Man Utd parent company makes loss

Debt repayments at Manchester United have caused parent firm Red Football Joint Venture to make a £44.8m ($65.6m) pre-tax loss for the year to June 2008.

It covers the 2007/08 season, when United won the Premier League and Champions League, and takes the Red Football's debt from £604m to £649.4m.

Red Football Joint Venture was set up when the Glazer family borrowed heavily to buy the club for £790m in 2005.

Group turnover for the year was £256.2m, an English club record.

It was up from £210m the year before, and operating profit was up £5m on the previous year.

'Global brand'

The football club enjoyed a successful 2007/08 - with television revenues made from the improved Premier league deal and Champions League final run, sell-out games at the 75,000 capacity at Old Trafford, and all its other commercial revenues. "The turnover is spectacular, which is what you would expect from a season when they won the Premier League and Champions League," said Harry Philp, financial analyst at Hermes Sports Partners.

Match day revenues were up from 92.6m to £101.5m, while media income was up by close to 50%, from £61.5m to £90.7m. Meanwhile, the club's commercial operations generated £64m.

"The company continues to explore new commercial opportunities within the United Kingdom and overseas to further leverage the Manchester United brand," it said in a statement.

The club said it had four elements to increase its financial growth; maintaining playing success, treating fans as customers, leveraging the global brand, and developing club media rights.

Manchester United also made a profit of £21.8m on player transfers.

Oil higher in Asian trade, trading above USD 50

Oil prices were higher in Asian trade on Thursday, pushed up by a smaller-than-expected rise in US crude reserves, analysts said.

New York's main contract, light sweet crude for May delivery gained 70 cents to USD 50.08.

Brent North Sea crude for May delivery advanced 59 cents to USD 52.18.

Prices received a mild boost from the latest US energy report released yesterday, which showed the country's crude stocks increased by a smaller margin than the industry had forecast, analysts said.

The weekly Department of Energy report showed crude reserves rose by 1.6 million barrels in the week ending 3rd April 3, lower than the gain of 1.9 million barrels that analysts polled by Dow Jones Newswires had predicted.

"The increase in US crude oil inventories was less than some had feared," said David Moore, a commodity strategist with the Commonwealth Bank of Australia in Sydney.

Oil prices are down significantly from record peaks of above USD 147 reached in July last year, pulled down by worries about the global crisis, but Algeria's energy minister had an upbeat outlook.

"The global economy is starting to pick up, especially in the United States," Algeria's energy minister Chakib Khelil said on Wednesday.

Google addresses newspaper woes

The majority of newspapers should be online, says Google boss Eric Schmidt, amid criticism it should share some of the millions it makes from newslinks.

Media owner Rupert Murdoch has questioned if aggregators like Google should pay to use content.

The Associated Press is to sue to protect its content at a time when the industry is losing readers to the web.

"I would encourage everybody to think in terms of what your reader wants," Mr Schmidt told newspaper bosses.

"These are ultimately consumer businesses and if you [annoy] enough of them, you will not have any more," he warned the Newspaper Association of America's (NAA) annual conference in San Diego.

While he praised the way newspapers initially embraced the internet, Mr Schmidt said they had since dropped the ball allowing the likes of Google to take over content distribution.

"There wasn't an act after that. You guys did a superb job, and the act after that is a harder question."

"Fair use"

In a question and answer session at the end of his keynote address, suggestions that Google and the internet were eroding the intellectual property rights of newspapers was downplayed by Mr Schmidt."From our perspective, there is always a tension around fair use - and fair use is a balance of interest in favour of the consumer."

Industry analyst Ken Doctor of Outsell told the BBC this was the wrong way to look at the argument over how Google profits from newspaper content.

"The real question is, 'Is it fair for news companies to produce all this content for Google and for Google to keep the lion's share of revenue?'

"What we should be focusing on is 'fair share'." said Mr Doctor.

In a blog post, the search engine giant claimed it did provide a financial kickback for newspapers through online advertising.

"We drive traffic and provide advertising in support of all business models - whether news sources choose to host the articles with us or on their own websites," wrote Alexander Macgillvray, Google's associate general counsel for products and intellectual property.

