The Star Online: Business
The Star Online: Business |
- Local bourse steadier on positive note
- EADS delays A350 but avoids heat of crisis
- Insight - In Greek crisis, HIV gains ground
| Local bourse steadier on positive note Posted: 10 Nov 2011 06:33 PM PST KUALA LUMPUR: The local stock market rebounded with the FTSE Bursa Malaysia KL Composite Index (FBM KLCI) rose 3.49 points, leaving investors delighted but puzzled over its future direction. The benchmark index opened 1.97 points higher at 1,474.62 today. Most stocks on Bursa Malaysia were higher. Gainers led losers 312 to 148, while 232 stocks were unchanged. Dealers said the local bourse took the cue from an overnight gain on Wall Street, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average gaining 112.85 points to 11,893.79. They said the drawbacks yesterday provided investors with opportunities for scale-down or bargian hunting buying today. HwangDBS Vickers Research said despite a positive overnight performance on Wall Street, it reckoned Asian investors would probably play cautious for the time being in view of the recent market volatilities. "This suggests that we may not see any major movements on our Malaysian bourse on the unique date of Nov 11, 2011. The benchmark FBM KLCI could struggle to overcome the immediate support-turned-resistance level of 1,475 ahead," it said. The research house said on the news front, Bank Negara Malaysia's monetary policy committee is expected to leave interest rates unchanged at a meeting this evening. Meanwhile, stocks worth watching out today include Benalec Holdings Bhd which has secured reclamation projects in Johor; CI Holdings, after increasing the amount of cash distribution to RM5.10 per share and Genting Bhd, as its listed subsidiary Genting Singapore's quarterly financial results released last evening broadly met expectations. Among the major gainers were DiGi.Com Bhd, which surged 82 sen to RM34.82. British American Tobacco and United Plantations Bhd added 50 sen and 40 sen respectively to RM46 and RM18 respectively. Among banks, CIMB Group added 2 sen to RM7.28, Public Bank remained unchanged at RM12.60 and Maybank was 1 sen lower at RM8.23. Leading the list of heavily-traded counters was Compugates Holdings Bhd remained unchanged at 8 sen with 40.1 million shares done. Newly listed iDimension Consolidated Bhd rose 2.5 sen to 40.5 sen. The manufacturing software solutions provider's initial public offering (IPO) was oversubscribed by 6.09 times. The IPO involved a public issue of 38.23 million new shares of 10 sen each at 38 sen apiece. It also involved a private placement of up to seven million shares. Of the RM14.5mil proceeds, 34.42% will be used for expansion in the group's key markets, 30.97% will be for research and development, 5.69% for working capital and 14.46% as capital expenditure. The balance 14.46% are for listing expenses. Full content generated by Get Full RSS. |
| EADS delays A350 but avoids heat of crisis Posted: 10 Nov 2011 05:01 PM PST PARIS (Reuters) - Airbus parent EADS pushed back its A350 carbon-fiber jetliner by six months with a 200 million euro ($272 million) charge as it seeks to avoid errors like those that nearly derailed Europe's A380 superjumbo. The delay trimmed third-quarter profits that nonetheless beat expectations as Airbus stabilized costs on the troublesome superjumbo project. And EADS shares got a boost as Europe's largest aerospace group raised its outlook for the year. Despite storm waves in Western economies, Airbus and Boeing , who dominate the $70 billion aircraft market, are boosting output to meet demand from Asia and the Middle East. "I am confident the commercial aircraft market will sustain our growth in years to come despite the weakening of the macro-economic environment and particularly of the European economies," Finance Director Hans Peter Ring told reporters. "Fifty percent of our backlog is in growing regions of the world and not in Europe or the U.S....so provided there isn't a big double-dip recession we think it is manageable for us." He declined to comment on the instability ripping through the euro zone or to say whether EADS, seen as another key European symbol, had drawn up contingency plans for further turmoil. "I am not in politics and this is something nobody can anticipate reasonably at this point, so we are following the environment, that is all I can say." EADS operating profit fell 15 percent to 322 million euros in the third quarter as revenues fell 4 percent to 10.751 billion euros. Net income rose sharply to 312 million euros. The