| China and the World |
blogs updatedWe updated the blogs.forumer.com You can now see new features when you login. Thank you for choosing Forumer, Have you created a community yet? If not, give it a try http://www.forumer.com8:59 PM - Feb. 22, 2006 - comments {0} - post commentBeijing chooses 5 dolls for Olympic mascotFri Nov 11, 2005 8:48 AM ET
 By Ben Blanchard
     BEIJING (Reuters) - Beijing chose five stylized doll mascots for the 2008 Olympic games on Friday representing a panda, a Tibetan antelope, a swallow, a fish and the spirit of the Olympic flame. Announced in a live nationwide broadcast with only 1,000 days to go before the opening ceremony, the mascots will join the official games slogan "One World, One Dream" and running man emblem which looks like the Chinese character for "capital". "They reflect the cultural diversity of China as a multi-ethnic country," Liu Qi, head of the games organizing committee, said. "They represent the enthusiasm and aspirations of our people." The mascots are called "Beibei", "Jingjing", "Huanhuan", "Yingying" and "Nini", which together mean "Beijing welcomes you." Coloured in the five hues of the Olympic rings, they also represent the sea, forests, fire, earth and air. Multiple mascots are not uncommon. The 2000 Sydney games had three native Australian animals and two years later in Salt Lake City a hare, coyote and bear represented the event. "We have approved them," International Olympic Committee coordinating commission chairman Hein Verbruggen said in Beijing. "That means we like them, otherwise we wouldn't have done that." But Tibetan groups, which campaign against Chinese rule in the mountainous land controlled by Beijing since 1950, condemned the choice of a Tibetan antelope, an animal on the verge of extinction due to hunting for its soft coat used to make shawls. "It is wrong to misuse this freedom loving animal of the Tibetan plateau to serve the propaganda purposes of the Chinese regime," Wangpo Tethong, chair of the International Tibet Support Network Olympics Campaign Working Group, said in a statement. The selection of China's mascots generated plenty of debate, and caused headaches for a design team trying to select something that could best represent a country which has a written history going back more than 2,000 years and much tradition to draw on. "The most agonizing thing of all has been the design of the mascot," Han Meilin, head of design team, told the People's Daily overseas edition. And not all Beijing residents warmed to the five dolls. "The colors look fine together, but if I look at each separately they seem a little like the uninspiring figures from the Chinese cartoons of my childhood," said university student Zhong Ling, 21. "I see them and I don't feel anything yet," said Du Xiaoxi, 25, an office worker out shopping in the fashionable Wangfujing district. "2008 is too far away." Yet if unloved, they can always be fired and replaced. Unpopular mountain goat "Chamois" at the 1992 Albertville winter games lost her footing to a fat blue snow imp called "Magique". (Additional reporting by Guo Shipeng and Beijing newsroom) 10:13 PM - Nov. 11, 2005 - comments {0} - post commentYahoo buys $1bn stake in AlibabaThursday, August 11, 2005 Posted: 0709 GMT (1509 HKT)
BEIJING, China (AP) -- Yahoo Inc. announced Thursday it would pay $1 billion in cash to acquire a 40 percent stake in the Chinese e-commerce firm Alibaba.com.
As part of the deal, Yahoo has also agreed to contribute its China business, Yahoo! China, to Alibaba, according to a joint statement from the two companies. The agreement makes Yahoo the largest strategic investor in Alibaba. The combined entity would also include 3721.com, a Chinese language search engine that Yahoo acquired last year, it said. Yahoo will have 35 percent of voting rights in Alibaba as a result of the investment, said the statement, which was distributed at a press conference in Beijing. The deal is the biggest yet in a flurry of investments in China by foreign Internet companies eager for a share of a market with more than 100 million people online. The alliance between Yahoo and Alibaba represents a challenge to U.S.-based eBay, the world's biggest online commerce company, which in 2003 bought a Chinese portal, eachnet.com. Alibaba was founded in 1999 by Jack Ma, who has become one of China's most promiment Internet entrepreneurs. The company is based in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, southwest of Shanghai. Alibaba runs both Chinese- and English-language auction sites serving foreign companies looking for Chinese wholesale suppliers and individual Chinese buyers and sellers. News of the deal comes just days after an initial stock offering in the United States by another Chinese online firm, search engine Baidu.com, set off a frenzy of buying. Its shares soared more than 350 percent in their first day of trading Friday before declining slightly this week. The Chinese government said last month that the number of people online in China had reached 103 million -- the second-biggest population of Web users after the United States. But Chinese online commerce is still in its infancy and consumer spending is low in a society where urban incomes average just US$1,000 (euro800) a year. Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
1:01 PM - Aug. 12, 2005 - comments {0} - post commentMarconi faces backlash over Huawei talksRival bids emerge as fears grow over R&D and jobs The British company, which came close to collapse four years ago, admitted yesterday that it was in talks with a number of companies "about potential business combinations". Reports in Hong Kong said that rival Asian manufacturer ZTE Corporation had tabled a bid for the business, while European rivals Alcatel in France and Siemens in Germany are also rumoured to be interested.
