Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Alibaba for $1bn IPO in US; UK youth shy away from manufacturing jobs; Who can control the post-superpower capitalist world order?



1 Alibaba for $1bn IPO in US (Michael Liedtkein San Francisco Chronicle) Alibaba Group, the king of e-commerce in China, is dangling a deal that could turn into one of the biggest IPOs in US history. In a long-awaited move, Alibaba filed for an initial public offering of stock that could surpass the $16 billion that Facebook and its early investors raised in the social networking company's IPO two years ago.

Alibaba's paperwork says it will raise at least $1 billion, but finance professionals believe that is a notional figure to get the IPO process rolling and say that the Chinese company's ambitions for the share sale are much richer."This is going to be the granddaddy of all IPOs," predicted Sam Hamedah, CEO of PrivCo, which researches major privately held corporations.

Although it's not well-known in the US, Alibaba is an e-commerce powerhouse that makes more money than Amazon.com Inc. and eBay Inc. combined. It has helped drive the rise of e-commerce in China, a transformation that has given millions of households greater access to clothes, books and consumer electronics in a society that in the 1980s still required ration tickets for some supermarket items.

Last year, 231 million customers bought a total of $248 billion in merchandise on Alibaba's e-commerce sites, according to the IPO documents. About $37 billion, or 15 percent, of that volume came through mobile devices.For now, Alibaba isn't specifying how much stock will be sold in the IPO, or setting a price range or saying which US exchange its stock will trade on. Those details will emerge as the IPO progresses. The process is likely to take three to four months before Alibaba's shares begin trading.

Most of Alibaba is currently owned by four shareholders: Japan's SoftBank Corp., with 34 percent stake; Yahoo, with 23 percent; former CEO and co-founder Jack Ma with 8.9 percent; and vice chairman and co-founder Joseph Tsai with 3.6 percent.

With Ma at the helm, Alibaba Group rebuffed a competitive threat after eBay entered China in 2002 and also lined up a Yahoo investment that fortified the Chinese company's position. Ebay abandoned the Chinese market in 2006 in a tacit admission of defeat.


2 UK youth shy away from manufacturing jobs (BBC) A large group of engineers in the UK nearing retirement age could constrain growth in the sector, according to a report.The problem is exacerbated by a perception among young people that manufacturing is an unsecure, badly-paid career choice, according to the Engineering the Future group.

Adding to the negative reputation is the way courses are taught, it said."There are a lot of misconceptions about manufacturing among young people: that it is badly paid, has high redundancy rates and is dirty, physically demanding work," said Engineering the Future, which includes the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.

"The lack of career advice and the national curriculum losing modules in design and technology at secondary level will have a negative impact on future manufacturing," it said. Engineering graduates are "taught to pass exams" rather than being given useful skills, it added. The group added that changes should be taken soon, as experienced technical staff with 30 or more years behind them are nearing the ends of their careers "in large numbers".

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-27303888

3 Who can control the post-superpower capitalist world order? (SlavojZizek in The Guardian) Back in the 1990s, a silent pact regulated the relationship between the great western powers and Russia. Western states treated Russia as a great power on the condition that Russia didn't act as one. But what if the person to whom the offer-to-be-rejected is made actually accepts it? What if Russia starts to act as a great power? A situation like this is properly catastrophic, threatening the entire existing fabric of relations – as happened five years ago in Georgia. Tired of only being treated as a superpower, Russia actually acted as one.

How did it come to this? The "American century" is over, and we have entered a period in which multiple centres of global capitalism have been forming. In the US, Europe, China and maybe Latin America, too, capitalist systems have developed with specific twists: the US stands for neoliberal capitalism, Europe for what remains of the welfare state, China for authoritarian capitalism, Latin America for populist capitalism. After the attempt by the US to impose itself as the sole superpower – the universal policeman – failed, there is now the need to establish the rules of interaction between these local centres as regards their conflicting interests.

This is why our times are potentially more dangerous than they may appear. During the cold war, the rules of international behaviour were clear, guaranteed by the Mad-ness – mutually assured destruction – of the superpowers. When the Soviet Union violated these unwritten rules by invading Afghanistan, it paid dearly for this infringement. The war in Afghanistan was the beginning of its end. Today, the old and new superpowers are testing each other, trying to impose their own version of global rules, experimenting with them through proxies – which are, of course, other, small nations and states.

It is definitely time to teach the superpowers, old and new, some manners, but who will do it? What is arguably the "principal contradiction" of the new world order is this: the impossibility of creating a global political order that would correspond to the global capitalist economy. Today, in our era of globalisation, we are paying the price for this "principal contradiction." In politics, age-old fixations, and particular, substantial ethnic, religious and cultural identities, have returned with a vengeance. 

Our predicament today is defined by this tension: the global free circulation of commodities is accompanied by growing separations in the social sphere. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of the global market, new walls have begun emerging everywhere, separating peoples and their cultures. Perhaps the very survival of humanity depends on resolving this tension.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/06/superpower-capitalist-world-order-ukraine

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