Latin America prepares for economic downturn
Washington, DC, United States (AHN) – Latin American finance ministers are trying to shield their countries from disaster amid predictions U.S. government budget cutbacks could hurt the region’s economies.
Economic ministers from the 11-nation Unasur organization met last week in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to discuss defensive strategies. They are working on an agreement that would create a roughly $12 billion emergency fund to bail out collapsing economies.
They also seek to reduce their dependence on the U.S. dollar for international trade and to develop policies to balance their trade deficits.
Unasur consists of Brazil, Colombia, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Surinam, Uruguay and Venezuela.
So far, Latin America’s economy has avoided the worst of the economic collapses in the United States and Europe that began in 2008 with a stock market collapse and recession. A brief drop in commodities prices along with government spending programs that shored up declining industries helped them avoid the worst of the crisis. However, economists predict the resilience of Latin American economies will not last much longer.
South American economies grew at an average of 6.6 percent last year, according to the International Monetary Fund.The Fund’s economists predict growth will slow to 4.7 percent this year and 4.1 percent in 2012.
By comparison, U.S. economic growth this year is running at 2 percent. Some European countries are showing no growth.
Stock markets in Latin American countries fell as much as 15 percent last week on news the credit rating service Standard & Poor’s downgraded the U.S. credit rating to double-A plus from triple-A.
Augusto de la Torre, the World Bank’s chief economist for Latin America and the Caribbean, said this week the outlook for Latin America is uncertain as concerns grow about another crisis for the United States and Europe.
China could be the next to falter as Western markets dry up for their manufactured products, he said.
“If China has a hard landing, that will hit us hard,” de la Torre told the Peruvian news media during an economic meeting.
Unasur leaders are exploring options to increase trade with China as its Western markets for manufactured products fizzle.
Protecting the economy is a major campaign issue in Argentina, where current president Cristina Fernandez won a landslide victory in primary elections this week.
She said at a press conference after the primaries that keeping Argentina’s economy strong would be a top priority for her if she is re-elected in October.
Low-income persons are most likely to be hurt by U.S. budget cuts that could reverberate around the world, including Argentina, she said.
Wall Street economists warn that her policies of price controls and using central bank reserves to pay debts could backfire for South America’s third largest economy.
The policies strengthen government control but depress market forces that help to balance the economy, according to some economists.
Argentina’s inflation rate is running close to 25 percent.
Other economic concerns are arising in Brazil, where inexpensive imported products are hurting the domestic manufacturing industry.
Chile and Peru still have stable economies as investors try to protect their assets by purchasing gold and copper, but economists predict declines in the precious metals market.
A decrease in demand for oil is depressing the economies of Venezuela and Mexico.
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Rice is king, but at a price
LONDON, United Kingdom (IRIN) – Most of us, when we worry about food prices, think short term – the price today compared with yesterday; the chance that the price will have gone up again tomorrow. But Oxfam this week risked some long term predictions, and came up with alarming results. They foresaw the steepest rise of all in the price of rice, with rice in China, for instance, becoming 80 percent more expensive by 2020, and 180 percent dearer by 2030.
The price of rice is obviously of huge concern in China, India and the rest of Asia, where it has always been the basis of the diet – just as the Middle East has traditionally depended on bread, Italy on pasta, northern Europe on potatoes and Africa on maize, cassava and root crops like yams.
But tastes in food are changing, driven by urban lifestyles and global communications. Consumers, no longer limited to what they can grow in their own area, look for foods which are easy to prepare and eat. The losers have been staples which need lengthy preparation – soaking, peeling and pounding. The winners have been pasta, noodles, and above all, rice, making the price of rice a matter of pressing concern far beyond the traditional rice-eating countries.
Nigeria has a rich tradition of foods based on local crops, amala (yam skin porridge) and eba (made from cassava), ogi (fermented cereal) and pounded yam. Rice used to be a party food, noodles practically unheard of. Now rice and noodle dishes are the staple of roadside food stalls, and every night in TV advertisements, smiling housewives feed their perfect families on instant noodles and jollof rice.
Forty years ago Nigerians ate an average of three kilograms of rice a year; now it is 35kg and rising. Nigeria is one of the world’s biggest rice importers, lying third (behind the Philippines and Iran) in 2008, the last year for which International Rice Research Institute figures are available.