Franco-German-led group said it expected strength in the commercial market to boost 2011 operating profit to 1.45 billion euros rather than staying flat at 1.3 billion euros. Shares rose six percent to 21.17 euros. EADS is already the top gainer in the French CAC-40 index <.fchi> this year. Analysts were predicting operating profit of 51 million euros on sales of 10.37 billion and a net loss of 34.6 million. Aircraft sales remain buoyant despite fears that the economy will dampen passenger travel and a downturn hitting cargo. After injecting new life into its best-selling A320 with a revamp in the summer, the world's largest commercial planemaker now expects record 1,500 orders in 2011 instead of 1,000. The prediction, beating a 2005 record of 1,111 orders, sets the tone for what industry sources expect to be a haul of at least 100 new Airbus sales at the Dubai Air Show next week. These include a sale of five new A380s to Qatar Airways, doubling its previous order, though it remains to be seen how the A350's largest customer responds to the delay in that model. Airbus had 1,372 gross orders by the end of October. BREATHING ROOM FOR BOEING Airbus faces a steep learning curve on the lightweight, carbon-fiber A350 but said it had learned from mistakes on the A380, when it clogged up factories by failing to spot weak coordination early enough. The delays hammered its shares in 2006 and stoked tensions between Paris and Berlin. Germany's Daimler confirmed on Thursday it would sell part of its stake. EADS said the A350 would enter service in the first half of 2014 instead of late 2013. It pushed the start of the first final assembly back three months to the first quarter of 2012. The A350 aims to compete with Boeing's 787 Dreamliner which entered regular service this month, three years late due to problems in mastering the same lightweight carbon materials. "Each delay of the A350 program and the individual models allows Boeing to recover some breathing room on the 787 program and to develop the 787-9," wrote U.S.-based aviation analyst Scott Hamilton, referring to the next Dreamliner variant. Airbus and Boeing see a market for several thousand of the twin-engined planes which aim to save costs by some 30 percent. Airbus, which overtook Boeing in 2003 as the world's largest commercial jet maker, turned the page on its earliest attempts to compete on the world's longest routes by axing the A340. The four-engined plane first flew 20 years ago with a focus on routes like the 18-hour trip from Singapore to New York. But its "four engines are better than two" slogan backfired when airlines put their faith in twinjets like the Boeing 777. The decision to scrap the plane rubs salt in the wound a day after Boeing trumpeted the start of work on its 1,000th 777. A two-engined sister version, the A330, continues to sell well. The A340 made its mark as a luxury accessory for VIPs like the Sultan of Brunei but it was dwarfed by sales of the 777. India's Kingfisher is expected to cancel two last A340 orders, leaving just two jets to assemble for unnamed VIPs. Bloomberg News reported Boeing could meanwhile notch up record 777 sales this year including possible orders in Dubai. |
| Insight - In Greek crisis, HIV gains ground Posted: 10 Nov 2011 04:41 PM PST ATHENS (Reuters) - 'Contagion' is the label financial markets use for the economic spread of the Greek crisis. For hundreds of people in an increasingly chaotic society, the word has a deadlier meaning. Take the mother of four introduced to Reuters by her social worker at the bright offices of an Athens non-governmental organisation called Kentro Zois, or The Centre for Life. A Ukrainian, she said she immigrated to Greece 12 years ago and married a Greek man. Bleached blonde hair tightly pulled back in a bun, the 34-year old spoke on condition of anonymity. When her two-year-old daughter was wheezy last October, she brought the child to a state-run hospital. The doctors could not explain the baby's persistent fever. One suggested an HIV test. The diagnosis for both mother and child was positive. "I was devastated," she said. She isn't the only one to be shocked. In 2009, the year the baby was born, Greece had detected not a single case of a mother transmitting the AIDS virus to her child, according to the Hellenic Centre for Diseases Control and Prevention, a public health agency funded by the Health Ministry. The mother's infection was apparently missed by a nationwide screening programme for pregnant women. "How was it possible for an HIV-positive child to be born in Greece? That is my question," asked