April 27, 2024

You are here: Home / 2011 / Archives for July 2011

Archives for July 2011

Green Column: Obstacles to Capturing Carbon Gas

July 31, 2011 by Leave a Comment

BRUSSELS — Can the world use fossil fuels and protect the climate too?

That is the goal of carbon capture and sequestration, which is a process for trapping carbon dioxide before it reaches the atmosphere and then pumping it underground, or under the seabed.

The process is already used by oil and natural gas companies like BP and Statoil at sites like In Salah, Algeria. There, the carbon dioxide that exists along with natural gas is captured and stored onshore in a saline aquifer.

Despite a tiny leak from a faulty wellhead valve four years ago, and despite the need to reduce the quantities of carbon dioxide injected because pressure had built up in the saline aquifer faster than expected, BP of Britain and Statoil of Norway said, millions of tons of the greenhouse gas have been prevented from reaching the atmosphere.

Oil and natural gas companies also have trapped large amounts of carbon dioxide in the minute pores and spaces in rocks at similar projects in countries like Norway and Canada.

But efforts to make the process, known as C.C.S., a mainstay of efforts by the power industry to go green are hitting obstacles.

Critics warn that a large leak could harm the climate and local populations. They also say huge amounts of state support would be needed to pay for infrastructure like pipelines, taking money away from renewable energy projects.

Supporters say the technology is essential if the world is ever to meet targets for cutting greenhouse gases and preventing runaway climate change. They say C.C.S. is the most viable way to curb emissions from existing fossil fuel plants and that it should be cost-competitive in the coming years.

They also say that there is large storage capacity in depleted oil and natural gas fields and deep saline aquifers across the world.

Although the separate elements of capture, transportation and storage already have been demonstrated, and although big engineering companies like Siemens of Germany and Alstom of France are helping construct pilot projects, a commercial-scale facility for capturing and burying carbon dioxide from a power plant has not yet been built.

Managing costs is a challenge. That was underlined by a decision last month by American Electric Power, a major U.S. utility, to put on hold plans to build a full-scale carbon-capture plant at Mountaineer, a coal-fired electrical plant in West Virginia, where the company has successfully captured and buried carbon dioxide in a small pilot program.

The company said it had to drop the $668 million project because it did not believe state regulators would let it recover its costs by charging customers, leaving no compelling regulatory or business reason to continue the program.

Another factor clouding prospects for C.C.S. is local acceptance, particularly in Europe.

Residents and environmental groups have raised concerns about the possibilities of contaminating water. There also are concerns about suffocation if large quantities of carbon dioxide should leak out and collect in valleys.

The effect that C.C.S. projects could have on property prices has also stirred unease.

Opposition to carbon dioxide burial has become known as numby, for “not under my backyard” — a variation of the more common “nimby,” or “not in my backyard,” denoting opposition to projects like power plants.

Last year, sustained local opposition led the Dutch government to cancel a project led by Royal Dutch Shell, an oil and natural gas company based in the Netherlands, that would have buried carbon dioxide under Barendrecht, a town near Rotterdam.

Delays and a “complete lack of local support” forced the cancellation, according to Maxime Verhagen, the Dutch minister for economic affairs.

In Germany, where there is a fierce debate over whether to pass a law laying down rules for testing carbon dioxide storage, companies like Vattenfall, a Swedish utility, face a long and uncertain wait for permission to test the suitability of burial sites.

Vattenfall had to abandon plans to bury carbon dioxide in Altmark, in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt, because of protests, and it faces a similar challenge at Beeskow, a site in Brandenburg State.

“We’re doing everything we can to develop C.C.S. but the future of the technology now lies in the hands of national politics,” said Maria Lidzell, a spokeswoman for Vattenfall.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=2d74e74f817e2c158007729ec08df112

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: , ,

Roaming Fees as Low as China’s Won’t Be Matched Soon

July 31, 2011 by Leave a Comment

BERLIN — When Su Xiaoqin, a Chinese translator living in Düsseldorf, calls family and friends back in Shanghai, she does not use the mobile network of her German operator, O2. She pops in the SIM card for China Mobile.

As a result, Ms. Su’s calls home cost as little as 2.86 renminbi, or 44 cents, a minute, a small fraction of what a call using the German SIM card would run. That is because China Mobile, the world’s largest operator, with 617 million customers, recently cut its international roaming rates, following similar cuts by its domestic rivals, China Unicom and China Telecom.

“The word has gotten around that the Chinese operators now have the best rates to China,” Ms. Su said.

While Europeans and Americans traveling abroad still face steep roaming charges, travelers from mainland China can call home for as little as it costs to make a local call in that market.