It should add up to big profits for the international rice traders, and it does, but they are acutely aware of the vulnerability of the system. A senior executive from one of the world’s biggest global dealers in agricultural produce said this week he was really concerned about threats to, and the sustainability of the supply chain.
“Look at Africa,” Chris Brett, senior vice-president and global supply chain manager for Olam International, told an audience at the UK’s Institute of Development Studies (part of Sussex University). “It’s absolutely amazing how much food is imported. We know that the food security agenda is very important.”
Vulnerable to price fluctuations
Of all the world’s food commodities, rice is perhaps the must vulnerable to sudden shocks. The world may produce a huge amount of the grain, but nearly all of it is eaten in the countries where it is produced – only somewhere in the region of 5-7 percent is traded on the international markets. So there is a disproportionately large effect on the price when in a major producing country has a bad harvest, or stops exporting, as India did in 2008. The supply is not limitless. 1.3 million tons is the most rice Olam has traded on the international market in a year, but that has now fallen back a little to 1.1 million. Brett told his audience: “We seem to have hit a ceiling.”
The hunger for security of supply has led Olam into production and processing, and it is now working with 12,000 rice farmers and operating two mills in Nigeria, the country where it first started as a produce buying company more than 20 years ago. “We have decided that rice is a good business for us to be getting into. Nigeria imports 2.4 million tons of rice a year; it’s not rocket science to think that if you can produce it, there’s a market.”
Production has flourished. With help from US Agency for International Development’s (USAID) MARKETS scheme, an agribusiness initiative, the farmers’ associations have received loans for inputs and improved seed, and raised their yields from 1.5 to 4.4 tons a hectare. The once-derelict mills are turning out smartly packaged sacks of “Lobi” brand rice.
It is a secure source of supply within Nigeria and insulated from currency shocks, but Olam’s problem is that Lobi at the moment cannot compete with the popular imported brands from East Asia, either on quality or on price.
Poor quality
Among Nigerian customers, local rice has a poor reputation, often well deserved. Ola Bassey, a young professional woman from Lagos, told IRIN she never bought Nigerian-produced rice. “Some people buy it, it’s cheaper, but it’s just too much stress. You have all the bother of picking the sand and stones out of it – they get the kids to do it for punishment. People would rather pay extra and not have the hassle.”
Olam’s rice mills can deal with the sand and stones, but Brett admitted to IRIN that the quality of the Lobi rice itself was still not as good as that of Mama Gold, Olam’s premium brand of imported rice, just because of the varieties of rice used by the farmers.
Growing rice in Nigeria is also more expensive than growing it in Thailand, the Philippines or China. It is dry upland rice, produced without irrigation, and only one crop a year is possible. Farmers in East Asia cultivate wet paddy rice and can have three harvests a year.
At the moment Olam can sell Lobi more cheaply than the imported varieties because of the duty that has to be paid on imported rice. That duty has already been suspended once, for six months, in 2008. Brett’s nightmare is that a new rise in global food prices will lead to the removal of protection.
“The threat is that I wake up one morning and find the Federal Government has decided to cut import duty on imported rice. Nigerian farmers are never going to be as productive, and at the moment we don’t have the tonnage. But give us another two years, and we should see a stronger commercial viability.”
Currently Nigerian farmers produce only 10 percent of the rice sold on the local market, according to a USAID survey, while Thailand supplies 74 percent of the rice Nigerians buy.
eb/cb
– Provided by Integrated Regional Information Networks.
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Needed but discouraged, Mideast entrepreneurs struggle
Cairo, Egypt David Rosenberg – When Hind Wassef, a thirty-something Cairo resident, got the idea to open a boutique bookstore with three friends in 2002, the idea seemed promising. Greater Cairo counted 16 million residents, including large numbers of university-educated people. The city’s existing bookstores were dour and drab affairs that would present little competition. President Husni Mubarak’s government was taking measures to encourage private enterprise.
But Wassef and her partners received little encouragement. Rather than seeing the absence of competition as a chance to address an untapped market, friends, family and others warned that the business would never take off. Egyptians don’t read and if bookstores are dull, there must be a good reason. Don’t take any chances.
“Nobody had seized the opportunity. No one felt that it would work,” Wassef told The Media Line. “We were fighting this image that nobody reads. We kept hearing that whenever we shared our idea with somebody.”
