1 HP’s ‘brutal’ forecast (San Francisco Chronicle) Hewlett-Packard Co. Chief Executive Officer Meg Whitman on Wednesday forecast 2013 profit that missed estimates and said a turnaround at the computer maker won't happen any time soon, sending shares to their lowest closing price in a decade. "The recent financial performance of HP has not been good," Whitman said. "It's going to take longer to right this ship than any of us would like."
Whitman, one year into her tenure leading the world's largest PC maker, said that the company lacks a "sharp, competitive focus" and needs to concentrate on fewer products. Hewlett-Packard is trying to boost profit by cutting jobs and reviving sales with multi-featured machines, including printers that double as scanners and copiers, as well as servers that combine computing, storage and networking - efforts that Whitman said may start to boost earnings after next year. "It's brutal - it's really, really negative," said Brian Marshall, an analyst at ISI Group. "They've been very transparent. The problem with transparency is when they open up the full picture, it's pretty ugly." Hewlett-Packard fell 13% to $14.91, its lowest price since November 2002. The stock has dropped 35% since Whitman was named CEO on Sept. 22, 2011.
2 Tesco’s first profit fall in 20 years (The Guardian) Tesco has reported its first fall in profits in 20 years after it was forced to invest heavily to revive its struggling UK chain and cracks emerged in its sprawling international empire. Its chief executive, Philip Clarke, said it was "far too early" to say whether the £1bn facelift announced for its UK supermarkets back in April was winning back shoppers: "The signs are encouraging but the plan is a long course of treatment, not a single dose."
The UK chain managed flat like-for-likes in the second quarter, ending an 18-month losing streak.
The performance of the domestic chain is crucial to the group's success as it generates two-thirds of group profits, but this week alarm bells sounded after Tesco warned that its profits were also being squeezed in South Korea, its second biggest market, and that US chain Fresh & Easy had failed to make any inroads into its losses. Overall group trading profit dropped 10.5% to £1.6bn in the six months to 25 August; within Britain, profits were down more than 12.4% at £1.1bn.
3 JP Morgan faces $20bn fraud suit (BBC) The New York Attorney General has sued JP Morgan Chase for allegedly defrauding investors who lost more than $20bn on mortgage-backed securities sold by Bear Stearns. JP Morgan bought the investment bank Bear Stearns in March 2008. It said that it would contest the allegations. This is the first action to come out of a working group created by US President Barack Obama looking into the causes of the 2008 financial crash.
JP Morgan said: "The NYAG civil action relates to Bear Stearns, which we acquired over the course of a weekend at the behest of the US government. This complaint is entirely about historic conduct by that entity." US mortgage-backed securities were the investment products that sparked the global financial crisis in 2008. In essence, each security or bond was linked to pools of US mortgage loans, many of which were classified as sub-prime - mortgages awarded to high-risk and low-wage homeowners. When many of those homebuyers defaulted on their mortgages as the US property bubble burst, it turned the linked securities into bad debt.
4 In India, ‘love’ drives murders (The Wall Street Journal) In recent weeks, it seems as if Indian papers have been full of crimes driven by unrequited love or obsession. The Hindu reported last month that a Delhi man allegedly shot four people, before turning the gun on himself, after a failed attempt to marry a 17-year-old girl. Two weeks ago, a man in love with a domestic worker broke into the home where she worked and allegedly shot her employer, the Times of India reported.
While the level of violence may vary from case to case, these “love” murders appear to be on the rise, statistics show. According to India’s National Crime Records Bureau, the number of murders due to “love affair/sexual causes” went up more than 11% in 2011, the most recent years for which figures are available. Murders as a whole rose just under 3% compared to 2010. Of the 34,305 murders across India last year, the motive in the majority of cases was listed as “other” in the report. But for more than 14,000 of the killings, a motive was identified.
About 2,637 of these murders were due to “love,” making it the third most common motive for murder after “personal vendetta” and “property dispute,” respectively. In 2010, 2,365 of 33,335 murders occurred due to love affairs. The 2011 numbers showed that an astonishing 62% of kidnappings of women and girls are perpetrated by men that want to marry them.
5 Baldness as business advantage (The Wall Street Journal) Men with shaved heads are perceived to be more masculine, dominant and, in some cases, to have greater leadership potential than those with longer locks or with thinning hair, according to a recent study out of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. That may explain why the power-buzz look has caught on among business leaders in recent years. Venture capitalist and Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, 41 years old, DreamWorks Animation SKG Chief Executive Jeffrey Katzenberg, 61, and Amazon CEO Jeffrey Bezos, 48, all sport some variant of the close-cropped look.
Some executives say the style makes them appear younger—or at least, makes their age less evident—and gives them more confidence than a comb-over or monk-like pate. "I'm not saying that shaving your head makes you successful, but it starts the conversation that you've done something active," says tech entrepreneur and writer Seth Godin, 52, who has embraced the bare look for two decades.
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