Bloomberg A unit of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. agreed to buy Wilhelm Schulz GmbH, a closely held German maker of piping components, as the billionaire accelerates an expansion in Europe. Rainer Floeth, chief executive officer of Krefeld, Germany-based Wilhelm Schulz, confirmed by phone that Berkshire’s Precision Castparts had agreed to buy the company. He declined to elaborate on ...

  I remember vividly the economic and financial mess President Barack Obama inherited when he was sworn in as the 44th US president eight years ago. Growth and trade were imploding, millions of Americans were losing their jobs, and the stock market was in free fall. This frightful combination was also playing out in many other countries, fueling a sense ...

  Politics and meanness are undermining an attempt to create a new French aerospace champion. Safran SA’s 9.7 billion euro ($10.3 billion) offer for industry supplier Zodiac Aerospace is structured in a way that threatens to give the state a better deal than ordinary shareholders. Safran has secured the agreement of Zodiac’s board for a deal that’s been circling for ...

  The biggest long-term threat to the iPhone isn’t Android, Samsung Electronics Co. or China’s bevy of cheap phone makers. Instead, it’s a deceptively simple idea: Apps work better if you embed them in a single program, rather than let them proliferate across your home screen. WeChat, China’s leading social media app, just launched a new platform with exactly that ...

  Bloomberg Microsoft Corp. and its competitors should eschew artificial intelligence systems that replace people instead of maximizing their time, Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella said. “The fundamental need of every person is to be able to use their time more effectively, not to say, ‘let us replace you’,” Nadella said in an interview at the DLD conference in Munich. ...

  Bloomberg Qualcomm Inc. built itself into the world’s biggest and most profitable smartphone chipmaker by using a simple formula: selling billions of dollars worth of semiconductors while raking in fat profits from licensing fees tied to the underlying technology. That lucrative model is under siege on a growing number of fronts — most recently this week when the US ...

  Dubai / Emirates Business Panasonic, a leading provider of integrated security and video surveillance solutions, introduced its next generation i-PRO® Extreme technology platform at Intersec 2017, taking place at the Dubai International Convention and Exhibition Centre (DICEC) from January 22 -24. Panasonic Marketing Middle East and Africa (PMMAF) has launched the i-PRO Extreme in response to the fast growing ...

  Munster / DPA This mummy has probably had a more eventful afterlife than anything in the three-decade lifespan of the Egyptian man who died and was embalmed and wound in bandages 2,700 years ago. Somewhere along the way the body lost its head, and it may have attended high-school parties in the role of a spook. Apart from lacking ...

  Chichigalpa / DPA Death lurks in the sugarcane fields. He reaps the strong young men, sometimes before they’ve even turned 30. The ones who get away are marked for life, sick and unfit for work. “We’re the walking dead,” says former sugarcane cutter Juan Salgado. There’s a mysterious illness making its way around Central America. It has already claimed ...

  ABU DHABI / WAM The UAE Central Bank has announced that the Money Supply aggregate ‘M1’ increased by 0.3% from AED472.6 billion at the end of November 2016 to AED474 billion at the end of December 2016. In its statement, the bank added that Money Supply aggregate ‘M2’ increased by 1%, from AED1212.9 billion at the end of November ...