Wassef and her partners stood their ground, investing their own capital in what became Diwan Bookstore, which combines hints of Middle Eastern décor with modern accoutrements and reader-friendly touches like sofas, on-line ordering and a virtual community of readers. Diwan not only sells books like its fusty competitors, but DVDs and stationery. Its stock includes literature in English, French and German as well as Arabic.
The Diwan partners succeeded. But if Egypt and the rest of the non-oil Middle East is going to pull itself out of the economic morass it’s in today, it will need millions of others like her, who are willing to risk quitting secure jobs and their reputations, investing their money or taking on loans. That will demand a delicate combination of institutional reforms to free markets as well as a different mindset for people used to counting on the state to provide jobs and hand out assistance.
The U.S., Europe and Saudi Arabia, not to mention an array of global financial institutions, are set to provide Egypt, Tunisia and other countries billions of dollars in financial aid. But economists warn that the money is only a stopgap – that the real economic growth that the non-oil Middle East desperately needs in order to sustain a rapidly-growing population can only come when ordinary people create innovative, efficient businesses.
The region is a private enterprise laggard by almost every measure. Much of the non-oil Middle East – countries like Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Tunisia, without the benefits of petroleum profits – took steps over the last two decades to encourage private business.
But it was too little effect. The biggest beneficiaries tended to be people like Ahmed Ezz in Egypt, who exploited their ties to politicians to buy state-owned businesses, rather than ordinary people like Wassef.
The International Institute for Finance estimates that private investment averages less than 15 percent of the gross domestic product in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), compared with more than 20 percent in other regions. Business executives and the firms they own and manage tend to be among the oldest in the world, a testament to the absence of the kind of start-up dynamism driving the world’s fastest-growing economies.
“A more open and enabling environment for the private sector is important both for faster growth and for greater acceptance of private sector-led growth among the population,” the International Monetary Fund said in a report to the Group of Eight conference last week, spelling out policy reforms the Middle East requires. It noted that per capita growth in the MENA region over the past 30 years was the slowest in the world.
On paper, the Middle East looks like a great place for entrepreneurs. In the World Bank’s 2010 annual ranking of business climate Doing Business, Saudi Arabia was in 11th place, ahead of South Korea and Germany. Bahrain was 28th and the United Arab Emirates 40th. That puts them way ahead of China. Egypt at 94th place was 40 places ahead of India.
In the Arab world, it takes an average of nine procedures and 22 days to start up a business, according to the World Bank. That makes it the third fastest in the world. The cost for starting a business is a relatively high 46.2 percent of per capita income, but that is far less than it was a few years ago.
Indeed, the absence of young, innovative enterprises is an inviting proposition for those who want to take advantage of it. So is the relative ease of expanding out of your home country to markets elsewhere in the region, which share the Arabic language and cultural norms. The Arab world counts a population of close to 300 million people, almost the same as the U.S., and includes some of the world’s wealthiest countries.
Mohamad Haj Hasan was thinking just these things in 2007 when he started the on-line jobs site Akhtaboot (Arabic for octopus) in his home country of Jordan. The site matches job seekers with over 500 registered employers, including international players such as Google, FedEx, and LC Electronics.
“The region offers a lot of opportunities because there are lots of kinds of business that don’t exist yet,” he told The Media Line. “I liked the economics of the Internet, especially being based out of Jordan. Jordan itself doesn’t offer a great market. All successful companies in Jordan, whether they are goods or services, they export ….[but] it had reasonable costs when it comes to employees and rent, and it has pretty high caliber talent.”
Haj Hassan moved quickly once he had established himself in Jordan to enter the much bigger markets of Egypt and Saudi Arabia. “It was easy to get cash flow positive, but once we did that – because Jordan is a very limited and tough market – we opened Saudi Arabia and Egypt,” he recalls.
But investors in MENA, especially executives in small and medium-sized firms, say they are discouraged by fickle regulations, corruption and an uneven playing field that favors older firms at the expense of new ones.
Wassef certainly encountered her fair share of such obstacles as Diwan expanded to what today is 10 outlets across Egypt. Some of the barriers were silly, like the one that gives local officials the right to vet what products a store can carry. Diwan ran into problems because it wanted to sell books and DVDs, Wassef recalls.
