April, 2016

• 20 April

  Slow quarter means ‘challenging’ year: Commerzbank CEO

  

    Bloomberg Commerzbank AG Chief Executive Officer Martin Blessing said a “slow” first quarter will make it more difficult to achieve last year’s profit, just a month after the bank projected an increase in full-year earnings. “The result for the first three months is likely to be lower than in the previous quarter,” Blessing, 52, told shareholders at the annual ...

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• 20 April

  PBOC injects funds to meet demand

  

    Bloomberg The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) used open-market operations to inject the most funds in two weeks, helping meet a seasonal spike in demand for cash that also saw the central bank provide two rounds of medium-term loans within a week. The PBOC auctioned 90 billion yuan ($14 billion) of seven-day reverse-repurchase agreements on Tuesday, the most since ...

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• 20 April

  Goldman Sachs sees much better market after bruising Q1

  

    New York / AFP Goldman Sachs reported a sharp decline in first-quarter earnings, but gave a fairly bullish outlook for the mergers and acquisitions business now that financial markets have stabilised. Earnings for the quarter ending March 31 were $1.2 billion, down 56.3 percent from the year-ago period. Revenues sank 40.3 percent to $6.3 billion. Nearly all of the big ...

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• 20 April

  Excessive yen gains could affect inflation trend: BOJ

  

    Tokyo / Reuters Bank of Japan (BOJ) Governor Haruhiko Kuroda said inflation could be affected if the yen continued to rise excessively, leading to further easing measures to meet the central bank’s price target, the Wall Street Journal reported. Kuroda also told the paper that the BOJ was not targetting the exchange rate but that he would continue to ...

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• 20 April

  China seeking takeover of $8bn Yum! brands unit

  

    Bloomberg China wants to get control of the most popular fast-food chain in the country. A consortium backed by sovereign fund China Investment Corp. has expressed interest in buying a majority stake in Yum! Brands Inc.’s China business, which runs more than 7,100 KFC and Pizza Hut eateries across the nation, people with knowledge of the matter said. The ...

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• 20 April

  Malaysia Air CEO quits, turnaround challenges loom

  

    Bloomberg Malaysia Airlines Bhd. said Chief Executive Officer Christoph Mueller will leave the company before his term ends, posing a new challenge to turn around the carrier after two plane crashes in 2014 dented its sales and reputation. Mueller requested to step down before the end of his three-year contract for personal reasons, the carrier said in a statement. ...

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• 20 April

  UK’s N Brown subdued trading faces challenges

  

    Reuters British plus-size fashion retailer N Brown Group Plc expects a hit of about 3 million pounds ($4.31 million) on full-year profit before tax in the new financial year, and said trading so far has been subdued. Shares of N Brown, known for its brands SimplyBe and JD Williams, fell as much as 13 percent to 273 pence, the ...

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• 20 April

  Undelivered Airbus jets jam parking, hurt cash flow

  

    Paris / REUTERS A growing backlog of undelivered Airbus passenger jets, stranded outside their factories due to supplier problems, is putting pressure on the planemaker’s cash generation for the start of the year, industry sources and analysts said. After a slow first quarter in deliveries, parking space at Toulouse airport in France, and at Hamburg in Germany, is increasingly ...

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• 20 April

  Indonesia’s Garuda in 4bn Airbus A330 order

  

    Paris / AFP Airbus said that Indonesian carrier Garuda had signed a firm purchase order for 14 of its new generation wide-bodied A330-900neo airliner for $4 billion. The deal, sealed in London for the re-engined version of Airbus’ popular A330 airliner, is designed to bolster Garuda’s expansion. Airbus said the order, for delivery from 2019, replaces and extends an ...

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• 20 April

  Serbian communist-era firms ‘hang in the balance’

  

    Priboj / AFP Deep in a western Serbian valley, the town of Priboj despairs at the decline of a truck factory that was once its lifeblood — and is now symbolic of the country’s failing state-owned companies. A thriving manufacturer employing thousands under communist Yugoslavia, Fabrika automobila Priboj (FAP) is today one of Serbia’s loss-making enterprises whose future hangs in ...

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