News

Bloomberg OPEC’s second-biggest producer is relinquishing some control over its prized oil in exchange for better prices. In a rare move, Iraq is allowing buyers to load its crude without saying where the cargo will finally end up. They will only have to let the Middle East producer know about the destination two weeks after the shipment’s bill of lading, ...

Bloomberg Ethiopia’s fast-growing economy has Asian investors lining up to build a new $4 billion oil refinery, even as a Blackstone Group LP-backed fuel pipeline project is shelved. The proposed 120,000 barrels-a-day plant has generated interest from Japanese, South Korean and Indian investors, said Zemedeneh Negatu, chairman of US-based Fairfax Africa Fund. The refinery in Awash, east of the capital ...

Riyadh / Reuters Saudi Aramco, the state oil company of Saudi Arabia, is considering entering India as part of its Asian expansion, Nikkei said, citing Aramco’s CEO who said that plans for an Indian refinery are crystallising. “Saudi Aramco is looking at additional investments in China, and India is also a very important destination which we are giving great consideration, ...

Bloomberg Fujifilm Holdings Corp. is gaining control of Xerox Corp. in a deal that would create an $18 billion company and see the iconic American corporate giant launching into new lines of business to seek global growth. The deal would combine Xerox, which has a market value of $8.3 billion, with a joint venture the company operates with Fujifilm, according ...

Bloomberg A deepening slump in US motorcycle demand is spurring more job cuts and a plant closure at Harley-Davidson Inc., a company President Donald Trump has cast as a model American manufacturer. The Milwaukee-based motorcycle maker will close its factory in Kansas City, Missouri, and consolidate production in York, Pennsylvania, according to a statement. The restructuring will eliminate about 260 ...

Bloomberg Google officially closed its $1.1 billion deal with HTC Corp., adding more than 2,000 smartphone specialists in Taiwan to help the search giant chase Apple Inc. in the cut-throat premium handset market. The deal will help Google design more of its own consumer hardware and could set it up to wade deeper into special-purpose chips—like Apple. Google’s most recent ...

Bloomberg The robots are coming—this time, to a dairy farm near you. It wasn’t long ago that cow-milking robots were a novelty in the US, but today, automation is showing up on more farms. One of the big factors spurring the trend: more than half of all workers on dairy farms are immigrants, and the Trump Administration’s hard-line policy stances ...

Bloomberg Volvo AB boosted its forecast for truck markets in the US and Europe this year as low fuel prices and interest rates push demand, a development that’s expected to put more strain on an already tight supply chain. The shares rose the most in three months. The world’s second-biggest truckmaker raised its expectation for industrywide North American deliveries by ...

DUBAI / WAM The National Bank of Ras Al Khaimah (RAKBank) reported a 22 percent y-on-y jump in net profit, which reached AED810.5 million in 2017, up from AED663 million a year earlier. “The figure puts net profit in the fourth quarter of 2017 at AED204.2 million, close to twice the AED108.7 million in net profit in the same quarter ...

ABU DHABI / WAM The Ministry of Health and Prevention (MOHAP) and Mubadala Investment Company (Mubadala) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to explore cooperation across eight key healthcare pillars. The agreement will see the organisations collaborate on a range of healthcare and therapeutic areas in which Mubadala Healthcare and its network of world class healthcare companies has deep expertise. ...