Thursday, July 18, 2013

Profits tumble at Intel, IBM; After Posco, ArcelorMittal scraps India project; Taliban to Malala: This is why we tried to kill you

1 Profits tumble at Intel, IBM (BBC) Two tech titans, IBM and Intel, have reported big drops in net income. Intel reported a second-quarter profit of $2bn, down 29% from a year ago. For its part, IBM saw earnings for the same period fall 17% to $3.23bn. Revenue for both companies slipped as well, with IBM's falling by 3% and Intel's down 5%.

Chipmaker Intel suffered as consumers and businesses switched away from traditional computers, while IBM made less on hardware and more on software. Last quarter, IBM's revenues and profit fell short of analysts' forecasts for the first time in eight years. As a result, the world's largest computer company slashed jobs and pivoted to focus on data analysis and cloud computing in an effort to stabilise its business.

More than 3,300 workers were cut from its ranks, and management at the top was changed. The company has now upped its forecast for the rest of the year, while its April-to-June figures beat expectations. IBM is unaffected by the global slide in sales of traditional personal computers, since it sold that division of its business to China's Lenovo for $1.75bn in 2005.

For Intel - the world's largest semiconductor manufacturer - the picture is not as rosy. After initially assuring investors that the outlook for the rest of the year would be bright, the company has now slashed its expectations in the wake of declining PC sales. According to market research firm Gartner, global PC shipments fell 10.9% to 76 million in the second quarter. This is the fourth straight quarter of declining sales for the company.

2 After Posco, ArcelorMittal scraps India project (BBC) The world's largest steel company, ArcelorMittal, says it has abandoned plans to build a steel plant in eastern India because of problems acquiring land. Initially agreed in 2006, the company was to manufacture 12 million tonnes of steel a year in Orissa state. But farmers who oppose the purchase of their land have protested.

The move comes a day after Korea's Posco scrapped a $5.3bn plan for a steel plant in southern India. The company said it was still pursuing two other projects in Jharkhand and Karnataka states. Farmers complain that they are being forced to sell land at below market rate.

3 Taliban to Malala: This is why we tried to kill you (Saba Imtiaz in The Guardian) A senior member of the Pakistani Taliban has written an open letter to Malala Yousafzai – the teenager shot in the head as she rode home on a school bus – expressing regret that he didn't warn her before the attack, but claiming that she was targeted for maligning the insurgents.  

Adnan Rasheed, who was convicted for his role in a 2003 assassination attempt on the country's then-president Pervez Musharraf, did not apologise for the attack, which left Malala gravely wounded, but said he found it shocking. "I wished it would never happened [sic] and I had advised you before," he wrote.

Malala was 15 when she and two classmates were targeted by a masked gunman who picked them out on a school bus as they went home from school in Pakistan's northwest Swat valley last October. Last week, she celebrated her 16th birthday by delivering a defiant speech at the United Nations in New York, in which she called on world leaders to provide free schooling for all children.

In the letter, Rasheed claimed that Malala was not targeted for her efforts to promote education, but because the Taliban believed she was running a "smearing campaign" against it. "You have said in your speech yesterday that pen is mightier than sword," Rasheed wrote, referring to Malala's UN speech, "so they attacked you for your sword not for your books or school."


Rasheed – a former member of Pakistan's air force, who was among 300 prisoners to escape jail in April last year – advises Malala to return to Pakistan, join a female Islamic seminary and advocate the cause of Islam.

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