Siam News Network

Many economic problems are still looming large in and outside Vietnam, making
experts at a recent business forum in HCM City believe this year would be very
challenging for Vietnam to reach targets for gross domestic product growth and
inflation.

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2012 GDP, inflation targets hard to achieve

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Samsung Electronics Co. reported a 17 percent jump in fourth quarter profit on the strength of sales in flat panels and smartphones even as the company battled claims it had copied Apple’s iPhone.

Samsung said Friday in a regulatory filing that its net profit reached 4 trillion won ($3.5 billion) in the three months that ended in December.

The company earned 3.4 trillion won in the same quarter a year earlier.

The Suwon, South Korea-based company said its operating profit jumped 75.8 percent to 5.3 trillion won in the fourth quarter.

The figure was closely in line with the company’s estimate earlier this month of a 73 percent rise.

Samsung, the world’s biggest manufacturer of memory chips and liquid crystal displays, said demand for semiconductors in mobile products and servers remained solid despite weakness in personal computers, which face stiff competition from the rising popularity of tablets.

Samsung has over the decades grown into a key global manufacturer of components that let PCs, digital music players and handsets store data and display it on flat, high-resolution screens.

The company has recently been stepping up its challenge against Apple Inc. in the global smartphone business, releasing models such as the Galaxy S II. Cupertino, California-based Apple, which spurred the smartphone boom with the launch of its iPhone in 2007, has accused Samsung of “slavishly” copying its smartphone and iPad in design, user interface and packaging. Apple sued Samsung in April last year in the United States.

The legal battle has now spilled into 10 countries, according to Samsung officials. Court rulings so far have tended to side with Apple.

The quarterly profit brought the 2011 net profit to 13.7 trillion won, down 15 percent from the previous year, Samsung said. “If profit in handsets continues to stream in, this year will also likely be a solid one for Samsung,” said Jae Lee, an analyst at Daiwa Securities in Seoul. “The biggest threat would be if the global economy worsens.” Lee said legal battles with Apple would start weighing less on Samsung this year as the South Korean company is expected to release models with new designs. Please follow Money Game on Twitter and Facebook . Join the conversation about this story » See Also: UBS: If You Exclude Apple, Then This Earnings Season Sucks Here Are The Key Market Moving Events For Tuesday, January 24 Chemical Giant DuPont’s Q4 Earnings Decline Less Than Expected, Strength In Performance Chemicals

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Samsung Earnings Beat Expectations Even As Legal Battle With Apple Weighs On Company

From WSJ’s Davos blog:

Standard Chartered PLC remains bullish on the major Asian economies of India and China, encouraged by the policy outlook for the two countries this year, the bank’s Asia chief executive said.

The U.K.-based lender, which focuses almost exclusively on Asia and emerging economies, also sees European rivals retreating from those markets as they are beset with challenges at home, Standard Chartered Asia Chief Executive Jaspal Bindra said in an interview on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum.

In India last year, Standard Chartered confronted a range of challenges including slowing growth, rising interest rates and a depreciating rupee. Revenue from the bank’s India unit fell by 12% in the first half of 2011 and by the “mid-teens” in the third quarter, Group Finance Director Richard Meddings said earlier.

Mr. Bindra blamed higher interest rates. “Interest rates went up almost 400 basis points in a short period, and it is very difficult, if you do wholesale business with the best clients in the country, to pass on a 400 basis point increase at any one time.”

But the central bank’s surprise move to loosen monetary policy this week has sent a “clear signal” that there will be no further rate hikes and the government is shifting its focus to promoting growth, Mr. Bindra said.

The Reserve Bank of India Tuesday held its key lending rate steady for a second straight policy meeting but cut the minimum cash reserve requirement by 0.50 percentage point to ease liquidity.

“The government has for a long time shown a huge preference to manage inflation through monetary policy,” he said. But following the RBI cut, “I think we will see a more balanced approach.”

Mr. Bindra also said that the recent “normalization” of the rupee exchange rate — it is up 6% against the dollar so far this year after declining 15.1% in 2011 — will encourage renewed foreign investment.

In China, Mr. Bindra believes authorities will be successful in guiding the economy to a “soft landing” ahead of a leadership transition at the end of the year.

“The priority for all of 2012 and beyond is going to be ‘how do we keep things stable,’ as they have this transition of power at the top,” he said, adding that not just the top political leadership, but also the leaders of major financial institutions and regulators are all due to be reshuffled. “It is quite a massive-scale change of power.”

As European banks regroup and retreat from Asia, Standard Chartered sees an opening. The trend is especially pronounced in industries including shipping and commodities and in markets like Indonesia and India where dollar liquidity is scarce, he said.

“It gives us an opportunity to scale up market share, and second, it gives us a little bit of pricing advantage.”

– Aaron Back. Follow him on Twitter @AaronBack.

In recent years, China has re-invigorated its support for leading state-owned enterprises in sectors it considers important to “economic security,” explicitly looking to foster globally competitive national champions.

In 2009, China announced that by 2020 it would reduce carbon intensity 40% from 2005 levels.

The government has also focused on foreign trade as a major vehicle for economic growth.

The restructuring of the economy and resulting efficiency gains have contributed to a more than tenfold increase in GDP since 1978.

The disparities between the two sectors have combined to form an economic-cultural-social gap between the rural and urban areas, which is a major division in Chinese society.