the woman's social worker, Anna Kavouri, head of social services at The Centre for Life, which helps people living with HIV/AIDS. Kavouri is working with the woman to try to find out what happened and what options she may have for legal redress. The health ministry did not respond to phone calls seeking comment, and Reuters was unable to verify all the elements of the woman's story. But others in the Greek capital say the country's social safety net is fraying, nowhere more so than in the health system. Spending by Greeks on health is falling 36 percent this year, according to the National School of Public Health. Including both the government and private individuals, the country spent around 25 billion euros, or roughly 10 percent of GDP, on both public and private health in 2010; in 2011 that will be 16 billion. Just 10 billion or so is government spending on the public health sector. The effect of that is most visible on the edges of society. Heroin use and prostitution are up. Drug addicts and illegal immigrants with HIV say clean needles, heroin substitutes and antiretroviral treatments are harder to come by. The pace of HIV infection is surging. The latest available United Nations figures, from 2009, show that 11,000 people, or 0.1 percent of the Greek population, had HIV/AIDS, a third the rate in the United States. But that may be changing. In the first five months of 2010, Greece had 255 new HIV cases. Over the same period this year, there were 384 new cases -- an increase of more than 50 percent. The Hellenic Centre predicts the rate of increase will rise to 60 percent by the end of 2011. By comparison in the United States, cases are increasing by around 7 percent annually. The problem in Greece has been aggravated by increased drug use. Historically, only about a quarter of people newly infected with HIV in Greece were injecting drug users. But 174 drug users have tested positive to mid October this year. The Hellenic Centre says that will be around 200 by the end of the year. Nikos Dedes, an adviser to the HIV Committee at the World Health Organisation (WHO), says that while most HIV in Greece is still transmitted through unprotected homosexual sex, the risks through heterosexual sex are rising. "The HIV situation in Greece is like a dry forest in summer which has just been hit with a gust of wind," says Dedes, who is also head of Positive Voice, a Greek NGO set up to combat the spread of HIV. "It could go up in flames any minute." HOLES IN THE SYSTEM The Ukrainian mother said she is not an injecting drug user and believes she got HIV through an operation several years ago, though this was impossible to verify. People in any society can have HIV and not know it -- the United Nations believes around 250,000 in the United States do. That's why many countries, including Greece, routinely screen pregnant women. But the mother said she was not offered an HIV test when she was pregnant with her youngest. "It didn't even occur to me that I would need one," said the mother, dressed in black sweatpants and a camel-coloured leather jacket. When and how she became infected is not clear, but doctors say she probably passed the virus to her daughter through breastfeeding. Women with HIV are told not to breastfeed as it significantly increases the chance of passing on the virus. The baby has a twin, a boy, who along with the rest of the family has tested negative for HIV. Unlike his sister, he did not take to breastfeeding. The mother has separated from her Greek husband in the last year, and now lives with her children in a government-run shelter. MORE SEEK TESTS As the economic crisis worsens, society is becoming gloomier. Greeks are swallowing 35 percent more anti-depressants than they did five years ago, according to the National School of Public Health. The health ministry says suicides are up 40 percent so far this year. And if the lines of people at the Hellenic Center's mobile HIV testing vans around Athens' poor quarters are anything to go by, more and more Greeks are also worried about AIDS. Wearing a stethoscope and long white gown, doctor Evaggelos Liapis conducts tests every night between 6 and 10 pm on the corner of Omonoia Square, which bustles with sesame breadstick vendors, businessmen and drug users hunting for cash. Six months ago, Liapis said, all four vans operating around the city would receive on average two people per night. That's now gone up to 40 tests a night. "There are no clean syringes around here and we have an increase in poverty and prostitution, especially amongst the drug users," Liapis said