"Users like me are sent from different Google sites to newspaper websites at a rate of more than a billion clicks per month."

Techmeme, which is an aggregator of technology news, agreed that the value of what they did was in driving traffic back to the original publisher of a story.

Much-awaited booking for Tata's Nano starts today

The much-awaited bookings for Tata Motors's Rs one-lakh car Nano opens on Thursday across the country for a limited period of 17 days.

It is understood that Tata Motors itself has sold over 75,000 booking forms from its 218 outlets across the country, although the forms are available at over 30,000 locations across 1,000 cities at company dealerships, branches of State Bank of India and other preferred financiers, and outlets of Westside, Croma, World of Titan and Tata Indicom.

When contacted, a company spokesperson said 'response is progressively increasing everyday', but declined to divulge details.

In a statement the company said it has joined hands with 18 banks and financial institutions to help customers with the booking process and to provide retail finance facilities.

The booking amount ranges between Rs 2,850 and Rs 4,110 among different banks.

While the interest rates on the loan amount would vary between 9 per cent and 14.25 per cent, customers would have to spend Rs 3,468-Rs 4,431 as insurance premium, the company said.

Those, who do not want to avail the financing facility, can book the car directly by paying an amount between Rs 95,000 and Rs 1.4 lakh depending upon the version of Nano.

The company said deliveries would be in a phased manner and within 60 days of the closure of bookings on 25th April, it would process and announce the allotment of 1,00,000 cars in the first phase of deliveries, through a computerised random selection procedure.

Nano, touted as the world's cheapest car, would be available at Rs 1.23 lakh-Rs 1.72 lakh (ex-showroom, Delhi).

Oil prices edge up in Asian trade

Oil prices edged up in early Asian trade on Tuesday, with the market continuing to be volatile, dealers said.

New York's main futures contract, light sweet crude for May delivery, rose four cents to USD 51.09 a barrel.



Brent North Sea crude for May gained six cents to 52.30.



"The oil market seems to be linking itself to the equities market... some lead strengthening seems to be pushing the (oil) market up," said David Johnson, an oil analyst with Macquarie Securities in Hong Kong.



But prices dropped more than a dollar on Tuesday, and some analysts cautioned that trade would remain volatile in the face of the global slowdown and softer demand.



"Traders are certainly realising that we are not out of the woods on the demand side, and that perhaps the optimism that was shown over the last few days was a little bit

premature," said Bart Melek of BMO Capital Markets.



The worldwide slump has cut energy demand, with prices far off their record peaks above 147 dollars last July.

RBS to cut a further 9,000 jobs

The Royal Bank of Scotland is to shed a further 9,000 jobs, half of them in the UK.

BBC Scotland understands the losses are to be in its back office operations.

These include document processing, information technology, procurement and bank property - a division known as Group Manufacturing.

The company would not say where the job losses would have most impact within the UK. It has already announced 2,700 job losses in Britain this year.

Group Manufacturing is the biggest single part of the troubled financial giant, employing a total of 45,000 people worldwide at a cost of £1.2bn last year. Of those staff, 27,000 work in Britain, so within the division, the job cuts represent one job in five.

'Minimise' redundancies

The UK hub of Group Manufacturing is in Edinburgh - where the group is also headquartered - with other significant employment centres, including NatWest, in London, Manchester and Bristol. The decisions on where jobs will be go is to be worked out at a more local level with staff unions. While the aim is to avoid compulsory redundancies, the company wants unions to be flexible on where people work and where they are re-deployed.

The international hubs of the Group Manufacturing division include about 4,000 employees in Greenwich, Connecticut, covering North America. The same number work in that division covering continental Europe from Amsterdam. A further 10,000 are employed in a combined Asian operation based out of Hong Kong, Singapore and Mumbai in India.

Facing a loss for last year of £24.1bn, and propped up by a huge injection of government capital, RBS is under pressure to ensure it recovers within a target of between three and five years.

It is likely the announcement will be the largest single tranche of job losses as the company seeks £2.5bn of cuts in its cost base over the next two years. The whole company employs more than 170,000 people, of whom 106,000 work in the UK.