Shares in Marconi rose 39.25p to 306.25p, valuing the business at £640m. Huawei is expected to be the front runner to buy out Marconi, which was forced to hoist the for sale sign three months ago when it missed out on a crucial network contract with BT as it already has a marketing deal with the firm. Union leaders fear that any acquisition of Marconi by Huawei will lead to job cuts and the loss of crucial research and development expertise. Last year the Department of Trade and Industry ranked Marconi as the eighth most important British-owned research firm. Marconi employs about 4,000 people in Britain with 1,500 at its largest site in Coventry. Huawei is likely to be most interested in the company's sales and marketing force rather than its research arm, which it can duplicate much more cheaply in China. "There is an issue for government in terms of the company's strategic options," said Amicus national officer Peter Skyte. "If it becomes clear that Marconi is going to be sold, whether it is to the Chinese or someone else, we shall expect the government to look very closely at that under the mergers and acquisitions framework. Despite its troubles it's still a key company in terms of research and development in the UK." A spokesman for the DTI refused to comment on the case, but the government does have the power to prevent intellectual property considered critical to national security from foreign ownership. The most important objections to any deal between Huawei, which last year received $10bn of loans from the state-sponsored China Development Bank to help its overseas expansion, and Marconi are likely to come from the US. During the dotcom boom Marconi bought US rivals Fore Systems and Reltec. As a result, Marconi's Pittsburgh-based data networking business, created from these firms, counts the US federal government among its biggest clients, supplying secure networking to clients including the Department of Defence. The Committee on Foreign Investments in the US (CFIUS), set up to look into foreign acquisitions of US firms, is expected to investigate any takeover of Marconi. CFIUS refused to comment yesterday. Huawei has had a previous brush with the American legal process. In 2003 the company was sued by networking giant Cisco which accused the business and two US-based subsidiaries of copying parts of Cisco's technology and infringing at least five of its patents. The dispute was eventually settled out of court for an undisclosed sum but did little to dispel the impression among some in the industry that Huawei was an upstart with little care for other's intellectual property. Since then Huawei has invested heavily in its own research and development, a process which culminated in its winning part of BT's 21st century network contract. A spokeswoman for BT said yesterday that the company investigated Huawei's background before awarding the contract. "Ethical standards were part of our selection criteria and all the successful companies either met or exceeded those standards." Decline of a giant The history of Marconi is the story of two businesses - Guglielmo Marconi's wireless group and the General Electric Company. Hugo Hirst and Gustav Byng founded GEC in 1886, nine years before Marconi sent the world's first radio message. They floated their business in 1900, three years after Marconi set up his firm. Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Company was taken over by English Electric in 1946. In 1968 English Electric merged with what was then called GEC. Under the 33-year tenure of Arnold, later Lord, Weinstock, GEC flourished. He built up a cash pile that was spent by George Simpson, who took over in 1996. With his sidekick, finance director John Mayo, he spent more than £4bn buying US businesses Fore Systems and Reltec at the height of the dotcom boom. In July 2001 the company warned on profits and its shares collapsed. Mr Mayo was ousted. Lord Simpson followed two months later. Mike Parton took over as the company struggled to negotiate a way out with its banks. Slumping sales holed a possible refinancing and Marconi was forced into a £4bn debt for equity swap that wiped out shareholders. New Marconi started trading in 2003, but was plunged into chaos in April when it failed to secure a contract with BT. The company effectively put itself up for sale as a result. 1:17 AM - Aug. 11, 2005 - comments {0} - post commentNot Bad, BaiduShares of China's largest web search company, Baidu, more than tripled in their U.S. market debut on Friday. The Beijing company's initial public offering sparked huge interest internationally. Baidu.com was repeatedly described as a potential Chinese Google, serving the world's most populous country, where internet usage is surging.
