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Document APULSE0020060605e265002e6

BUSINESS IN ASIA TODAY - JUNE 5, 2006
1,228 words

5 June 2006

Asia Pulse

APULSE

English

(c) 2006 Asia Pulse Pty Limited
Business in Asia on June 5, 2006. A summary prepared by Asia Pulse ( http://www.asiapulse.com ), the real-time, Asia-based wire with exclusive news, market intelligence and business opportunities:
NISSAN, SUZUKI TO BEGIN JOINT PRODUCTION IN INDIA
NEW DELHI - Suzuki Motors Corp, the parent company of car market leader Maruti Udyog, has announced a manufacturing collaboration with the Nissan Motor Co. The firms announced they will begin joint production in India. "Nissan and Suzuki will start manufacturing collaboration in new emerging markets by sharing their respective manufacturing facilities. This activity will start at Suzuki's plant in India," a statement by the companies said here.
SINO-US INDUSTRIAL PARK PROJECT LAUNCHED IN HENAN PROVINCE
ZHENGZHOU, China - Construction has strted on a China-US cooperative industrial park project known as the "California Industrial City" in Zhengdong District of Zhengzhou, the capital of central Henan Province. The project lies in the southeastern part of Zhengzhou, between the Beijing-Guangzhou Railway in the west and the Beijing-Zhuhai Expressway in the east. The project is sponsored by the Zhengzhou State-owned Assets Management Company and the California Industrial City Development Corporation. Overall investment in the project will be over than US$2 billion, with the infrastructure to be finished within three years.
AUSTRALIA'S CYTOPIA SIGNS US$205MLN DEAL WITH NOVARTIS
MELBOURNE - Drug developer Cytopia Ltd (ASX:CYT) has signed a licence and research deal with global pharmaceutical firm Novartis potentially worth more than $A274 million ($US205 million). Cytopia, which develops new drugs to treat cancer, immune disorders and cardiovascular disease, will also receive $13 million over the first three years of the deal in up-front payments and research funding. Cytopia and Novartis will work together to develop orally-administered compounds to prevent transplant rejection and to treat auto-immune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis.
INDIA'S JINDAL STEEL WINS MINING RIGHTS IN BOLIVIA
NEW DELHI - Jindal Steel and Power Ltd (JSPL) (BSE:532286) has announced winning the mining rights for 20 billion tonnes of iron ore reserves in Bolivia. The company plans to invest US$2.3 billion over the next 10 years for mining and setting up a steel plant there. JSPL will invest US$1.5 billion over the next five years and increase this to US$2.3 billion in 10 years. The contract would be signed shortly, JSPL MD Naveen Jindal told reporters.
MITSUI TO BUY 87 PCT INTEREST IN AUSTRALIAN SALT FIELD
TOKYO - Mitsui & Co. (TSE:8031) has said it will acquire a 87.3% interest in an Australian salt field from Dutch chemical company Akzo Nobel NV for about Y13 billion ($US116.45 million). The deal will make the major trading house the third-largest global player in terms of output capacity. Located 1,300km north of Perth, the Onslow field can produce 2.5 million tons of salt a year. Mitsui also owns another salt field in western Australia. Together, their annual output capacity will come to 3.8 million tons.
ETRADE AUSTRALIA TO BUY HSBC AUSTRALIA BROKING OPERATIONS
SYDNEY - Online broker ETrade Australia Ltd (ASX:ETR) has sealed a deal to buy HSBC's Australian stockbroking operations for $A51.3 million ($US38.47 million), giving it access to St George Bank (ASX:SGB) customers and propelling it to outright second in the local online trading ranks. The HSBC business currently has 40,000 retail clients and is contracted to provide St George bank customers with internet broking - but only until March 2007. ETrade today said it was in final stage negotiations with St George to extend the contract. ETrade is 35 per cent owned by ANZ Bank (ASX:ANZ), with which it also has a referral alliance.
IRAN-KHODRO EXPORTS 530 DIESEL-POWERED BUSES TO AZERBAIJAN
TEHRAN - A contract for exports of 530 diesel-powered buses to Azerbaijan was signed in Baku Saturday, Iran-Khodro's public relations department reported. The contract, which is valued at US$25 million, was signed during the visit of Iran's high-ranking industrial and trade delegation to the country. The managing director of the Iran-Khodro Diesel Company, Majid Sheykhani, said the buses are designed both for short and long-haul operation. Following export of the buses, a feasibility project for construction of a bus assembly line in Azerbaijan will start. The project would be commissioned by the end of the year (March 21, 2007) and plant capacity will be about 1,000 buses annually.
IBA HEALTH RAISES $US21 MLN TO FUND ASIAN GROWTH STRATEGY
SYDNEY - Health information technology firm IBA Health Ltd (ASX:IBA) has raised over $A28 million ($US21.0 million) to fund its Asian growth strategy. The Sydney-based company today said it had raised $28.3 million through a placement of 39.3 million shares at 72 cents each. Executive chairman Gary Cohen said: "This capital raising will accelerate our ability to take advantage of core business opportunities and to fund our Asian growth strategy. In Asia, we are particularly focused on the opportunity we have to deploy our integrated system at prices that deliver superior returns for the business."
CNOOC SIGNS US$1.6 BLN LOAN PACT FOR NIGERIA OIL PROJECT
BEIJING - The China National Offshore Oil Company Limited (CNOOC Ltd, HKSE:0883) has announced that its wholly-owned subsidiary, CNOOC China Limited, has signed a loan agreement with the Export and Import Bank of China to fund an oil project in Nigeria. The 12.8 billion yuan (US$1.6 billion) loan will be used for the company's operations in Nigeria and for general capital expenditure for other projects, said CNOOC Ltd in a statement. CNOOC Ltd acquired a 45 per cent working interest in an offshore oil mining license "OML 130" in a US$2.6 billion deal concluded in April.
PUNJ LLOYD ACQUIRES SINGAPORE-BASED CONSTRUCTION COMPANY
NEW DELHI - Construction major Punj Lloyd Ltd (BSE:532693) has acquired a majority stake in the Singapore-based SembCorp Engineers and Constructors for over Rs 1 billion ($US21.8 million). Punj Lloyd acquired an 88 per cent stake in the Singapore-based construction company through its wholly-owned subsidiary in the country, Punj Lloyd Pvt Ltd, a company statement said. The company plans to acquire the remaining 12 per cent stake by December 2007. With the current acquisition, the company's operations will expand to Europe, China besides Iran and other South East Asian markets.
(C) Asia Pulse Pte Ltd. Each day Asia Pulse creates up to 350 items of news, business opportunities, expert commentary and industry profiles. Asia Pulse is a unique joint venture involving the resources of Asia's major news and information groups:
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Document APULSE0020060605e26500232
EDITORIAL

