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
No comments:
Post a Comment