DP World’s long-serving chief executive Mohammed Sharaf has retired with immediate effect, the Dubai-based port operator said on Wednesday. Sharaf had been CEO for 11 years and worked for the company for 23 years, a statement to the Nasdaq Dubai bourse said. DP World’s chairman Sultan bin Sulayem will carry out the CEO’s duties on interim basis, it said. The company has a portfolio of more than […]
The trend of cyberattackers targeting retail and fast-food chains is continuing in 2016. Nationwide fast-food chain Wendy’s is the latest to announce it is investigating a possible credit card breach stemming from its POS (point-of-sale) system. “Reports indicate fraudulent charges may have occurred elsewhere after payment cards were legitimately used at some restaurants,” Wendy’s spokesman Bob Bertini told Reuters. “Until this investigation is completed, it is difficult […]
Lei Jun, founder and chief executive officer of Xiaomi, attends a session of the second annual World Internet Conference in Wuzhen town of Jiaxing, Zhejiang province, China, December 16, 2015. Reuters/Aly Song HONG KONG/ BEIJING Xiaomi Inc, China’s second-biggest smartphone vendor, more than doubled Internet services revenue in 2015 to about $564 million, an internal document reviewed by Reuters showed, but still fell well short of an […]
SAN FRANCISCO/MUMBAI As China sales show signs of cooling, Apple Inc(AAPL.O) is touting India’s appetite for iPhones, betting that rising wages and an expanding middle class will pull consumers away from the cheap alternatives that currently dominate the market. In an earnings call in which the company reported meagre iPhone growth and forecast its first revenue drop in 13 years, the Indian market stood out as a […]
The world’s biggest oil producer is spending as much now as it did before the crash in crude prices, signaling no surrender in Saudi Arabia’s battle with rivals. Saudi Arabian Oil Co. is maintaining investment in oil and natural gas projects and has formulated a new strategy in response to cheaper crude as it studies options to sell shares in its parent company and downstream refining and chemical […]
UAE. To coincide with the annual Arab Health Exhibition & Congress this week, six major investment opportunities in the GCC’s health care market in 2016 have been predicted by EY as being areas of high demand and growth in the region. According to the EY ‘Investment Big Bets – Healthcare and Life Sciences in the GCC’ report launched today, specialized centers of excellence (CoEs), home health care […]
UAE. Businesses must adjust how they nurture loyalty among Millennials or risk losing a large percentage of their workforces, according to Deloitte’s fifth annual Millennial Survey. Forty-four percent of Millennials say, if given the choice, they expect to leave their current employers in the next two years. That figure increases to 66 percent when the time frame is extended to 2020. The findings were revealed through a […]
A man opens the shutter of a shop painted with an advertisement of Reliance Communications in Mumbai, India, November 3, 2015. Reuters/Shailesh Andrade/Files MUMBAI India’s Reliance Communications Ltd (RCom) expects to reach a deal to sell its mobile phone masts business to a group of companies led by buyout firm TPG Capital Management LP in the next two weeks, its chief executive said on Monday. RCom last […]
ECONOMY BEING HELD HOSTAGE BY BULLION MERCHANTS
By Nantoo Banerjee
Swiss banks may not be too happy with India’s latest round of searches for big Indian accounts there. But, largely impoverished India’s endless gold hunt, especially at a time when the global economy and trade are shrinking and stock markets around the world are going topsy-turvy following economic slow-down in China, has placed the Geneva-based World Gold Council on top of the world. India’s gold import last month hit a new 120-day high at nearly $4 billion while all other imports to the country shrank by over 15 per cent in value. The massive gold import by bullion merchants, mostly from Mumbai and Ahmedabad, widened the country’s trade deficit to $11.7 billion in just one month. In the pre-reform period, India’s annual trade deficit rarely topped $5 billion. During the current financial year 2015-16, t
The $15 trillion rout in global equity markets since May is reawakening the lure of gold for investors seeking safety. Hedge funds more than doubled their net-long position in bullion last week, just three weeks after they were the most-bearish ever. Investor holdings of gold through exchange-traded products are expanding at the fastest pace in a year, and the value of the ETPs has jumped by $3 […]
INTERNATIONAL. Oilprice.com recently spoke with Carl Larry, Director of Oil and Gas at Frost & Sullivan, a consultancy that conducts research on oil and gas markets, to get his thoughts on the state of oil in 2016. Oilprice.com: I saw that you were on Bloomberg in December, and you said that you thought oil would go to the low $30s per barrel, which was a good call […]
Senior Saudi and Iranian figures clashed behind closed doors at a private meeting convened by the World Economic Forum in Davos this week to try to promote peace in Syria, participants said. The barbed exchange between Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal and Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif at an invitation-only meeting on Wednesday underlined the hostility between the two Gulf rivals, who are waging proxy wars in Syria, […]