In part, that reflects the growing global clout of the Chinese mobile phone industry, where the three big operators, with a combined 889 million customers, are able to negotiate less expensive roaming deals for their users with international operators.

As a result, one should not expect the lower roaming prices paid by travelers from the mainland to come soon to consumers in Europe, the United States or other parts of the world. In part, that is because European and U.S. operators do not compete directly with their counterparts in China for mobile customers, so they have little financial incentive to match the lower prices.

David Dyson, the chief executive of Three U.K., a British mobile phone operator owned by Hutchison Whampoa, the Hong Kong company, cited another reason. He said that high roaming prices in Europe, especially for downloading data, reflected the operators’ profit expectations, not the true costs of service.

Mr. Dyson said that smaller operators, especially, could not lower roaming rates because of what it costs them to connect calls using the networks of larger operators, whose rates are driven by those profit demands.

In 2007, the European Union stepped in to limit the price of mobile roaming charges in the 27-nation bloc, but those retail price caps — 35 euro cents, or 50 U.S. cents, a minute for making a call — are higher than those paid by consumers from mainland China. In the United States, the level of roaming charges is not regulated by the government but set by American and international operators through private agreements on the costs of using each other’s networks to connect calls.

For travelers from the United States, the roaming charges can still be startlingly high.

In May, Paul O’Brien, the general legal counsel of an international maker of industrial sealants based near Philadelphia, returned home after a business trip to Milan and Rome to a $2,300 roaming bill, which he had incurred in two days of normal calling and surfing.

Mr. O’Brien described his iPhone activity during his Italy trip as moderate — making and receiving calls to the United States through Telecom Italia, and downloading and reading e-mail.

Just two days into what was a four-day trip, his U.S. operator, which he declined to name, shut off his service, citing his company’s policy.

“I was blindsided,” Mr. O’Brien said, adding that he did not know what the limit was that he had exceeded.

Local operators — in Mr. O’Brien’s case, Telecom Italia — tend to reap the most profit from roaming charges, said Deep Basu, the vice president for product strategies and consumer products at Roamware, a software maker in San Jose, California, that helps operators manage roaming traffic. But the U.S. operator, which has more customers than Telecom Italia and thus more clout in negotiating deals on roaming rates, would have received a sizable slice as well.

Customers of China Unicom, the country’s No.2 operator after China Mobile, with 182 million mobile users, pay about 2.8 renminbi, or 44 cents, a minute to call China from most countries in Europe, and as little as 1.5 renminbi from the United States.

The operator makes its low rates possible by running a huge phone callback program, called **100 Program, which assigns local land line phone numbers to its mobile customers while they are abroad and then has a company computer in China call them back over less-expensive land lines to complete their long-distance calls.

China Unicom introduced the service in May, effectively cutting its roaming rates as much as 90 percent. Sophia Tso, a spokeswoman for China Unicom in Hong Kong, said the decision to reduce roaming prices drastically had been made to serve the company’s customers, who are among the 100 million Chinese citizens who travel abroad each year.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=49607679a384ff9dd60232c011325000

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: , ,

Al Jazeera’s New Goal in Sports

July 31, 2011 by Leave a Comment

PARIS — Al Jazeera used to be known, somewhat unfairly, as the television network of Osama bin Laden. Now it wants to become the network of Yoann Gourcuff, Alou Diarra and Eden Hazard.

Mr. Gourcuff, Mr. Diarra and Mr. Hazard are stars of the Ligue 1, the top division of the French professional soccer league. In June, Al Jazeera acquired the rights to show Ligue 1 matches in France, signaling an escalation in the broadcaster’s global ambitions.

Al Jazeera, based in Qatar, has had a significant sports operation in the Middle East for several years, beaming World Cup and European professional soccer, American basketball and Wimbledon tennis across the region via satellite. It is also well known for its news and entertainment channels.

But the deal with the French league, which is to take effect in 2012, is different: For the first time, Al Jazeera will broadcast a major Western sporting event in the league’s domestic market. Its goal is to become the equivalent of a local European broadcaster, no longer content to be seen as merely a niche news channel from the Middle East.

“Al Jazeera has very deep pockets, and they seem to be splashing money everywhere — you have to see it in that context,” said Faisal Abbas, former media editor at Asharq Al-Awsat, an Arabic newspaper that is based in London. “They want to push their presence across multiple platforms and change the perception of the brand.”

The investment in French soccer rights is only one of a number of moves by Qatar, whose ruling family owns Al Jazeera, to expand its international presence in sports.