The technological level and quality standards of its industry as a whole are still fairly low, notwithstanding a marked change since 2000, spurred in part by foreign investment.

China’s increasing integration with the international economy and its growing efforts to use market forces to govern the domestic allocation of goods have exacerbated this problem.

The growth in both outbound investment from, and inbound investment to, China reflects the nation’s rising economic power and attractiveness as an investment destination.

” Although the figure is already “quite amazing,” the volume is “not large enough” considering China’s economic growth and local companies’ expanding demand for international opportunities, Shen said.

It also aims to sell more than 15 million of the most fuel-efficient vehicles in the world each year by then.

Although China is still a developing country with a relatively low per capita income, it has experienced tremendous economic growth since the late 1970s.

Since the late 1970s, China has decollectivized agriculture, yielding tremendous gains in production.

China is the world’s largest producer of rice and wheat and a major producer of sweet potatoes, sorghum, millet, barley, peanuts, corn, soybeans, and potatoes.

China ranks first in world production of red meat (including beef, veal, mutton, lamb, and pork).

Growing domestic demand beginning in the mid-1990s, however, has forced the nation to import increasing quantities of petroleum.

China’s leading export minerals are tungsten, antimony, tin, magnesium, molybdenum, mercury, manganese, barite, and salt.

Major industrial products are textiles, chemicals, fertilizers, machinery (especially for agriculture), processed foods, iron and steel, building materials, plastics, toys, and electronics.

Brick, tile, cement, and food-processing plants are found in almost every province.

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Davos: StanChart Bullish on China, India

The prime minister is attending the World Economic Forum in Switzerland and meeting with leading business people to clarify Thailand’s flood recovery plan. Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra is in Davos, Switzerland today to take part in the 42nd World Economic Forum. She’s scheduled to take part in a round-table luncheon with leaders and leading business people to discuss sustainable economic growth.

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PM to Meet Leading Businesspeople at World Econ Forum

A severe drought and a decline in rice prices in early 2010 do not bode well for agricultural production and consumption, although increased employment in manufacturing will partly offset the impact to agriculture.
All in all, a more favorable external environment should help boost real GDP growth to 6.2 percent in 2010. After this year, slower growth in developed countries, emerging capacity constraints as capacity idled during the crisis is quickly put to use, and the weight of the ongoing political turmoil on new investment, should likely keep growth below Thailand’s historical average of 5.1 percent. On the whole, Thailand’s fiscal and financial picture remains solid

The relative strength and power of sovereign wealth funds is massively increasing, and the money has to go somewhere.
But another factor is likely the presence of larger, institutional investors in large-cap stocks who are more concerned about long-term performance than short-term market movements.

In 1972 the Government took a further step in this direction by amending the “Announcement of the Executive Council No. 58 on the Control of Commercial Undertakings Affecting Public Safety and Welfare”. The changes extended Government control and regulation over the operations of finance and securities companies, which until then had operated fairly freely. Following these amendments, in May 1974, long-awaited legislation establishing “The Securities Exchange of Thailand” (SET) was enacted. This was followed by revisions to the Revenue Code at the end of the year, allowing the investment of savings in the capital market. By 1975 the basic legislative framework was in place and on April 30, 1975, “The Securities Exchange of Thailand” officially started trading. On January 1, 1991 its name was formally changed to “The Stock Exchange of Thailand” (SET).

New Delhi business newspaper economic times says that India and Thailand will sign a free trade agreement by the middle of this year, according to Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra.

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Thailand to expand trade and investment with India

Sectors linked to external demand (namely, manufacturing, hotels and transport) have been the main contributors to growth since the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, and have also determined the dynamics of the economy in 2008-09. These sectors have accounted for almost all of the annual changes in real GDP.
Overall, domestic demand should provide a positive but limited contribution to growth: vulnerable households lost ground in 2009 and risks are substantial in 2010, as falling agricultural output due to the current drought may offset opportunities from the improved overall economic environment. Household consumption levels, which are highly correlated with the poverty rate, contracted in 2009 despite the rebound in the last quarter of the year, suggesting a likely increase in the poverty rate compared to 2008, especially when compounded by the loss in purchasing power from the food and fuel crisis of 2008. The outlook for 2010 is uncertain : average wages are likely to increase, thanks to the reallocation of labor from agriculture to manufacturing. Although labor markets appear very tight, with unemployment below 1 %, the data do not account for the large number of workers who moved to lower-productivity jobs in agriculture and informal services due to the crisis. Many of these workers are now returning to manufacturing, which offers higher wages than agriculture.

Total shareholder returns (TSR) for 2009 are calculated by assuming that investors reinvest all cash received over the course of the year to determine a total return from one’s investment. The 2009 analysis covers 505 companies from the Stock Exchange of Thailand and the Market for Alternative Investment and is based on share valuations as of Dec 31 and dividend payments made over the 2009 calendar year.
The TSRs for the two groups are similar.

Ho Chi Minh City industrial zones are crafting ways to weather the economic storm and push performances in 2012.

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HCM City in the zone

The release of more than 200 political prisoners on January 13 and the subsequent decision by Washington to announce its readiness to send an ambassador to Burma are the latest steps taken by both governments to normalize relations.

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Mobile handset market leader Nokia, with manufacturing facility in an SEZ near Chennai, plans to revamp its business in India by infusing fresh investment of Rs 250 crore in the next three years, with potential to create 500 new jobs.

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Nokia to invest Rs 250 cr to revamp India business