Others, such as censorship, are more serious for someone in the book business. Wassef says she often spends time in long discussions with customs officials and regulators, who have wide powers, often arbitrarily exercised, over business regulations.
“If you’re involved in buying and selling there’s always the suspicion that you’re doing something wrong,” she says of government officials. Often she has to negotiate to get books subject to censorship past customs. “You have to use the personal touch. You meet and have a talk with them. They say they have instructions from the top and you say ‘Well, it’s just a cookbook’ and they say ‘Oh, I see.’”
Being a woman isn’t a handicap; being a business person of either gender is the real problem. “As a woman, you can sometime get your way more easily,” she adds.
David Wachtel is senior vice president for marketing and communications at Endeavor, which helps entrepreneurs by providing mentorship, expert networks and strategic advice. The New York-based non-profit added the Middle East to its portfolio in 2007, starting with Egypt and most recently adding Lebanon. Regulations aside, he says, much has to be done to change the culture of business in the Middle East.
“The whole issue of the cost of failure in the Middle East for entrepreneur is quite high,” Wachtel told The Media Line. “It isn’t acceptable to take risks and fail. This is reinforced by institutional issues like the lack of bankruptcy legislation.” In Egypt, for instance, there is no such thing as a business bankruptcy. Owners must take personal obligations. “That raises the bar.”
Other problems are the preponderance of family-owned business. The next generation may have the will to shake up an enterprise by entering new markets, developing new products, streamlining management, but older family members often will hold them back. Often no one controls the company at all as shares are divided among more and more heirs.
The Middle East also lacks angel investors and others willing to risk capital on new and untried businesses, Wachtel adds. Banks are also unfriendly to start-up entrepreneurs, says Imad Malhas, a Jordanian who founded and owns the high tech company IrisGuard.
“Financing and money is a big issue. Banks are the biggest problem in Jordan – they won’t give you money based on your business plan,” Malhas told The Media Line. “In the end, they want collateral – your father or someone else who’s wealthy enough to sign. They’ll go through the motions of studying your business plan, but in the end they want collateral. That needs to change big time.”
IrisGuard is an unusual start-up by Middle Eastern standards – a path-breaking, technology start-up that is the market leader in its field. Formed in 2001, the company developed a camera that photographs the iris, which is as unique as a fingerprint to every person. It’s used by Cairo Amman Bank to verify customers’ ID and by the United Arab Emirates to screen incoming travelers.
Malhas says an important element in fostering new business is mentoring. He acts as a mentor himself, and is also working both inside his company and out to teach young Jordanians the ropes. Together with the King Abdullah II Fund for Development, he is helping to run a program that sends young Jordanian engineers to work in multinational companies abroad in the hope they will later put their technology and management skills to work back in Jordan. IrisGate, which runs its research and development center in Britain, does the same on a smaller scale.
Budding entrepreneurs don’t have many role models and people they can turn to for practical advice in their home countries, Malhas says.
“The problem with doing mentoring is our young kids look at these guys like John Chamberlain from Cisco and say ‘There’s no way on earth that’s something we can aspire to.’ If you do $10 million in sales in the Middle East in the first five years, you’re super successful.”
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Congress Warned That Public Transit Cuts Would Hurt U.S. Economy
Washington, D.C., United States (AHN) – Public transportation advocates said at a Senate Banking Committee Thursday that if transit agencies lose federal funding, the entire nation would suffer.
Sen. Tim Johnson (D-S.D.) chairman of the Banking Committee, said, “It is sometimes forgotten but reliable and accessible public transit is vital in rural areas like South Dakota, just as it is vital in large urban cities.”
Public transportation funding is among budget items members of Congress are considering reducing as they try to cut the $14 trillion federal deficit.
However, fewer bus, subway and passenger rail trips will mean more roadway congestion, transit advocates say.
“Our public transit systems connect workers with employers, keep cars off congested roads, reduce our dependence on foreign oil and get people where they’re going safely and affordably,” Johnson said.
Republicans, such as Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, say the federal government should subsidize local transit agencies only if they match the funds and agree to keep their systems in a state of good repair.
The Obama administration seeks to increase operating assistance to transit agencies. Operating assistance refers mostly to salaries for workers, but also recurring expenses like electricity.