The emirate was recently named host of the 2022 World Cup. Meanwhile, in France, the Qatar Investment Authority, a government-controlled fund, agreed this spring to acquire a controlling stake in the Paris Saint-Germain soccer team, which plays in the Ligue 1.

“They want the world to know that Al Jazeera, the broadcaster from Qatar, the 2022 World Cup host, has rights to all sorts of sports properties,” said Henri de La Grandville, senior researcher at Sportcal, a Web site that covers the business of sports. “It’s about getting themselves noticed, and they’re doing an excellent job.”

In its deal with the Ligue 1, Al Jazeera will pay €90 million, or $130 million, a year to show two games a week for four seasons. It is sharing the rights with Canal Plus, the French pay-television company, which will also broadcast two matches a week; Canal Plus is paying far more, €420 million a year, but it gets its pick of the best matches, while Al Jazeera gets the leftovers.

Ligue 1 rights are currently shared by Canal Plus and Orange, a unit of France Télécom, which set up a pay-TV channel three years ago to show the matches and other sports events.

The Orange Sport channel has attracted only 500,000 customers — not enough to cover the €200 million a year that it has been paying for Ligue 1 rights. Now the company is looking to unload Orange Sport, either via a sale or a partnership with another broadcaster — perhaps Al Jazeera.

“We are holding discussions with them, in the same way we are discussing opportunities with other interested parties, but this is still at a very early stage and too premature to come to any conclusions,” said Vanessa Clarke, a spokeswoman for Orange.

Al Jazeera, which did not make an executive available to answer questions, has not detailed its plans for French soccer broadcasts. Nasser al-Khelaifi, general manager of Al Jazeera Sport, told the French sports newspaper L’Équipe in June that Al Jazeera was considering several possibilities.

“We are in talks with Orange Sport, but not exclusively,” he said. “There are other options. We could start a channel. We are very open to talks. ”

A partnership with, and potentially an acquisition of, Orange could solve several potential problems for Al Jazeera. One is that it needs to acquire additional sports content quickly to fill out the programming lineup for a French sports channel. It also needs distribution deals with pay-TV platforms to deliver the channel to viewers’ living rooms. Orange already has these things in place.

“If they tried to do it on their own, it would be a long road to creating a profitable business,” said Tim Westcott, senior analyst at Screen Digest in London.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=5ad90b9798bb775803595e33949b7492

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: , ,

That Aug. 2 Deadline? It May Be Impossible, Veteran Lawmakers Say

July 31, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The seemingly unbridgeable impasse between the two parties as the deadline for raising the nation’s debt limit approaches has Tom Daschle losing sleep, as he never did when he was a Senate Democratic leader in the mid-1990s and Congressional Republicans forced government shutdowns rather than compromise on spending cuts.

“That was nothing compared to this. That was a shutdown of the government; this could be, really, a shutdown of the entire economy,” Mr. Daschle said. “You can’t be too hyperbolic about the ramifications of all this.”

Democrats and Republicans with legislative experience agree that even if both sides decided Saturday to raise the $14.3 trillion borrowing ceiling and to reduce future annual deficits, it would be extremely difficult for the compromise measure to wend its way through Congress before Tuesday’s deadline, given Congressional legislative procedures.

But such a bipartisan deal seemed virtually impossible on Friday, as House Republicans approved their bill and dug in deeper against compromise with President Obama.

Any possibility of avoiding an economy-shaking default seemed to rest on hopes of a so-far nonexistent compromise in the Senate — between the majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, and the Republican minority leader, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky — that could pass by Tuesday and then be sent to the House.

That would force Speaker John A. Boehner to decide at the 11th hour whether to hold a House vote on a bill that would not get many Republican votes, forcing him to rely on Democrats and perhaps further weaken his leadership, or to risk blame for an economic crisis.

“He’s going to have to pass it with Democratic votes. That’s going to be a tough decision, but he doesn’t have any choice at that point, particularly if the markets are reacting,” said Tom Davis, a former House Republican leader from Virginia. “That’s the position they’ve got themselves in.”

But, he added: “The stakes are much higher here. If interest rates start spiking up, it’s going to cost us a lot more than anything you could save. They’re playing brinkmanship with our credit rating. That’s not very smart.”

Mr. Davis recalled his vote in late September 2008 for the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program that President George W. Bush sought to rescue a financial system near collapse. “I hated TARP, but no one had a better alternative,” he said.

But most of his Republican colleagues opposed the rescue measure and helped defeat it, sending the stock markets tumbling even as the vote was taking place. That reaction forced the Republicans to retreat, and days later a bailout bill carried on a second try.