Hard to hold the line on borders - In the age of e-mail and global markets, boundaries aren't always where we'd like them to be

MOISÉS NÁIM

894 words

31 May 2006

The Star-Ledger

NSL

FINAL

15

English

(c) 2006 The Star-Ledger. All rights reserved.
A country's borders should not be confused with those familiar dotted lines drawn on some musty old map of nation-states. In an era of mass migration, globalization and instant communication, a map reflecting the world's true boundaries would be a crosscutting, high-tech and multidimensional affair.
Where is the real U.S. border, for example, when U.S. customs agents check containers in the port of Amsterdam? Where should national borders be marked when drug traffickers launder money through illegal financial transactions that crisscross the globe electronically, violating multiple jurisdictions? How would border checkpoints help record companies that discover pirated copies of their latest offering for sale in cyberspace - long before the legitimate product even reaches stores? And when U.S. health officials fan out across Asia seeking to contain a disease outbreak, where do national lines truly lie?
Governments and citizens are used to thinking of a border as a physical place: a fence, a shoreline, a desert or a mountain pass. But while geography still matters, today's borders are being redefined and redrawn in unexpected ways. They are fluid, constantly remade by technology, new laws and institutions and the realities of international commerce - illicit as well as legitimate. They are also increasingly intangible, living in a virtual and electronic space.
In this world, the United States is adjacent not just to Mexico and Canada but to China and Bolivia. Italy now borders on Nigeria, and France on Mali.
These borders cannot be protected with motion sensors or National Guard troops.
Political unions, economic reforms and breakthroughs in technology and business came together to revolutionize the world's borders during the 1990s.
It was a decade during which a global passion for free markets erupted. From Latin America to Eastern Europe, politicians and their electorates felt that prosperity was possible by enticing foreigners to invest, tourists to visit, traders to import and export, banks to move funds freely in and out of countries and businesses to operate free of heavy regulations.
It was also a decade when nations with long histories of conflict or animosity surprised the world by dismantling or rearranging their borders through political unions and trade agreements. The European Union kicked into high gear; Argentina, Brazil and rival South American nations formed a regional customs union, and Mexico joined Canada and the United States in their own trade agreement. These efforts sought to maximize economic growth and political harmony (or so the leaders hoped).
Meanwhile, new technologies were vastly reducing the economic and business importance of distance and geography. The only prices that dropped more quickly than shipping a cargo container from Shanghai to Los Angeles were those for sending e-mail, making phone calls or rapid-firing text and images across borders.
With borders much more fluid, opportunities for profit multiplied and cross-border activity boomed. Suddenly it seemed normal to invest in Thailand, visit China, trade in exotic currencies, take seasonal jobs in different countries or download stolen software from Bulgarian Web sites.
These changes reflected a severe and acute new asymmetry: Borders became harder for governments to control and easier and more lucrative for violators to bypass. Anyone seeking to cross them found it easier to do so, while government agencies floundered in their efforts to regulate the new world they had helped create.
Today's borders are violated, enforced and remade not only on the ground but in cyberspace, multilateral agencies and the virtual world of international finance.
National boundaries are also being transformed by new - or newly empowered - international institutions. For example, when the World Trade Organization's 149 member states agree on the reduction of tariff rates around the globe, our time-honored beliefs about controlling sovereign borders are upended. On trade, the borders that matter may be drawn at the WTO headquarters in Geneva as much as anywhere else.
The paradox of policing borders in a high-tech, globally integrated era is that today, less sovereignty may equal more protection. To reinforce national boundaries and combat terrorism, one of the most effective tools a government can deploy is collaboration with other nations - in effect, ceding or "pooling" certain aspects of their sovereignty.
That is no easy task. It requires partnering with less efficient, less democratic and less trustworthy nations and sharing information, technology, intelligence and decision-making power. In many quarters - Washington and beyond - the notion of diluting national sovereignty verges on treason.
But if sovereignty is indeed a hallowed concept, it has become a somewhat hollow one, too. Traditional borders are violated daily by countless means, and virtual borders seem even more permeable and misunderstood. "Closing the border" may appeal to nationalist sentiments and to the human instinct of building moats and walls for protection. But when threats travel via fiber optics or inside migrating birds and when finding ways to move illegal goods across borders promises unimaginable wealth or the only chance of a decent life, unilateral security measures have the unfortunate whiff of a Maginot line.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________ Moisés Náim, editor of Foreign Policy magazine, is the author of "Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy." This essay first ran in the Washington Post.
Document NSL0000020060531e25v00011

