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Iraq loosens oil shackles for premium prices

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, ...

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Ethiopia $4bn refinery spawns Asian interest

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 ...

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Unions oppose Norway power export drive

Bloomberg Norway’s vast resources of Europe’s cheapest and greenest electricity has helped its energy-intensive industry gain an edge and produce everything from aluminum to chemicals and tankers. But now the nation’s powerful unions are objecting to plans by grid managers and utilities to get in on the act by spending more than $6 billion on cables to profit from selling ...

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Saudi Aramco mulls expansion to India

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, ...

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Harley shuts plant as woes worsen

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 ...

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Google bets on $1.1bn deal to chase Apple

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 ...

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Thanks to Trump, more milk in US will be coming from robots

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 ...

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Rising truck demand to strain supply chain

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 ...

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Britain has indeed lost its bearings on Brexit

The leaked UK government forecasts of Brexit’s impact on the economy discusses several scenarios, none of them favorable. But the scariest takeaway was that London still isn’t clear on what kind of deal it’s capable of getting, or what it wants. Almost 600 days have passed since the referendum. The three scenarios discussed in the assessment dated January 2018, are ...

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