News

  Madrid / AFP Spain’s heavily indebted telecoms giant Telefonica Thursday reported a plunge in profits on adverse exchange rates but maintained its objectives for the year. It posted net profits of 693 million euros ($770 million) in the second quarter, down 54.5 percent, below the figure of 743 million predicted analysts polled by Factset. The group was hit by ...

  Bloomberg Royal Bank of Canada ousted Toronto-Dominion Bank from the top spot in a J.D. Power consumer banking satisfaction ranking for the first time, ending a decade-long winning streak for the country’s second-largest lender by assets. Royal Bank captured the highest grade among Canada’s five biggest banks with 765 points on a 1,000-point scale, according to a study released ...

  WAM The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has announced the selection of eight new research and development projects to receive a total of $11.5 million in federal funding under DOE’s Subsurface Technology and Engineering Research, Development, and Demonstration Crosscut initiative. The new projects are focused on furthering geothermal energy and carbon storage technologies, and will be funded by the ...

  Paris / AFP The board of energy giant EDF is voting on Thursday on a hugely controversial project to build a nuclear power station in Britain which critics say could bankrupt the French utility. EDF’s directors are deeply divided over the planned construction of two nuclear reactors at Hinkley Point for £18 billion (21.4 billion euros, $23.8 billion), with ...

  Frankfurt / AFP Scandal-struck car manufacturer Volkswagen said Thursday that its profits fell in the second quarter by 57 percent to 1.15 billion euros ($1.3 billion). Second-quarter profits were weighed down by almost 2.5 billion euros of special items, mostly related to 2015’s diesel emissions cheating scandal. “Further enormous feats of strength will be needed to contain the high ...

  London / AFP Royal Dutch Shell’s net profit collapsed in the second quarter on low oil prices, weak refining margins and production outages, the British energy giant said Thursday. Net profits sank 71 percent to $1.175 billion in the three months to June, compared with $3.986 billion in the same part of 2015, Shell announced in a results statement. ...

  ABU DHABI / WAM Under the directives of His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces, the Crown Prince’s Court has launched an education initiative to be included in school curricula and courses in the form of a subject entitled, “Moral Education”, in cooperation and ...

  DUABI / EMIRATES BUSINESS Emaar Malls, the shopping malls and retail business majority-owned by global property developer Emaar Properties (DFM: EMAAR), has reported first-half (January to June) 2016 net profit of AED 987 million (US$ 269 million), 17 percent higher than the net profit of AED 845 million (US$ 230 million) during the same period last year. Revenue for ...

  ABU DHABI / WAM Emirates Telecommunications Group Co. (Etisalat Group) reported a consolidated net profit (after federal royalty) of AED 2.3 billion for the second quarter of 2016, a 51 percent year-on-year rise. “The increase in profit is attributed to lower finance costs, incurring forex gain during the period as compared to forex loss in the same period last ...

  DUBAI / Reuters The quality of real estate loans in the United Arab Emirates has continued to improve despite sliding home prices, the International Monetary Fund said, in a sign that the UAE is coping better with a real estate downturn than it did in the last slump seven years ago. The quality of loans to households – a ...