Tinubu Woos Chinese Investors to Lekki Free Trade Zone
729 words

30 May 2006

12:49 PM

All Africa

AFNWS

English

(c) 2006 AllAfrica, All Rights Reserved
Lagos, May 28, 2006 (This Day/All Africa Global Media via COMTEX) --
Lagos State Governor, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu at the weekend in Beijing, China mounted an aggressive marketing pitch to persuade Chinese investors to invest in the newly created Lekki Free Trade Zone.
Addressing over 500 captains of Chinese industry and top decision makers, Tinubu said China and other Asian economies had already recorded a feat as the Asian Tigers but must co-operate to ease the emergence of Nigeria as the African Tiger.
"The Asian Tiger no longer roars. It must now facilitate the emergence of Nigeria as the African Tiger to rise from its slumber"
Noting that increased tariff by Western countries to check rising exports of Asian countries is slowing down production in their industries, he advised them to divert investment to the Lekki Free Trade zone to take advantage of the generous waivers granted Nigeria by the European Union and the United States.
Presenting an impressive profile of Lagos State, the governor said the companies in the state were recording returns on investment of over 30 percent and making good because of the huge population that served the vibrant market and the willingness of the average resident to work.
Giving a testimony of the state's investment in the top GSM service provider, V-Mobile, Tinubu said the state has recouped its investment and secured 30 percent return on its investment per annum since it bought into the company over three years ago.
Noting that skilled and semi-skilled labour were available, Tinubu said the reforms of the Federal Government has liberalised the investment climate and given foreign investors more confidence to invest in the economy.
He allayed their fears of political instability, assuring that constitutional democracy had come to stay in Nigeria and continues to take root daily.He said Nigerians were resolved to ensure peaceful transition from one administration to another and that the transition process would not hurt business.
Although he admitted that every investor would like to assess his or her risk before committing funds to a foreign project, Asiwaju said enough guarantees had been put in place to minimise the risks and maximise the gains.
Besides the concession given to companies in the Lekki Free Zone to repatriate their profits, Tinubu noted that the government has also granted them tax holidays and waiver on customs duty on their machines.
To enable them recoup their investments, charges have been waived on the final goods to be sold to the market and the Lekki Free Trade Zone Authority is expected to maintain its own police system to ensure the protection of life and property.
Tinubu said these generous conditions were sufficient to assure investors that they would not regret bringing their capital to Nigeria.
Also speaking at the occasion, the Minister for Commerce, Ambassador Waziri declared that the Federal Government was fully in support of the project and that investors should not nurse any fear that the relations between Federal and state governments might frustrate the objectives of the Lekki Free Trade zone.
He said the President, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo is convinced that China and Nigeria can work together to achieve greatness and sees zone as a concrete effort of both countries to learn from each other and grow together.
Responding on behalf of the investors, the Director General, Foreign Economic Co-operation Department, of the Ministry of Commerce, Mr. Wu Xilin thanked the Federal Government and the Lagos State Government for building on the excellent bilateral relations between Nigeria and China by setting up the Lekki Free Trade Zone.
He told Chinese captains of industry that the fact that four Chinese companies were involved in the management of the zone is a sufficient indicator that their interests will be protected.
He enjoined them to cement relations between both countries further by investing in the new enterprise, assuring them that both parties would benefit from the deal.
Also speaking, the Deputy Secretary General, Jiangsu Provincial Government, Mr. Chen Mengmerry reviewed the enormous potentials of the Lekki Free Trade zone and concluded that it would do many Chinese companies a world of good.
He cited the experience of the Free Trade zone at Nanjin as a successful experiment that will be the model that the Lekki Free Trade Zone will try to copy.
Document AFNWS00020060530e25u002mq
In Depth / CHEAP PCs