“There’s no point in using federal dollars to buy brand spanking new buses for transit systems if they can’t afford to pay the drivers to put those buses into service,” Federal Transit Administration chief Peter M. Rogoff told the Banking Committee.
JayEtta Hecker, transportation advocacy director for the Bipartisan Policy Center, said public transportation will get the funding it needs only if Congress can be assured taxpayers are getting a good deal.
“We are not going to get consensus for the kinds of [revenue] increases that are required in transportation until we rebuild the credibility of the program,” she said. “A clearer set of performance objectives, clearer outcomes, clearer recognition that we’re getting value for our money.”
The Bipartisan Policy Center is a foundation that promotes policies supported by both Republicans and Democrats.
Other warnings about big cuts in public transportation came from a study released this week by the Urban Land Institute, a public policy group.
It concluded that the United States would fall behind other countries economically if transit spending is drastically reduced.
Outside of the United States, “in most of the developed world and in many emerging markets, countries have committed to fulfilling infrastructure agendas as essential for sustaining or enhancing living standards in an increasingly competitive global marketplace,” says the report.
One example mentioned in the report came from the United Kingdom, which is spending $326 billion over the next five years to stimulate its economy by investing in passenger rail, broadband access and energy production.
China is on schedule to complete 10,000 miles of high-speed rail lines by 2020, the report said.
Meanwhile, major U.S. cities like Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia and San Francisco are reducing transit service, raising fares and delaying new projects as they divert transportation funding to other priorities, the Urban Land Institute reported.
Additional budget cuts are likely for defense spending, federal employees’ pensions, student loan subsidies and farm payments, according to members of the Obama administration.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates this week described how the Pentagon is trying to figure out which weapons systems can be reduced without risking national defense.
President Obama announced a 12-year deficit reduction plan earlier this year that seeks to save $400 billion.
The Pentagon’s review of its own budget includes ways to find management efficiencies that might reduce the size of the armed forces, Gates said.
In addition, the Obama administration is doing a “serious examination” of policies that “drive dramatic” increases in health care, retirement and infrastructure, he said.
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China inflation edges lower to 5.3%
Inflation in China moderated slightly in April but remained stubbornly high despite government efforts to restrain rapid price rises
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Wealth of worlds’ millionaires calculated to rise to $202 trillion by 2020
New York, NY, United States (AHN) – Financial analysts from service company Deloitte say the total wealth among millionaire households could more than double over the next decade in 25 major economies. Their wealth now calculated at nearly $92 trillion could rise to a staggering $202 trillion in 2020.
According to the study, the United States and Europe will continue to have the greatest concentrations of wealth, despite emerging markets closing in. The findings also highlight that numerous opportunities for growth in local markets across the country still remain.
“We wanted to go beyond some existing wealth management statistics by looking both into the future and across the globe to forecast how wealth among millionaire households might evolve,” says Andrew Freeman, executive director of the Deloitte Center for Financial Services. “Identifying and understanding how different market segments are changing can help formulate growth strategies.”
Freeman adds, “Which countries may offer the most promising future and how wealth managers can potentially increase profitability in the next decade are important questions for a wide range of financial institutions.”
Some of the other findings in the report include China continuing to be the driving force in the growth of millionaire wealth, followed by Brazil and Russia. Of the 25 countries examined in this study, China and South Korea will join the top 10 countries in terms of the total number of millionaires by 2020.
Millionaire households in the U.S. could reach $87 trillion in 2020, up from $39 trillion in 2011.
Among the forecasts for each of the 50 U.S. states, California is expected to remain the state with the wealthiest households, while New Jersey will continue to have the greatest density of millionaire households. The East Coast could see the highest growth rates with New York and Florida adding 1.5 million new millionaire households by 2020.
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China cannot for ever avoid oilseed imports
Palm oil prices will revive as China resumes buying, Standard Chartered says, following a warning from Oil World over Beijing’s soybean policy
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Higher commodity prices for food and fuel a fact for the future
New York, NY, United States (AHN) – Soaring commodity prices are wreaking havoc on consumer’s budgets here in the U.S., but experts say not to expect them to go down because the culprit is increased global demand for food and fuel.
Increased demand from population growth in developing nations is not only causing prices to increase but it is also causing a scarcity of resources, according to Jeremy Grantham, who helped found Boston-based GMO asset management firm.
