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Bloomberg Italy is looking to shed its status as one of Europe’s most expensive gas markets, but the way it plans to do so has riled traders. Lawmakers will likely discuss a proposed national energy strategy that would overhaul the country’s gas sector and may cut prices by 5 percent. Economic Development Minister Carlo Calenda seeks to turn the plan, ...

SINGAPORE / Reuters Spot prices for October-loading Iraqi Basra Light crude in Asia have slipped to discounts against its official selling price and could stay weak for another month after the producer did not cut prices for November, four trade sources said. Iraq kept the November official selling price for Basra Light to Asia unchanged even as Saudi Arabia trimmed ...

ALGIERSE / Reuters Algeria’s state energy company Sonatrach is facing difficulties meeting clients’ demands for gas exports, its chief executive said, citing unwieldy beaucracy and the need to attract more foreign expertise. Sonatrach, Algeria’s cash cow and a major gas supplier to Europe, has been shaken by corruption scandals, the frequent departure of top executives and bureaucratic inefficiencies that have ...

Bloomberg Steel demand in India is gathering speed amid an infrastructure building boom that’s set to more than double capacity of the nation’s mills, according to the government. “We’re expecting domestic consumption to accelerate in the decade between 2020-2030,” Steel Secretary Aruna Sharma said in New Delhi. Annual capacity stands at 126 million metric tons and is forecast to rise ...

Bloomberg Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. will more than double research and development spending to $15 billion over the next three years to develop next-generation technology, drive its sprawling business and explore moonshot projects that could upend industries. The e-commerce giant plans to set up seven research labs and hire 100 scientists around the world to delve into artificial intelligence, the ...

Bloomberg When Infosys set out to remake its internal training programme, instructors visited flight schools to see how professional pilots are taught to deal with fast-changing situations. That led India’s outsourcing giant to model classes on flight simulators that teach recruits to work faster, think for themselves and anticipate corporate customers’ needs. They’re put through multiple scenarios, and no two ...

Bloomberg Coal India Ltd. signed an agreement with workers unions to raise salaries of its non-executive staff, ending months of negotiations over the increase that affects pay until 2021. The state-run miner will incur an average annual cost of $868 million because of the rise, it said in a stock exchange filing. The increase will be effective for five years ...

Bloomberg At the height of the dot-com bubble in late 1999 and early 2000, Masayoshi Son’s net worth was surging by $10 billion a week. For three days, he was the richest person in the world, Son said. But before Son had a chance to tell anyone, SoftBank Group Corp. crashed. The company’s shares plunged 75 percent in two months ...

Bloomberg ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­ Just over a month after Amazon.com Inc. ate Whole Foods, the shakeout in the American grocery aisle keeps getting uglier. The latest sign of trouble: Private-equity giant Apollo Global Management recently tossed a $50 million lifeline to Fresh Market, the struggling high-end chain it took private only 17 months ago. It will only get worse from here, analysts ...

Bloomberg Social-media giants such as Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. will have to reveal the scale of cyber bullying in the UK and face being made to pay the cost of dealing with it. Under the latest guidance by the UK government, technology companies will be required to publish an annual report on how complaints are handled, the reported abuse ...