PC For The Masses -- The world's poor can't afford computers and vendors need new markets. Enter the cheap PC.

Darrell Dunn

1,772 words

29 May 2006

InformationWeek

IWK

47

1091

English

Copyright (c) 2006 CMP Media LLC
Millions of us have enjoyed the fruits of Moore's Law ever since IBM introduced the first mainstream PC 25 years ago. Falling PC prices and rising performance have buoyed businesses and consumers alike, elevating education, productivity, and prosperity. But not everyone has benefited. For every person in the world with a computer, there are more than two without one.
With every computing advance, the digital divide widens, pushing already disadvantaged parts of the world further down the opportunity curve. Now, after years of hand-wringing over the problem, the tech industry is addressing it. Researcher Nicholas Negroponte left a cushy job as head of MIT's Media Lab to pursue his dream of developing laptops that, at $100 each, are within reach of schools in remote parts of the world. And just last week, Advanced Micro Devices, Intel, Microsoft, and others put more of their skin in the game by promoting new models of PC distribution and financing that will put full-featured computers into the hands of people who otherwise couldn't afford them.
Microsoft is leading a trial in Brazil under which thousands of consumers will be able to buy PCs at half the usual cost, then pay off the balance through hourly usage fees. Microsoft is teaming with Intel and AMD on the project, which will expand to China, India, Mexico, and Russia in the coming months.
Meantime, AMD, Intel, Microsoft, and others are investing billions of dollars in research, engineering, and marketing to target consumers in China, India, Latin America, and Russia, which represent promising markets for their products as growth slows in the United States, Europe, and Japan. They now recognize that the pricing, products, and distribution tactics that work in developed countries don't always work in the developing world. And if they're successful, they'll make some additional waves by creating work and educational opportunities in places where technology has made few inroads.
Microsoft began testing the new PC distribution model in Brazil last year. Under the pay-as-you-compute program, a PC running Windows XP with a 17-inch monitor that normally would sell for $600 will be sold for between $250 and $350, with 10 hours of usage time. Pre-paid cards available in stores give users additional time for about 75 cents per hour, says Mike Wickstrand, a director in Microsoft's market expansion group. When time expires, the PC enters a special limited mode and eventually will lock up unless users buy more time. The strategy is based on the belief that consumers won't settle for a stripped-down PC that lacks the features they already know about from Internet cafes and schools. "The person isn't making sacrifices," Wickstrand says.
CRANK THEM UP
The One Laptop Per Child initiative led by MIT and Negroponte takes a different tack. The goal there is to provide $100 laptops-including one that can be powered by a hand crank-to schoolchildren in developing countries starting next year. Another initiative, called pc-1 from processor maker VIA Technologies, already has seeded China, India, Vietnam, and other countries with tens of thousands of sub-$250 PCs.
Bringing technology to the developing world was a main focus at the World Congress on Information Technology in Austin, Texas, earlier this month. There, Hector Ruiz, CEO of home-town microprocessor maker AMD, outlined the company's 2-year-old 50x15 program, whose goal is to extend Internet access to half the world's population by 2015. Only 15% of the world's 6 billion-plus people now have Internet access, and at current growth rates it would be 2030 before half the world gets there, Ruiz said.
Much of AMD's efforts to date have centered on its Personal Inter-net Communicator, a hardened PC that uses the company's Geode processor and comes equipped with a 56-Kbps modem, an internal hard disk, and four USB ports. The system, which sells for less than $200 without a monitor, is being used in Brazil, the Caribbean, India, Panama, Turkey, Russia, and Uganda, says Billy Edwards, an AMD senior VP and chief innovation officer (see story, p. 50).
Intel CEO Paul Otellini used the World Congress to debut the World Ahead Program, under which the chip maker will