The Gulf Time Newspaper One of the finest business newspapers in the UAE brought to you by our professional writers and editors.

  Economists are increasingly turning their attention to the problem of monopoly. This doesn’t mean literal monopoly, like when one utility company provides all the power in a city. It refers to market concentration in general — when an industry goes from having 20 players to having only 10, or when the four biggest companies in an industry start taking ...

  Part of Warren Buffett’s mystique is his fondness for a good value. He still lives in an Omaha house he bought in the 1950s. Buffett’s license plate at one point read “Thrifty.” When it comes to Apple Inc., however, Buffett’s firm isn’t exactly plucking from the bargain bin. Berkshire Hathaway Inc. first disclosed a $1 billion stake in Apple ...

  Is Europe heading back to financial mayhem? Bank of Greece Governor Yannis Stournaras warned this week that it might be. Any further delay in reaching agreement between Greece and its creditors, he said, risked a new recession and a fresh crisis of confidence across the euro zone. Maybe that’s a little alarmist — but he’s right about one thing. ...

  US President Donald Trump on Wednesday did about-face on Palestine-Israel conflict. He abandoned the US policy on ‘two-state’ solution for Middle East peace. Trump, during a joint White House press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, held back from clearly supporting an independent Palestinian state. Trump said he would be open to a Mideast peace agreement that doesn’t ...

  Why does everything cost so darn much? More to the point, why does it cost so much more than it used to? Well, not everything costs more than it used to. Food is cheap. Electronics are absurdly cheap: I can get a clock radio on Amazon today for not much more than I would have paid in 1965 (before ...

  Elon Musk wants to dig tunnels. Without them, he says, “we will all be in traffic hell forever.” It’s a well-timed ambition, given President Trump’s plan to spend $1 trillion on infrastructure projects. Let’s hope he can figure out what he’s doing. Musk has already started burrowing near the offices of Space Exploration Technologies Corp. in Los Angeles — ...

  Chinese companies looking to escape slower economic growth at home have turned, quite naturally, to soccer and Hollywood. They should prepare for some unhappy endings. Recon Group, the Chinese firm that bought the UK’s Aston Villa Football Club, is the latest to attempt to add movie making to its bow, in talks to acquire Millennium Films, according to people ...

  Bloomberg Lenovo Group Ltd.’s mobile-phone business continues to shrink, while its personal-computer division managed anaemic growth in the face of brutal holiday-season competition. The world’s largest PC maker’s profit plummeted more than two thirds in the December quarter, missing analysts’ projections after HP Inc. threatened its position in North America. Smartphone sales declined almost a quarter globally as Lenovo ...

  Bloomberg Huawei Technologies Co., the third-largest smartphone maker, is preparing to enter the competitive world of digital assistants with its own voice-powered service, people familiar with the matter said. A team of more than a hundred engineers is in the early stages of developing the technology at its Shenzhen, China offices, one of the people said. The efforts are ...

  Bloomberg For global technology investors, deal-making is set to be one of the biggest investment opportunities of 2017, and they may have the new US president to thank for it. Tech companies are one of the biggest accumulators of offshore capital. According to some estimates, Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp., Cisco Systems Inc., Oracle Corp., and Alphabet Inc. hold a ...