled with signs of slower growth in key emerging markets like China and Brazil.
Still, the developing world's gross domestic product growth of 5.0% this year and 5.4% next, as projected by the International Monetary Fund, will far outpace the advanced economies' 1.2% and 2.1%.
Developing countries are now also better armed to keep panic at bay, with more foreign exchange reserves than before and less aggregate debt than developed nations. Many have put their economies on firmer foundations.
Fear of a mass exodus of investors, however, has still sent emerging market shares down about 10% in the past two months, as measured by the MSCI Emerging Markets Index, compared with a marginal rise in the Standard & Poor's index of US shares.
Consider some other data that the World Bank has crunched, suggesting developing nations will attract increased capital flows because their growth implies big investment opportunities, improved creditworthiness and the ability to better diversify portfolios and manage risk.
According to one bank report, by 2030 developing countries will represent two-thirds of all global investment, up from about half today and from one-fifth in 2000.
At that time, half the global stock of capital is expected to reside in the developing world, compared to less than one-third today. That means a shift in the distribution of wealth and in the creation of opportunity.
This shift in investment activity coincides with the catch-up growth that began during the 1990s, as developing nations integrated into global markets, transformed their economies and improved their institutions, Hans Timmer, director of the World Bank team that produced the report, said.
"Productivity catch-up, increasing integration into global markets, sound macroeconomic policies and improved education and health are helping speed growth and create massive investment opportunities, which, in turn are spurring a shift in global economic weight to developing countries," the report said.
And to be clear, this is investment in buildings and machinery, not the more flighty financial flows.
The Bric nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China) are expected to loom large. China will make up 30% of all investment activity, while Brazil, India and Russia together will account for more than 13% of global investment in 2030, edging the 11% projected in the United States.
But their growing importance as sources and destinations of capital flows will not be a Bric story alone, the report says. It calls out sub-Saharan Africa, for example, which can be expected to not only receive a growing volume of capital flows but also to attract an increasing share of the total capital flows to developing countries.
The bank's researchers forecast that developing countries will likely have the resources needed to finance massive future investments for infrastructure and services.
That's predicated on strong saving rates, expected to top out at 34% of national income in 2014 and averaging 32% annually until 2030. Meanwhile, the saving rate for high-income countries will fall from 20% to 16%.
In aggregate terms, the developing world will account for 62-64% of global saving of $25-27trn by 2030, up from 45% in 2010.
This points to greater wealth in the developing world as a percentage of the global total: the average per capital income of the developing world is expected to rise from about 8.0% of that in high-income countries in 2010, to about 16% by 2030.
The average citizen of what is now a developing country, according to one bank scenario, will earn 19% of the income of an average high-income country citizen by 2030.
Indeed, one McKinsey study projects more than half the world's population will have joined the consuming classes by 2025, boosting consumption in emerging markets to $30trn a year. It will, the report says, be nothing short of the "defining growth opportunity of our times".
Seizing on this theme, Bhaskar Chakravorti and Gita Rao, writing in Foreign Affairs recently, pointed to the hand-wringing over the decline of American power and urged US businesses to compete in emerging markets to help themselves grow, hire again and create wealth.
Another fan with a long lens is Mark Mobius, chairperson of the Templeton Emerging Markets Group, who wrote last month that commodities, exports and infrastructure development could continue to be leading growth drivers in many emerging economies, but overall growth is likely to arise increasingly from healthier domestic demand.
"Expanding consumer wealth is creating an increasingly large and discriminating body of middle class consumers across emerging markets, and their demand is, in turn, creating increasingly significant domestic economic activity," Mobius said. "
"With a relatively high proportion of the population in emerging markets moving into the workforce and a relatively low proportion of dependents, demographics are acting to reinforce consumer demand."
These forecasts are not unconditional. Some risks will reduce over time. Others will increase.
The countries must continue to drive increases in productivity and attract investors to finance the investments, the bank's report says.
There is also an assumption that some of markets will have addressed some of the hurdles to invest now which variously include poor governance, lax enforcement of contracts and property rights, corruption, lack of adequate infrastructure and distribution networks and uneven pipeline of talent.