With Star Wars: The Force Awakens being the biggest in the series, it’s gotten me thinking about the influence of this incredible franchise on our lives. It defined a movie genre, of course, and no doubt inspired many a young kid to want to become a pilot or astronaut (me included, even if NASA still won’t return my calls). And just think how many cultural references we have […]
Reuters/Daniel Munoz/Files BEIJING China will maintain plans to gradually phase out subsidies for green energy vehicles until they are fully eliminated in 2021 and allow the market to determine the direction of green car development, Finance Minister Lou Jiwei said on Saturday. But auto executives speaking alongside Lou at an industry conference in Beijing laid out differing visions as to which technology the market will […]
Reuters/Stephen Lam (Corrects spelling of Prem Sikka) By Tom Bergin LONDON Google has agreed to pay 130 million pounds ($185 million) in back taxes to Britain, prompting criticism from opposition lawmakers and campaigners who said the “derisory” figure smacked of a “sweetheart deal”. Google, now part of Alphabet Inc, has been under pressure in recent years over its practice of channelling most profits […]
Compared to rival tech companies like Google and Facebook, Apple doesn’t say much publicly about its virtual-reality ambitions. Occasionally, though, the company’s aspirations are revealed through a business acquisition or a new hire. This time, speculation is being fueled by Apple’s recently revealed hiring of Doug A. Bowman, a leading VR researcher who has until now been director of Virginia Tech’s Center for Human Computer Interaction. Bowman’s […]
DUBAI // A young lioness that escaped from her owner is believed to have roamed the streets for more than three hours before she was captured by a team of Dubai Municipality animal welfare officers. Dubai Police said they received reports of the lioness prowling the streets of Al Barsha neighbourhood, one of the newer residential developments on the city’s west side, at about 7pm on Thurday. […]
DUBAI // Enduring an 18-hour flight from Colombia to take part in the Standard Chartered Dubai Marathon yesterday was worth it, says Juan Carlos, a physical training teacher. “The first few kilometres were difficult, but I wanted to take part because it’s a long course and for me, it’s good for my health,” the 28-year-old said about his first marathon. He completed the 42-kilometre course in two […]
Details about the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S7 smartphone emerged this week in advance of its anticipated release. A Hungarian Android blog reported benchmark scores for the single-core and multi-core versions of the phone, which are significantly higher than those of last year’s Samsung Galaxy S6. The scores come from Geekbench, a cross-platform processor benchmark whose scoring system separates single-core and multi-core performance. The single-core version of the […]
Oil rallied, heading for biggest two-day advance since 2009 after a slump to a 12-year low prompted some investors to buy back record bearish bets. Front-month futures have jumped more than 18 percent after the February contract expired Wednesday at $26.55 a barrel, the lowest settlement since 2003. Speculators this month amassed the biggest-ever short position in U.S. crude amid concern that turmoil in China’s markets would […]
Microsoft‘s latest update to Skype now hides a user’s IP address by default. The change is likely to be noticed most by gamers who in the past have been targeted for online harassment and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks via user details found through their Skype accounts. Skype recently rolled out the ability for users to hide their IP address from others they communicated with using […]
Less than two months after OPEC nations sparred over oil policy in Vienna, they resumed the debate at Davos. Nigeria’s oil minister, speaking on a panel at the World Economic Forum in the Swiss resort, said the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries needs to meet soon as crashing prices force the group to reconsider its current laissez-faire policy. Saudi Arabia, represented by the chairman of its national […]
|By Lawrence Williams| With an increase of 21.8 tonnes in its gold reserves in December, Russia continues to build its central bank bullion holdings – largely through buying in its most of its own domestic production. Russia was the world’s third largest gold producer (after China and Australia) in 2014 in producing 266.2 tonnes – only 6 tonnes less than Australia. It will be interesting to see […]
The removal of sanctions on Iran may trigger at least $50 billion a year in foreign investment to finance a rebound in an economy hit by the oil slump, the country’s central bank governor said. “Our country can absorb a great deal of foreign investment, considering its potential,” Valiollah Seif said in an interview Wednesday at his office in Tehran, days after the trade and financial curbs […]