Mr. Davis predicted that the current standoff over the debt limit could end similarly. “When the markets react” — as early as Monday if there is no compromise in sight — “I think the politicians will act,” he said.

Yet many of the Congressional Republicans who won office last November with the help of the antigovernment Tea Party movement, giving their party control of the House, campaigned on promises to resist any government bailouts and to oppose an increase in the debt limit. Some lawmakers have been quoted describing the debt-limit vote as a way to make up for Republicans’ support of the bank rescue three years ago.

Against that backdrop, major business groups issued statements on Friday reiterating their calls for a deal, but with a heightened note of alarm.

The Business Roundtable, an association of executives of some of the country’s largest corporations, sent a letter to the White House and Congress warning that “inaction poses an unacceptable financial risk to the nation’s economic growth and job creation” — this on a day when the latest economic data confirmed that growth slowed in the second quarter with the fallout of Japan’s tsunami, Europe’s debt crisis and upheaval in the Middle East.

“Failure to Raise Debt Ceiling Could Turn the Economy Back Into a Recession” was the headline on a statement from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

“I’ve never seen people genuinely worried like this,” said Vin Weber, a former representative from Minnesota, now a Republican strategist who has been meeting with other Republicans, including lawmakers, this week. “This time you have people who genuinely don’t know what the outcome is going to be, and they’re worried that the wrong outcome could genuinely be disastrous.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=116ec8ffec072a59543b2b8ee7d2eabf

Filed Under: Economy News Tagged With: , ,

Trade in Pork Bellies Comes to an End, but the Lore Lives

July 31, 2011 by Leave a Comment

CHICAGO — This city’s market for the pork belly, a commodity nearly everyone seemed to have heard of but only a small, close-knit fraternity truly understood, is no more.

When the Chicago Mercantile Exchange announced the other day that pork belly futures would no longer be traded, it was hardly a shock. Trades had shrunk to almost nothing. Volatility was too much. The frozen bellies, used to make bacon, were, in the view of some, losing relevance.

Still, the demise of the futures means something else is really gone now, too — a unique belly culture and its hard-charging, daring cast of characters who, decades ago, made their fortunes in the high pressure of the belly pit.

“It was a club,” said Gary Wilhelmi, who arrived at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange as a markets reporter not long after pork bellies helped pioneer the exchange’s livestock futures markets in 1961. “If you were new, you could come to the trading floor, and you could come to the belly pit. But they wouldn’t trade with you.”

There was the balding trader whose wig was seen as a gauge of the market’s volatility; on the craziest days, the wig’s part ran ear to ear, Mr. Wilhelmi recalled. There was the analyst who died right there. “Bellies killed him,” Mr. Wilhelmi said. And there was the veteran trader who once told Mr. Wilhelmi — who was, at the time, trying to analyze a trading report on pork bellies — not to bother. “The bellies,” the trader told him, “are what we say they are.”

Pork bellies have long held a puzzling mystique to the public. Experts in the field offer a range of sometimes conflicting explanations: everybody likes bacon; the word “belly” sounds funny; no one actually knows what a pork belly is. Whatever the reason, pork bellies pop up in an inordinate number of references in magazines, popular culture and movies, like “Trading Places,” the 1983 film in which Eddie Murphy’s character used pork bellies to explain, in unforgettably bare terms, how a market works.

To hear many who frequented the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in the early 1960s tell it, the trading of pork belly futures seemed to open up a whole new set of possibilities — other livestock, for instance — for the exchange. “The bellies are gone,” said Gary Truitt, the president of Hoosier Ag Today. “But they really did make a contribution.”

Way back, pork belly futures made sense. The bellies were frozen and set aside, then used to make bacon during the summers when the demand for it (think bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches) rose. But the pork belly landscape has shifted, said Shane Ellis, a livestock economist at Iowa State University. With bacon accompanying salads, hamburgers, even chocolate, it is on call all year now, removing some of the demand for frozen bellies.

For many here, the announcement by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in July that no further such trades would be made was merely acknowledging the inevitable. Some said it was high time. Past time, in the view of some, who had worried that the ups and downs of trading were too risky when almost no trades at all were being made. It was hard to imagine next to the memories of the old belly pit, where you had to really watch out, Mr. Truitt said, or you would “get your clock cleaned.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=0e63982bf6e84ffb8a8ba51e4cd5fa5f

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: , ,

Sure Cure for the Debt Problem: Economic Growth

July 31, 2011 by Leave a Comment

It seems remarkable now, with all the End Times talk of debt ceilings and default, but it was only 11 years ago that the owners of that electronic totem, the Durst family, simply pulled the plug. The clock, a fixture since 1989, went dark after the federal government ended its 2000 fiscal year with a record $236.4 billion budget surplus.