But even analysts who expected a strong market debut were stunned Friday when Baidu shares more than trebled the $27 per American Depositary Share pricing of its IPO in the first U.S. listing of a Chinese search engine. "It's just been amazing," said Sal Morreale, who tracks IPOs for Cantor Fitzgerald. "It could be over-enthusiasm, it could be the way Google charted, but there is obviously a lot of speculative buyers who think this could be an Asian Google." Shares of Baidu surged as high as $151 in intraday trading and closed Friday at $124. Baidu is tiny by U.S. standards. The company earned $1.8 million on revenue of $13.6 million during the first half of this year. Investors are betting it will grow rapidly as more of China's population becomes hooked on the internet. Despite its investment in the company, Google represents a major threat to Baidu because the company is gearing up for a major push into China. Yahoo and Microsoft, which rank second and third, respectively, behind Google in U.S. share of the search engine market, also have designs on China. Although its business model mirrors Google's, Baidu faces different challenges. China's Communist government and its history of censorship pose the biggest potential stumbling blocks. In 2002, the government shut down Baidu for a week and fined the company for producing search results with content considered "socially harmful," according to Securities and Exchange Commission documents.
1:33 PM - Aug. 9, 2005 - comments {0} - post commentBaidu.com Gets Rousing WelcomeAugust 5, 2005 Chinese search provider Baidu.com (Quote, Chart), dubbed the "Google of China," became the hottest IPO in more than five years Friday, soaring 354% in its Wall Street debut. Perhaps Google (Quote, Chart) should strive to become the Baidu of the United States. It's taken a year for Google to add 244% to its August 2004 IPO price of $85. Baidu passed that milestone in a few hours and kept going, ending the day at $122.54, $95 higher than its $27 IPO price. The company raised both the terms and the price of the IPO because of demand from investors, and even then, the 4 million-share offering opened at $66 when it began trading on the Nasdaq stock market and doubled from there, reaching a high of $151.21 before pulling back. By the end of the day, the company was valued at about $4 billion ¡ª more than 100 times sales and about 300 times cash flow, a valuation that dwarfs both Google and Yahoo (Quote, Chart). But with a 200% growth rate and a commanding presence in the fast-growing Chinese Internet market, investors flocked to the IPO, trading nearly six times the number of available shares on the day. Google fared well in Baidu's debut ¡ª the company owns a 2.6% stake in its Chinese rival, and there were also reports that Google tried to buy Baidu before it went public. Also faring well in the offering was Silicon Valley venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, which has a 28% stake in Baidu. The broader market fell after a stronger than expected July jobs report suggested that there is no end in sight to Federal Reserve interest rate hikes. The Fed is expected to raise rates again on Tuesday, and Cisco (Quote, Chart) will report earnings after the close that day. The Nasdaq lost 13 to 2177, the S&P dropped 9 to 1226, and the Dow fell 52 to 10,558. Volume declined to 1.9 billion shares on the NYSE, and 1.52 billion on the Nasdaq. Decliners led 25-7 on the NYSE, and 20-9 on the Nasdaq. Downside volume was 79% on the NYSE, and 68% on the Nasdaq. New highs-new lows were 80-35 on the NYSE, and 68-31 on the Nasdaq. Computer Sciences (Quote, Chart) lost 4% after beating estimates but issuing lukewarm guidance, and Network Appliance (Quote, Chart) fell 3.7% after warning of an earnings shortfall. WebMD (Quote, Chart) fell 5% after reporting a 5-cent profit and a name change to "Emdeon." Homestore (Quote, Chart) soared 40% on its results, while Audible (Quote, Chart), Ctrip (Quote, Chart) and Openwave (Quote, Chart) fell on their earnings reports. Microsoft (Quote, Chart) continued to gain on hopes for a higher dividend.
1:14 PM - Aug. 9, 2005 - comments {0} - post commentBaidu.com ready for Nasdaq debut
12:54 PM - Aug. 9, 2005 - comments {0} - post comment
|
Description Watching China, Watching the Rest of the World With a Special Focus On the Economy, Particularly Chinese Enterprises Foreign Expansion and Corporate Globalization. More about China By CIA WorldFactBook By Wikipedia Home User Profile Archives Recent Entries - blogs updated - Beijing chooses 5 dolls for Olympic mascot - Yahoo buys $1bn stake in Alibaba - Marconi faces backlash over Huawei talks - Not Bad, Baidu - Baidu.com Gets Rousing Welcome - Baidu.com ready for Nasdaq debut - Adidas to pay $3.8bn for Reebok - China firms look abroad to expand - Report: CNOOC set to scuttle bid Links Economist BusinessWeek Far Eastern Economic Review Fortune Forbes TIME NewsWeek Guardian The New York Times Reuters Associated Press Agence France-Presse Bloomberg CNN BBC C-Span Wired Singapore United Morning Post Email Me Free Hit Counter |