Grantham says that population growth and the rise of India, China and Brazil have caused a shift in balance in the world that has resulted in increasing prices for food, energy and metals.
Those factors are contributing to soaring global prices for those commodities. Although some people have blamed speculation in commodity markets or the fiscal policies of some governments or central banks, population growth is also a driving force in pushing prices upward. That means that if even commodity markets crash, prices will not stay far down for long, Grantham says.
Grantham notes that in the past century commodity prices declined by 70 percent because of economies that were achieved in using materials more efficiently or substituting materials. However, he said that trend is reversing as we reached the end of being able to achieve efficiencies at a time when the world population was growing.
In addition to global population growth, people in developing nations are earning more and consuming more as a result.
In his April 2011 newsletter, Grantham warned that it was “time to wake up” because “the days of abundant resources and falling prices are over forever.”
“The world is using up its natural resources at an alarming rate, and this has caused a permanent shift in their value,” Grantham wrote. “We all need to adjust our behavior to this new environment. It would help if we did it quickly.”
Grantham summarized the problem:
- Until about 1800, our species had no safety margin and lived, like other animals, up to the limit of the food supply, ebbing and flowing in population.
- From about 1800 on the use of hydrocarbons allowed for an explosion in energy use, in food supply, and, through the creation of surpluses, a dramatic increase in wealth and scientific c progress.
- Since 1800, the population has surged from 800 million to 7 billion, on its way to an estimated 8 billion, at minimum.
- The rise in population, the ten-fold increase in wealth in developed countries, and the current explosive growth in developing countries have eaten rapidly into our finite resources of hydrocarbons and metals, fertilizer, available land and water.
- Now, despite a massive increase in fertilizer use, the growth in crop yields per acre has declined from 3.5% in the 1960s to 1.2% today. There is little productive new land to bring on and, as people get richer, they eat more grain-intensive meat. Because the population continues to grow at over 1%, there is little safety margin.
- The problems of compounding growth in the face of finite resources are not easily understood by optimistic, short-term-oriented, and relatively innumerate humans (especially the political variety).
- The fact is that no compound growth is sustainable. If we maintain our desperate focus on growth, we will run out of everything and crash. We must substitute qualitative growth for quantitative growth.
- But Mrs. Market is helping, and right now she is sending us the Mother of all price signals. The prices of all important commodities except oil declined for 100 years until 2002, by an average of 70%. From 2002 until now, this entire decline was erased by a bigger price surge than occurred during World War II.
- Statistically, most commodities are now so far away from their former downward trend that it makes it very probable that the old trend has changed – that there is in fact a Paradigm Shift – perhaps the most important economic event since the Industrial Revolution.
- Climate change is associated with weather instability, but the last year was exceptionally bad. Near term it will surely get less bad.
- Excellent long-term investment opportunities in resources and resource efficiency are compromised by the high chance of an improvement in weather next year and by the possibility that China may stumble.
- From now on, price pressure and shortages of resources will be a permanent feature of our lives. This will increasingly slow down the growth rate of the developed and developing world and put a severe burden on poor countries.
- We all need to develop serious resource plans, particularly energy policies. There is little time to waste.
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Dutch telecom KPN to cut 25 percent of workforce amid competition, falling demand
The Hague, Netherlands (AHN) – Dutch telecom firm KPN has announced plans to cut up to 25 percent of its workforce over the next four years because of increased global competition and slumping demand.
KPN’s announcement on Thursday comes on the heels of Chinese telecom giant Huawei announcing Monday that its sales outside China had increased by 33.8 percent. Huawei has become one of the largest telecom manufacturers in the world, operating in more than 140 countries amid complaints of unfair trade practices.
KPN employs 30,599 people. It announced that it would cut from 4,000 to 5,000 jobs in The Netherlands between now and 2015.
Citing problems in both its mobile and fixed-line business, KPN also issued a profits warning, which sent its share price down by 7.7 percent resulting in a brief suspension of trading. The company will issue its first quarter earnings report on April 28.
In the meantime, KPN has revised its forecast of its gross operating income for 2011 downward from $7.7 billion to $5.3 billion.
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Cheap freight, behind unusual crop deals, to stay
The low shipping costs which have helped take US corn to China and, potentially, Australian wheat to Europe, look set to stick around
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