Today, well — you know. We face the largest budget deficit the nation has ever known: $1.6 trillion, the equivalent of about 11 percent of our economy. And, whatever Washington does, many economists say the situation will grow only worse, particularly as Americans age and Medicare costs spiral higher.

But there is, in theory, a happy solution to our debt troubles. It’s called economic growth. No need to raise taxes or cut programs. Just get the economy growing the way it used to.

Good luck with that. Growth is in short supply these days, as new, dismal numbers underscored on Friday. Revised data showed that the recession took an even bigger bite of the economy than we thought. And economists are sizing up the risks of another recession.

“The basic issue is that the U.S. is on an unsustainable fiscal track,” says Dean Maki, the chief United States economist at Barclays Capital. “From that point, none of the choices are fun.” The most obvious choices, Mr. Maki says, are to reduce spending (ouch), raise taxes (yuck), let inflation run (gasp) or default (thud).

We wouldn’t need any of that if we could restore economic growth. If that happened, Americans would become richer and pay more taxes. Et voilà! — we’d pay down the debt painlessly.

Crazy as that might sound, particularly given Friday’s figures, the possibility isn’t some economic equivalent of that nice big farm where your childhood dog Skip was sent to run free. There are precedents.

Before its economy crashed, Ireland was a star of this sort of debt reduction. In the 1980s, Ireland’s debt dwarfed its economy. Over the next two decades, though, that debt shrank to about a quarter of gross domestic product, largely because the economy went gangbusters.

“Ireland went from being, you know, the emerging market in a European context, to a very dynamic economy,” says Carmen Reinhart, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and co-author of “This Time Is Different,” a history of debt crises.

The United States has done the same in the past, too. After World War II, gross federal debt reached 122 percent of G.D.P., the highest ratio on record. But over the next 40 years, it fell to about 33 percent. That wasn’t because some blue-ribbon panel prescribed austerity; it was because the American economy became much, much richer.

The same happened during the prosperous 1990s, which began with deficits and ended with surpluses. Former President Bill Clinton is often credited for that turnabout, as he engineered higher tax rates. But most economists attribute the surplus years primarily to extraordinarily rapid growth.

It would be lovely to repeat that experience today, and send our federal debt off to that farm with Skip.

But the structure of America’s federal spending is different now than it was in, say, the immediate postwar decades. Back then, growth helped to erase the debt. But remember that in the 1950s, the United States didn’t have Medicare. The population was younger, and Americans didn’t live as long.

Given the health spending obligations we face, and the debt overhang we’re already dealing with, growth rates would have to acquire something like Ludicrous Speed, as in the movie “Spaceballs,” to keep up. And, near term, even modest speed is unlikely.

Usually after a recession, growth snaps back quickly and the economy makes up for ground lost — and then some. That’s not the case this time, at least so far. In the 60 years before the Great Recession, the economy expanded at an average annual rate of 3.5 percent. In the second quarter of this year, it grew at less than half of that pace, putting us further and further behind where we would be if the economy were functioning normally.

These doldrums won’t last forever, but many predict that economic growth to come will be somewhat slower than it was before the recession, for many of the same reasons that our debt is growing so quickly — the aging of the population, for instance.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=f7633028f99871bac6838a48fed93b06

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: , ,

Corner Office: Peter Löscher : The Trust That Makes a Team Click

July 31, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Q. Do you remember the first time you were in a leadership position?

A. I was captain of the volleyball team in high school and then in college.

Q. And did that role come pretty naturally to you?

A. Yes. It came naturally because, at the end of the day, it’s about fostering the best performance from the people on the team. It’s less a question of how you train and your physical conditioning. The difference between a good team and a great team is usually mind-set. When you watch great games in sports, you see there’s a moment, all of a sudden, when the team clicks. It’s something that’s always caught my attention — why and how that happens with teams.

Q. And how do you make those moments happen?

A. When you’re in business, I think the underlying principle is trust. How do you establish within a team a blind trust so that each person plays for the other? Business is about lining up a leadership team or a group of people and you rally them behind a cause or a certain direction. But the underlying strength is the trust within the team — so that you actually are no longer just playing individually at your best, but you’re also trying to understand what you can do to make the team better. And for me a defining moment in this regard was when I arrived for the first time in the United States, and had my first leadership role running a whole company.

Q. Tell me more about that.

A. It was an agricultural group, and I had the responsibility to lead a team that stretched from Mexico to Canada. There were three different entities but one leadership team. So all of a sudden I find myself in cultural situations where I start to recognize that even though two people are speaking English, there’s a distinct cultural difference. So the challenge was how to lead a diverse team, and this was always one of my interests.

