China Spurns Home-Grown Phones
The News Review:
- China Spurns Home-Grown Phones
- So Much for Reform in Western Europe
- Bent swayed by Addicks ambition
China Spurns Home-Grown Phones
Washington Post – Jun 1, 2005
Mobile-phone sales are expected to rise 11 percent this year, and Western phone giants such as Motorola Inc. are ringing up profits from the boom. So why are China’s own cell phone makers floundering?.
So Much for Reform in Western Europe
Washington Post – Jun 1, 2005
So persuasive was Jeanneney that, with the backing of Chirac and other national leaders, the European Union committed $125 million last month to a project that will not only scan the books in Europe’s national libraries, but also develop a nonprofit search engine to rival Google. Let’s put aside, for a moment, the cultural paranoia that drives this project, and consider merely the economic assumptions that lie behind it. We could start, for example, by asking why the Google search engine has a bigger market share in many European countries than it does in the United States, even after the creation of the world’s largest free-trade zone and the launching of the euro, which were supposed to spur development of home-grown champions?Why is the first reaction to a strong foreign competitor to launch a government-protected, taxpayer-subsidized rival?And why would government officials assume that they have such exquisite instincts that they can identify a huge, untapped market for a European-oriented service that European companies have completely ignored?The fact that those questions do not even occur to European leaders — let alone their voters or their opposition parties — goes a long way toward explaining why free market capitalism has yet to take root in Western Europe. Steven Pearlstein will lead an online discussion at 11 a. today on washingtonpost.
Bent swayed by Addicks ambition
dailymail.co.uk – Jun 1, 2005
Move a ‘necessity’ – SheepshanksLast season Bent struck 19 times and was an integral part of theteam that just missed out on promotion – after which it was alwayslikely he would leave. Bent would have gone into the new season with just one year lefton his contract so the club revealed they had reluctantly acceptedthe Addicks’ offer. Chairman David Sheepshanks told the club’s official website,www. uk: “It is always sad to sell one of your home-grownplayers but this has become a necessity. “Both the player and his agent have, for the last 12 months,declined to discuss any new long-term contract other than if wewere promoted.