It has already announced 2,700 job losses in Britain this year, from its UK corporate division. Since the start of the credit crunch, it has announced the shedding of about 15,000 jobs worldwide, including the Group Manufacturing announcement.

The bank has stressed that the 9,000 staff being lost from Group Manufacturing will not all be under pressure to leave. Indeed, it has agreed with British and Europe-wide unions that it will try to minimise compulsory redundancies.

A bank spokesman said the intention was to re-deploy staff into areas of the bank that are expanding, with 650 new jobs already identified.

The bank also reckons on turnover of its staff of about 10%, even in the recession. Over two years, that number of departures from the Group Manufacturing division could come close to the total number of job reductions being sought. In addition, there is a voluntary redundancy scheme, and contract staffing will be cut back.

The reasons being given for the cutback include a downturn in the amount of business coming through RBS. There is also an extensive programme for automating its processes, with more customers using online banking, and new software that should speed and open up the process for loan applications.

Even before it ran into severe financial difficulties, RBS intended to lower its staffing as part of the integration of the Netherlands-based bank, ABN Amro, which it bought nearly two years ago, and which has since been seen as a key reason for RBS's downfall.

Customer concern

Much of RBS's Asian assets are up for sale, as it sheds about a fifth of its balance sheet seen as non-core. It is reported that those interested in buying are Standard Chartered, HSBC, and ANZ, the Australia and New Zealand bank. Without those assets, there is less reason to maintain 'manufacture' on the current scale.

Stephen Hester, chief executive of RBS, said: "We have set a new strategy for RBS to restore the bank to standalone strength as soon as practicable. From this we want the government to be able to realise value from its investment in RBS.

"To do so we need to cut our costs, as in all businesses, given the current recession. Unfortunately that means taking difficult decisions about jobs as well as taking many other cost reduction actions.

"We want to be as open and transparent as possible and are announcing these plans at the earliest possible opportunity so that our employees can prepare for the future."

A source at RBS commented: "We don't need as many people as we did when we were earning £10bn a year. Just about every customer of ours is now laying people off. Banks that are really healthy are laying people off.

"Our customers are saying to us: 'I hope you don't have anybody working in there that you don't need'. It's really important that we are as lean as we can be."

Job shedding has also been affecting financial firms that do not face the severe difficulties on RBS's balance sheet. In the past two weeks, HSBC has moved to shed as many as 3,000 jobs, according to union calculations, or 1,200 according to the bank. Aviva, the insurance company including Norwich Union, announced last week it is to reduce its workforce by 1,700.

Intel works with GE on healthcare

General Electric and chip maker Intel have joined forces to develop hi-tech health care products that will allow patients to be treated at home.

The two firms plan to invest $250m in the project over the next five years.

Intel is best known as the world's largest chip maker but it has been working hard over the past few years to grow a new business in health care.

GE already has a sizable business selling health care products to hospitals and insurance companies.

Neither company has been immune to the effects of the global economic downturn but they were confident that this could become a multi billion dollar business.

At the launch event in New York, Jeff Immelt, GE's chief executive told the BBC he had high hopes for the project.

"Neither Intel nor GE does anything to create small businesses," Mr Immelt said.

"We do things to create big businesses."

Cutting costs

The Intel Health Guide, a special computer which allows doctors to remotely monitor, diagnose and consult with patients at home.

The technology could save hundreds of people from making repeated trips into hospital and could lower costs

"Something like 80% of the spending today in the health care system is on chronic care patients," Paul Otellini, Intel's chief executive said.

"This has the potential to take that down dramatically because a day at home costs a heck of a lot less than a day in the hospital."

As populations age in the US and in other countries, the two companies believe the market for using this kind of technology to manage chronic diseases could grow from $3bn a year to $7.7bn by 2012.

In the UK, the National Health Service in West Lothian is already piloting Intel's Personal Health System.

The deal comes as the Obama administration in the US has made improving the efficiency and lowering the cost of health care a major priority.

To achieve this, companies will have to play their part.