My forefathers are from Italy, my parents are Austrian, my wife is Spanish, two of our children are American and the third is Spanish, so I have the United Nations at home. You have to adapt to a diverse environment and appreciate the diversity.

My career has allowed me to hone this skill. I’ve worked in Asia. I’ve worked in Europe. I’ve worked in the U.S. When you start to run a global business you must appreciate the different environments you’re operating in and then try to combine them. When I arrived at Siemens, the global leadership team was mostly Germans with a certain cultural background, with a certain experience. Now we have a much more diverse team. The last thing you want as a leader is to have clones of yourself.

Q. Any other lessons learned from starting so many new jobs as you’ve moved around?

A. The most important thing is, when you arrive somewhere new, that you come in without a preset agenda. I didn’t join Siemens with a leadership team in mind. I’m just the 12th C.E.O. in the history of the company, which was founded in 1847. So the culture of the company was actually formed over a long period of time, through longevity of leadership. So for me the important thing was to come in and say Siemens doesn’t need a revolution. We will go for an evolution but with speed, speed, speed.

And I said I need 100 days. Obviously the first expectations are: What are the first decisions? What will he do? I said I need 100 days because I want to talk to as many people as possible, and go around the world so that I really understand what is on people’s minds, what the issues are. I went from China to India to Japan to Brazil to the U.S. Slowly but surely the agenda was formed, and then you move forward, and you work closely with your leadership team and all the changes that we have initiated.

And then I went through a complete assessment program for the top 100 positions. We benchmarked everybody against outside candidates, and it was a totally open process. You have to think about how you develop an agenda together with your team, and how you build trust. And one element of building trust is transparency.

Q. You did this benchmarking assessment, but certainly chemistry with you is part of it, too.

A. Absolutely. This was very important. At the end of the day, there must be chemistry, there must be a sense that this is the team that I want to create, with people who believe in its totality. Because you can have a great team of superstars, but it’s by no means certain that they will actually be a great team.

Q. How do you hire for key leadership positions in your organization?

A. The most important thing is to look for diversity in your career path. I will look for passion, because I think that’s a very important element.

Q. And how do you get at that?

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=029f8989594933d905f2793f6af0e5f5

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: , ,

Stocks Fall After G.D.P. Data

July 31, 2011 by Leave a Comment

A disappointing report on the nation’s second-quarter economic activity spurred a steep initial decline in stocks in the United States on Friday, adding to the malaise in the markets as investors wait for an outcome of the debt ceiling debate in Washington.

The three main indexes raced lower by about 1 percent shortly after the market opened, responding to the Commerce Department’s report that gross domestic product grew at an annual rate of 1.3 percent in the second quarter, well below analysts’ forecasts. The department also revised the first-quarter annual rate to 0.4 percent from earlier estimates of 1.7 percent.

But through the course of the trading session, stocks retraced some ground, possibly in response to the prospect of a resolution related to the other main market factor on Friday: the debt ceiling impasse.

At the close, the Dow Jones industrial average, retreating for the sixth consecutive trading day, was down 96.87 points, or 0.79 percent, to 12,143.24.

The Standard Poor’s 500-stock index, a broader measure of the market, lost 8.39 points, or 0.65 percent, to 1,292.28. The Nasdaq composite index fell 9.87 points, or 0.36 percent, to 2,756.38.

The broader market as measured by the S.P. ended the week down about 3.9 percent, its largest weekly loss in more than a year. It also recorded its third consecutive monthly loss. The last time the broader market closed lower for three straight months was in 2008, for the months of September, October and November.

Commerce Department revisions to earlier G.D.P. figures suggested that the recovery was weaker than initial estimates had let on. Consumer spending, accounting for about 70 percent of G.D.P., was virtually unchanged in the second quarter.

Stephen Wood, Russell Investments’ chief market strategist, noted that many economists had expected a slow second quarter, for reasons including severe weather and the supply chain disruptions that followed the earthquake in Japan.

But changes to the G.D.P. estimates for the first quarter and the quarters before it weighed especially heavily on sentiment.

“We were clearly looking at a second-quarter slow patch,” he said. “The revision to Q1 caught the market by surprise.”

The lack of a strong recovery highlights the difficulties Congress is facing in its deadlocked deliberations to raise the debt ceiling for the American government because some businesses are delaying decisions amid the uncertainty. A recovery in the job market and consumer spending is seen as crucial in stimulating the pace of the economy.