as a heavily tattooed Greek man in his twenties sat down in the van for a blood test. The WHO recommends that 200 clean syringes are provided per drug user per year, to limit HIV infection. Greece has been providing three, the Hellenic Centre says. Adding to the risk is the fact that when times are tough, drug users are more likely to inject heroin rather than snorting or smoking it, because they get a bigger hit for their money by using a needle, according to French researchers. "Between 2007 and 2008, whilst gross salary growth rates were falling significantly, the proportion of injecting drug users rose by 1.70 percent," wrote Christian Ben Lakhdar, of the Catholic University of Lille, and Tanja Bastianic, of the French Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, in the International Journal of Drug Policy. Yannis, a 34-year old Greek addict, is among them. He said he used to inject heroin, then cleaned up at a state-run rehab centre just outside of Athens. But earlier this year he says he became HIV-positive from sharing needles. "Now they want me on a detox programme to prove my commitment to giving up drugs. Otherwise it can get difficult to get my (HIV) drugs, even though I am Greek and have social security," he said by telephone in Athens. On paper, all Greeks who make social security contributions should be granted HIV treatment, but Yannis says doctors are becoming choosy over who gets them. And the treatment is expensive. CAN'T PAY FOR DRUGS Budget cuts have complicated Athens' relationship with pharmaceutical companies. Athens has imposed some of the most draconian price cuts for medicines of any European country, and some companies have been forced to accept Greek government bonds instead of cash for outstanding debts. So far, there are no signs that this has disrupted supplies of HIV medicine. But the cuts could have a huge impact on the health system. "It is proven that the more money spent on health, the lower the fatality (rate). Cuts in health will affect lives," said epidemiologist Georgios Nikolopoulos, who tracks HIV rates at the Hellenic Centre. Currently, antiretroviral drugs cost Greece at least 1,000 euros per patient a month. For the state to pay for all those people would cost just over 130 million euros a year. According to Christianna Rizopoulos, who collects data at the Hellenic Center's HIV office, there is talk among health professionals that the government plans to cut its contribution for drugs to 600 euros per treatment per month, so patients would have to foot almost half the bill. The health ministry did not answer calls seeking comment. "We are very worried," said Rizopoulos. "With the economic crisis, there is no way of knowing what will happen next." "MAKES NO SENSE" Josephine, a 50-year old HIV-positive illegal immigrant from Mozambique who also visits the Centre for Life, is among those on the edge. She has been in Athens since 2005, applied for asylum four years ago and says she is still waiting to learn if her status will be approved. She has a limp caused by severe arthritis, which HIV aggravates. For the past six months, she said, she has received zero antiretroviral medicine because she cannot find work to pay social security contributions. "This is also due to the economy in Greece now. I used to get plenty of work before," she said, her small black braids tucked under a red and white scarf. Last year she didn't work at all. Since April this year, she has found sporadic cleaning jobs, but hasn't paid her rent for seven months. And Greece's preventative programmes are under heavy pressure. In September the health ministry ordered that the seven mobile clinics that provide heroin replacement treatment around the rundown areas of town be moved to 32 state-run hospitals across Athens. The move was welcomed by some health professionals, who said it would help improve the distribution of staff and treatment. Others said it was unrealistic. Staff for the Greek Organisation Against Drugs, OKANA, which provides the bulk of drug replacement treatment and reintegration programmes, joined an anti-austerity protest on Syntagma Square last month. They said the cuts will make it harder to reach drug-users. "Countries like Spain have the centres right where the problem is, here we have the opposite," said Emi Koutsopoulou, an OKANA psychiatrist. "We now have rehab and methadone points in really posh hospitals in wealthy suburbs. This makes no sense. A drug user is not going to go out there." Full content generated by Get Full RSS. |
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