In addition, as emerging economies develop, their financial markets integrate more into global ones, and they ease restrictions on capital that flows across their borders. It then  becomes more difficult to shield them from international shocks, the World Bank's Timmer said.
They can mitigate those shocks as alternatives to the dollar rise, and as they build reserves in other currencies like the euro and the yuan.
There are other challenges that concern Neil Shearing, chief emerging markets economist at Capital Economics in London. The first, already well known in China, is the need to reposition economies to be more consumer-driven and less dependent on exports.
The second is avoiding the kind of investment bubble created in the eastern European property market - which burst a few years ago.
"If the investment is in glitzy shopping malls," Shearing told me, "it can create bubbles and be dangerous. Whereas investment in China is excessive but in roads, railways and ports that you do want to look for."
Growth may slow, and challenges will abound, but the prospects loom large. And therein lies opportunity.

Gas flows from Myanmar-China pipeline

Gas has started flowing to energy-hungry China through a pipeline from Myanmar, Beijing's official media reported, in a major project that highlights their economic links even as political ties come under pressure.
The 793-kilometre (492-mile) pipeline runs from Kyaukpyu on resource-rich Myanmar's west coast, close to the offshore Shwe gasfields, and across the country.
It enters southwest China at Ruili, near areas where heavy clashes between the rebel Kachin Independence Army and the Myanmar military were reported earlier this year.
As well as diversifying China's sources of fuel, by supplying energy to the vast and less developed west it could help Beijing's attempts to promote economic growth there.
It went into operation on Sunday at a ceremony in Mandalay, the official Xinhua news agency reported. "When torches flamed in the sky.... a storm of applause and cheers broke out," it said.
But the controversial project is the fruit of Beijing's long allegiance with the military junta that ruled Myanmar for decades, a bond that is weakening as the reforming government opens up to the West.
In an editorial on Monday China's Global Times newspaper, affiliated with the ruling Communist Party, said: "This is another breakthrough in China's strategy of energy diversification and has obvious significance in reducing China's dependence on the Strait of Malacca for the import of oil and natural gas."
Construction began in June 2010, according to China National Petroleum Corporation, the key investor. A parallel oil pipeline is also part of the project.
According to Xinhua, the gas pipeline will be able to carry 12 billion cubic metres annually, while the crude oil pipeline has a capacity of 22 million tonnes per year.
Under military rule Myanmar was a pariah state largely isolated from the rest of the world and subject to heavy international sanctions, but it maintained close economic links with China, which for years was its major foreign influence.
Now, with Myanmar which also includes tin and precious gems among its natural assets opening up politically and economically, more countries are setting up operations and seeking deals that sanctions had previously prevented.
"Myanmar used to be sanctioned by the West and China was its only friend," the Global Times editorial acknowledged.
"Nowadays, it has opened more to the West. This will reduce its passion in cooperating with China, but does not mean it will set itself against China."
But in a warning that Beijing expects its economic interests to be protected, the newspaper cautioned Myanmar that it must ensure agreements regarding the project are fulfilled, no matter who eventually leads the country, where democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi has entered parliament.
"China should be determined to supervise Myanmar in doing so," the paper said. "Myanmar should hold a serious attitude toward China, and Chinese will take (the Myanmar) people's attitude toward the pipeline as a test of their stance on China."
Chinese nervousness about its investments in Myanmar comes after Naypyidaw said last week it had revised a controversial copper mine agreement with a Chinese company, after dozens of Buddhist monks and villagers were injured in a botched police raid.
Myanmar Minister of Mines Myint Aung told parliament that new terms gave the government 51% of the revenue, replacing a previous deal that was a joint venture between the Chinese firm and a holding company owned by the Myanmar military.
In 2011, Myanmar President Thein Sein stopped construction on the China-backed $3.6bn Myitsone Dam on the Irrawaddy river amid public opposition to the project, a move that led Beijing to call for its companies' rights and interests to be protected.
The Shwe Gas Movement, a campaign group, says the pipeline project has sparked protests over issues including demands for higher salaries for local workers, and concerns among farmers about its environmental impacts.
Myanmar plans to renegotiate billions of dollars of natural resource deals as it imposes tougher environmental standards and clamps down on corruption, the US-based Asia Society said in a report last month.