While it was another day of selling, investors had few alternatives for their money.

“The debt ceiling debate, if you can call it that, is an ongoing drama,” Mr. Wood said. “Where do you go given that Treasuries are in the teeth of the debt ceiling negotiations? This is uncharted waters.”

Kevin H. Giddis, the executive managing director and president for fixed-income capital markets at Morgan Keegan Company, described the G.D.P. report as “roundly disappointing.”

He also said that the stalemate in the debate in Congress was having an impact on the markets.

“The Treasury market is trading higher this morning as yet another day goes by without a viable plan for resolving the debt ceiling impasse,” said Mr. Giddis in an early commentary, referring to prices.

As Treasury prices rose, the yield on the benchmark 10-year note fell sharply to 2.79 percent in late afternoon trading, compared with 2.96 percent late Thursday.

Lawmakers have to reach a deal by Aug. 2 or the government might face a shortfall and be unable to meet its financial obligations.

Declines in European markets steepened after the G.D.P. report was released in the United States. The FTSE 100 in London fell 0.99 percent to 5,815.19, the DAX in Frankfurt was down 0.44 percent to 7,158.77 and the CAC 40 in Paris fell 1.07 percent to 3,672.77. The euro rose to $1.439.

Catherine Rampell contributed reporting from Washington.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 29, 2011

An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to the number of consecutive trading days the Dow Jones industrial average had declined. Friday was the sixth.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=b8199419c85a214e8d218391640020f2

Filed Under: Economy News Tagged With: , ,

Greentech: Plug-and-Play Batteries: Trying Out a Quick-Swap Station for E.V.’s

July 31, 2011 by Leave a Comment

THERE may be fewer than 500 electric cars on Danish roads, but signs of progress in building an infrastructure to support a larger population of E.V.’s. are already evident.

The first electric car battery swapping station in Europe opened here last month, the initial site in a network of 24/7 fully automated drive-through stations. There, the lithium-ion battery packs, which weigh about 600 pounds, will be removed from specially designed cars and replaced with a fully charged pack. The swap takes five minutes.

Is this plan — a solution that could make E.V’s practical for long trips — some sort of utopian E.V. fantasy? I thought so until I experienced the process myself.

I was in the second car to do a battery swap after the ribbon was cut on June 28. Passengers in the first car included Lykke Friis, Denmark’s minister of climate and energy, and Johnny Hansen, chief executive of Better Place Denmark, the local branch of the Silicon Valley company. It is building the swap stations and related businesses in Australia, China, Denmark, Israel (where the world’s first swap station is) and eventually, the United States.

Better Place has 19 more battery swap stations in the works for Denmark. “By the first of April, we will cover the whole country,” Mr. Hansen said, referring to 2012, with stations no more than 40 miles apart.

At this point, only Renault is making cars designed for quick battery swaps. The company stretched the gasoline-powered version of its Fluence, a Corolla-like sedan, by five inches to accommodate the suitcase-size 24-kilowatt-hour battery pack. The resulting Fluence Z.E., for zero emissions, goes into full production later this year, available in either swappable or fixed-battery versions.

My 20-minute drive in the Fluence Z.E. from the Better Place offices in Copenhagen to the swap station in the suburb of Gladsaxe, was pleasingly uneventful. The swap station adjoins a filling station, where a gallon of gasoline was priced at the equivalent of $9.15 and diesel was $8.40.

The battery swap was also uneventful. Swipe a membership card at the entrance and the garage door to the battery-change track, similar to a carwash tunnel, opens. Pull forward and the robot takes over — the driver simply shifts into neutral and lets go.

As the car is guided forward, it’s lifted a few inches. Inside the car, you hear buzzes and hums and feel vibrations, but there’s no view of what is happening below. About a minute into the experience, the dashboard message indicates empty battery — meaning it’s gone — after which there’s no air-conditioning, although music and other functions continue. During most of Denmark’s year, the brief lack of climate control would not be a problem, but during my trip, on a hot summer day, the sealed cabin quickly became steamy.

That small discomfort did not mar the significance of the occasion: four and a half minutes after entering the station, the car had a fresh battery. The sedan was lowered and we pulled out of the tunnel ready to drive another 100 miles or so, according to Renault’s range estimate. The Better Place robot worked.

Better Place subscribers purchase their cars, but not the expensive battery packs. For a fixed fee of about $350 a month, they will lease access to the batteries, swap stations and charge points.

Renault says it intends to produce more than 100,000 Fluence Z.E. sedans through 2015, although availability in Denmark will be limited. Another battery-swappable model from Renault, the Zoe Z.E. — a smaller hatchback more suited to Danish tastes — is expected next year. But it could be a number of years before other carmakers produce models that work with the Better Place stations.

