Intercultural Business News

After failing to buy Yahoo outright a year ago, Microsoft has now announced a search and advertising partnership with its former online rival. It’s an important deal, and not just for advertisers.

Poor Yahoo shareholders. They could have pocketed a cool $44.6bn, or $33 a share, when Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo outright.

Microsoft and Yahoo agree partnership deal

Eighteen months on, the shares are trading at just under $16 and they have to make do with the promise that Microsoft will help Yahoo to survive and grow by providing a better search, and thus a better advertising platform.

Consumer market

Yahoo’s audience will have to wait at least a year before they will see the difference.

First the deal will have to be shepherded past weary regulators around the world; this will take until early 2010, says Yahoo’s new boss Carol Bartz. It will take another three to six months before Microsoft’s “Bing” search engine starts answering the queries of Yahoo users.

Read More>BBC NEWS

British celebrity chefs are heading for Australia in an attempt to escape the economic downturn.

Rick Stein has announced he will open a seafood restaurant in a coastal town south of Sydney later this year, and Gordon Ramsay is planning to open a branch of his London restaurant Maze in Melbourne’s Crown Casino in 2010.

The moves come as restaurants are facing an increasingly hard time in Britain with Ramsay seeing two of his London restaurants close and profits from his food empire falling 87 per cent in 12 months.

Celebrity Chefs heading for warmer climes?

 
Stein and Ramsay are following in the footsteps of Jamie Oliver, who has opened a fourth branch of his training restaurant Fifteen in Melbourne.

The trend has been helped by economic factors as Australia has weathered the global financial crisis better than most other Western economies, managing to stay out of recession.

Just yesterday (TUES) the governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, Glenn Stevens, announced the nation had effectively sidestepped the meltdown that had been felt so sharply in Britain and America

Read More> The Telegraph

Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group is set to inject A$80m (£40m) into the Australian budget airline Virgin Blue after the carrier warned of looming full-year losses.
Virgin Blue Holdings is carrying out a deeply discounted A$231m rights issue and cancelling its dividend in an effort to shore up a balance sheet battered by an operating environment that the company has called the most challenging in its 10-year history. Virgin Blue is predicting losses of between A$160m and A$165m for the 12 months to the end of June.

Strugling Airlinne receives Branson funding

Its short-haul operations are profitable and have increased their market share to more than 30 per cent but Virgin Blue’s long-haul division, V Australia, has been hit particularly hard by the recession and is forecast to drop to between A$30m and A$35m in the red this year, with another A$60m to A$65m lost on start-up and foreign exchange costs.

Virgin Group, which owns 25.5 per cent of Virgin Blue, has committed to buy 305 million shares itself and is also acting as sub-underwriter for 20 per cent of the retail component of the offer, which could raise its stake to 30.2 per cent.

Read More> The Independent

BELMOPAN, Belize — A signing ceremony took place on Thursday morning in Belmopan between the Prime Minister of Belize, Dean Barrow, and the Ambassador of the Head of the European Union Commission in Jamaica, Marco Mazzocchi-Alemmani for the allocation of a financial grant for the Accompanying Measures for Sugar and the Special Framework of Assistance for the Banana Support Programme.

Sugar Cane in Belize

The Accompanying Measures for Sugar Agreement provides for the total contribution of BZ$25.2 Million. It makes provisions for road design, construction and supervision, for a cane replanting programme and the institutional support of extension services. The overall objective is to reduce poverty and improve the standards of living of the rural population in Northern Belize.

Read More>Caribbean Net News

Consumer efforts to improve poor farmers’ earnings will be helped from Wednesday as one of Britain’s most popular chocolate bars becomes fully “fair trade”.
Cadbury has relaunched its Dairy Milk bar as a certified Fairtrade product, tripling demand for cocoa from certified farmers in the small West African country of Ghana to 15,000 tonnes a year.

Cadbury Dairy Milk goes Fairtrade

Sales of such products, where manufacturers guarantee a minimum payment even if market prices drop lower, have increased by 50 per cent since 2001.

 
“Fairtrade is a good thing,” said Comfort Kwaasibea, a cocoa farmer in Ghana, where the crop is the second-highest export earner.

Read More>Telegraph