"I think business has an obligation when they have technology and new ideas and new market opportunities to step up," said Mr Otellini.

"Government also has an obligation - sometimes as the payer or the regulator - to be aware of what technology can do," he added.

Switzerland experiences deflation

Switzerland is experiencing deflation according to official figures.

Consumer prices in March were down 0.4% from a year ago, the Federal Statistics Office said, a 50-year low.

The country has been close to deflation all year, with inflation having fallen from a peak of 3.1% in July 2008. The rate was 0.2% in February.

The Swiss National Bank predicts that inflation will average -0.5% this year and remain close to zero throughout 2010 and 2011.

The deflation was blamed on energy, rent and transport costs all falling as a result of lower oil prices.

The year-on-year price fall for March was the biggest since December 1959, when consumer prices fell 0.6%.

"We forecast that CPI would fall into negative territory, but it is a bit surprising how sharp the fall was in March," said Alessandro Bee, an economist at Sarasin.

"It's predominantly due to the impact of lower oil prices."

The Swiss government is forecasting that the economy will shrink by 2.2% this year.

Oil slips below USD 52 after surging overnight

Oil slipped below USD 52 a barrel on Friday in Asia after surging overnight on investor optimism crude demand will soon rebound if the US recession has bottomed.

Benchmark crude for May delivery fell 72 cents to USD 51.92 a barrel by midday in Singapore in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract rose USD 4.25 on Thursday to settle at USD 52.64.



Oil prices have bolted from below USD 35 a barrel six weeks ago, riding a wave of improving investor sentiment that the worst of the US recession may be over.



Crude prices have mirrored a surge in stock markets, with the Dow Jones industrial average up more than 20 per cent during the last month.



"At this point, it's more momentum than fundamentals," said Gerard Rigby, energy analyst with Fuel First Consulting in Sydney. "People are expecting oil to jump over the next 12 to 24 months."



Investors brushed off evidence this week that US crude inventories are at a 16-year high.

Dollar rises above 100-yen mark

The US dollar rose briefly above 100 yen in Asian trading on Friday, the first time it had done so since early November 2008.

The news boosted shares in Japanese exporters, with the likes of Sony and Toyota Motor closing higher.

The dollar later fell to 99.50 yen amid nervousness ahead of the US jobless figures due later on Friday.

In the first three months of 2009, the dollar had its best quarterly performance against the yen since 2001.

"The yen selling was not sustainable before the US jobs data release," said a dealer at a Japanese brokerage.

"Opinion may be tilted towards the yen weakening in the longer term, but the market would first like to see this major event through."

The yen has been falling in value as a result of weak Japanese economic data and speculation that Japanese investors are planning to move funds overseas in the new financial year.

Global markets rise on G20 deal

Stock markets have rallied after world leaders reached a $1.1 trillion deal to tackle the global economic crisis at the G20 summit.

London's FTSE 100 index closed up 4.3%, Germany's Dax index gained 6.1% while France's Cac 40 rose 5.4%.

US markets also took heart as the global efforts unveiled added to optimism that the worst might be over for the world economy.

In New York, the Dow Jones rose 2.8%, or 216.5 points, to 7,978 points.

Stocks were also boosted as the US announced changes to accounting standards that would give companies more freedom in valuing assets and reporting losses.

The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) approved the proposals, which could help boost bank balance sheets.

Earlier, shares in Asia closed higher. Japan's Nikkei 225 index rose 4.4% while Hong Kong's Hang Seng gained 7%.

'Buying mood'

Recent upbeat economic data on the US housing market and on the manufacturing sector has cheered investors.

"Everyone is in a buying mood," said Eric Ross, director of research at brokerage Canaccord Adams.

"Everyone is feeling good."

Hopes that the global downturn might be easing also pushed oil prices up almost 10% to above $50 a barrel.

US light, sweet crude was up $4.25 to $52.64 a barrel, while London Brent crude rose $4.31 to $52.75 a barrel.

"There seems to be a G20 factor," said Tony Machacek, an oil broker at Bache Commodities in London.

"The stock markets are strong and the dollar is weaker. That is also helping the market."