The economics are challenging. Each station costs “a couple of million Euros” — about $3 million — to build, Mr. Hansen said. That is a big investment for stations that might barely be used in the next couple of years.

The Better Place business model is a top-down, central-office approach to electric car charging infrastructure. Whether that plan will work may be uncertain, but its Danish swap station does deliver as promised.

When E.V.’s finally arrive here, Denmark could be one of a few places in the world to have eliminated limited driving range and insufficient charging spots as potential obstacles to the adoption of electric cars.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/31/automobiles/a-plug-and-play-plan-for-ev-batteries.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Global Business Tagged With: , ,

Will Plug-In BMWs Turn Enthusiasts On?

July 31, 2011 by Leave a Comment

BMW fans can soon decide for themselves whether the company has delivered on its promise. On Friday in Frankfurt, BMW unveiled working prototypes of the i8, a plug-in hybrid sport coupe that will carry a six-figure price tag, and the i3, a four-seat battery-powered compact car aimed at a wider market.

The two cars are the first from the company’s new “i” subbrand for electric cars, plug-in hybrids and other alternative-power vehicles. While BMW hasn’t disclosed what other models may be in the works, the i8 and i3 appear to be the high and low ends of what may someday be a broader line of low-emission, high-mileage offerings.

Though officially labeled concept cars, the prototypes presented in Frankfurt are essentially the vehicles that will begin rolling off an assembly line in Leipzig, Germany, in 2013. BMW plans to market the cars in all of its main markets, including the United States, by the end of 2013, with the emphasis on urban areas.

•

There was never much worry that the i8, versions of which BMW has shown before, would disappoint purists. With a battery-powered electric motor turning the front wheels and a 1.5-liter 3-cylinder gasoline engine driving the back, the i8 will race from a standstill to 100 kilometers per hour (or 62 miles per hour) in 4.6 seconds, BMW says. That is faster than the most powerful version of BMW’s Z4 sports roadster and competitive with most incarnations of the Porsche 911.

The i8 is also a riposte to the Audi R8 E-tron and Mercedes-Benz SLS E-Cell, electric sports cars that have already been publicly shown in concept form and will go into limited production within the next two years.

The four-seat i8 can go 20 miles solely on battery power and will theoretically travel more than 100 miles on a gallon of gas when the engine and batteries are working together, with the electric motor providing a power boost during acceleration. The company concedes that hard driving will cut that figure in half; this BMW may be green, but it can also be aggressive.

It is less clear if the i3, presented as a city car, will rate a place alongside highly regarded BMWs like the 3 Series. The fuzzy renderings the company had shown before Friday, as it carefully rationed information about the electric-car project, looked more like a streamlined Mini than a prototypical Bimmer.

There had remained doubts as to whether the company was really willing to risk its prestige on a market for electric cars that, for all the hoopla, remained unproven. But based on the model shown in Frankfurt, BMW has clearly concluded that the i3 will cast a positive halo on its brand.

The car is visually a BMW, including the trademark double-kidney grille, which, however, is purely decorative. The battery-powered i3 doesn’t need a front air intake for engine cooling.

The i3 also preserves the rear-wheel-drive format that is another BMW hallmark. At the same time, designers have updated the design language for the iPhone generation. Familiar elements, including a prominent roundel badge and L-shaped taillights, mix with features like transparent roofs and side panels, the better to show off the carbon-fiber passenger compartment and the seats of leather tanned with environmentally friendly olive oil.

The i cars also signal that they represent a new kind of BMW. In contrast to the monocolor of most conventional cars, the i8 and i3 prototypes have what BMW calls layered schemes, swoops of carbon black and light gray on the body panels, with blue accents.

The i3 aims for Euro-coolness rather than the techno-nerdiness of a Toyota Prius or Nissan Leaf.

“It is a BMW,” said Richard Steinberg, who is in charge of the company’s electric car operations in the United States. “It remains an ultimate driving machine.”

The performance metrics of the i3 seem respectably BMW-like. It can go from 0 to 62 m.p.h. in less than 8 seconds, faster than some variants of BMW’s 1 Series and 3 Series cars. Moreover, the i3 will deliver a nice kick from stoplights, reaching 60 k.p.h. (37 m.p.h.) in just 4 seconds, according to BMW. That is because electric motors deliver peak torque from a standstill. In internal combustion engines, torque increases, up to a point, with the engine speed.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/31/automobiles/will-plug-in-bmws-turn-enthusiasts-on.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Global Business Tagged With: , ,
Next Page »