from the L.A. Times — Nathan Olivarez-Giles
Google announced that it’s investing $94 million in solar panel farms in the Sacramento area.
The money will go toward four photovoltaic, or PV, panel farms built by San Francisco-based Recurrent Energy, owned by tech-giant Sharp, and will help fuel the project alongside funding from investment firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., said Axel Martinez, Google’s assistant treasurer, in a company blog post Tuesday.
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Suryo Sulisto, first hosted by AICC in the 1980’s as an Eisenhower Fellow, returned as Chairman of Indonesia’s largest business organization, KADIN (Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and Industry), to speak to 45 AICC members at a December 8thbreakfast at the Yale Club of NY. KADIN is the only organization with statutory authority to represent business with the government. Sulisto highlighted the fundamental connection between NY and Indonesia through the shared legacy of colonization by the Dutch and the fact that the Manhattan was traded to the British fo ran island in the Moluccas. Acknowledging the serious economic challenges facing Europe and the US, he urged American companies to focus on new opportunities, and made the case for Indonesia as one of them.
Given the anticipated lower demand from the US, EU and even China, Indonesia was well positioned to ride out the “turbulence” for the following reasons, in Sulisto’s opinion:
- Only 22% of GDP is export related, 60% is consumption
- Growth in range of 5.5-6%
- Low debt to GDP ratio: 26%
- Structurally sound economy with abundant natural resources and a middle class predicted to be 60% of the population by 2030.
- High levels of consumer confidence fueling good demand for products, heightened by the youth of the country’s population (50% under 35)
- Better exposure internationally in forums such as G20, APEC, East Asia Summit
- Ample foreign reserves, in worst case the finance ministry can buy back bonds to curb a currency run
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Batik lovers must not miss this upcoming event – a World Batik Summit to be held at the Jakarta Convention Center, from September 28 to October 2, 2011
To be organized by the Indonesian Batik Foundation (YBI) in cooperation with the government, the Batik Summit will consist of two main events: the World Batik Exhibition (WBE) and the World Batik Conference (WBC).
The World Batik Summit (WBS) themed “Indonesia: Global Home of Batik” will be officially opened by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, according to Organizing Committee Chairwoman of the World Batik Exhibition Murniati Widodo in Jakarta on Friday (Sept. 23).
The biennial World Batik Exhibition will have three themes, namely :”Multi-Partnership: Bringing Batik To The World”, “Batik`s Contribution to the Creative Economy”, and “Batik as a Cultural Heritage: Conservation and Modernization”.
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Posted by:
admin | Posted in:
Enterprise | Posted on: 09-12-2011
By Berni Moestafa and Chan Tien Hin
Sept. 12 (Bloomberg | Original Article) — Indonesian stocks have become more attractive to overseas investors after the world’s fourth-most populous nation overtook Malaysia as Southeast Asia’s second- largest equities market by value, PT Panin Sekuritas said.
“Foreign investments into Indonesian stocks will likely increase as portfolios are weighted in line with the size of a nation’s stock market,” Winston Sual, who helps manage $991 million at Jakarta-based Panin Sekuritas, said in a Sept. 9 interview. The firm’s $407 million Panin Dana Maksima fund has climbed 40 percent in the past year, beating 35 rival funds, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
The value of Indonesian equities surged 17 percent to $416 billion this year to Sept. 9, surpassing Malaysia’s $407 billion to become the ninth-biggest stock market in Asia. Singapore’s stock market is the biggest in Southeast Asia at $523 billion. The Jakarta Composite index has risen 8 percent in 2011 through last week, compared with a 3.3 percent drop in the FTSE Bursa Malaysia KLCI Index. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by:
akripke | Posted in:
Enterprise | Posted on: 08-31-2011
Asia will add 1.66 million dollar-millionaires by 2015, taking the total number of wealthy to 2.82 million as the world’s fastest-growing major economies of China and India continue to mint millionaires, a report from Julius Baer said Wednesday.
The Swiss wealth manager forecast that the wealth of high networth individuals (HNIs), those with $1 million or more in investable assets, would nearly triple to $15.8 trillion in the five years to 2015.
China alone would be home to nearly half of the millionaires in Asia with a combined wealth of $8.8 trillion. The world’s most populous nation had 502,000 million HNIs with investable assets totaling $2.6 trillion, the report said.
India would more than double the number of HNIs to 403,000 by 2015, while Indonesia would see the highest growth rate in the number of wealthy, up by a quarter to 99,000, the first such report from Julius Baer said.
The wealth manager forecasts that China and India would collectively contribute 40 percent to global growth for 2011 and 2012.
RANKS OF THE RICH BY 2015
The number of High Networth Individuals HNIs (1,000) and wealth of High Networth Individuals HNIs ($bln) by country:
- China 1378 – 8764
- India 403 – 2465
- Indonesia 99 – 487
- Philippines 38 – 164
- Thailand 128 – 609
- South Korea 310 – 1074
- Malaysia 68 – 329
- Taiwan 136 – 593
- Hong Kong 131 – 711
- Singapore 129 – 616
- Total 2820 – 15812
PHOTO: Models pose with a gold-plated Infiniti luxury sports car on display at a jewellery store in Nanjing, east China’s Jiangsu province on March 31, 2011. China is predicted to become the world’s largest luxury goods market by 2020, accounting for 44 percent of worldwide sales and bigger than the entire global market is now. Read more about the 24k gold plated Infiniti G37 at topspeed.com
In a diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks last year, there was mention of a cobalt mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The document revealed that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security considered this mine so vital that its “incapacitation or destruction … would have a debilitating impact” on U.S. security or the national economy. That’s because the U.S. is the world’s largest consumer of cobalt, but mines none of it.
Now that is set to change. The first mine in the U.S. dedicated to producing cobalt will open in Idaho next year, reflecting the metal’s increasing importance in transportation, communication, and energy technologies. Cobalt is used in rechargeable batteries for wireless devices and hybrid vehicles, and in catalysts for refining gasoline. Half of the $440 million worth of cobalt consumed in the U.S. last year went into heat- and high-pressure-resistant “super-alloy” metals for aircraft engine compressors, combustion chambers, and turbines.
The U.S. has largely relied on imports of refined cobalt from China—the world’s leading producer—and from Norway, Russia, and Canada. (About one-fifth of the 10,000 tons of cobalt consumed in the U.S. in 2010 came from recycling scrap metal and spent catalysts.) China, besides its domestic supply, processes cobalt from mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which supplied half of the 88,000 metric tons of cobalt mined in the world last year. (Zambia provided an additional 13 percent, with another 7 percent coming from Russia and China each.)
However, this geographic diversity masks the fact that much of the world’s supply—possibly one-third—is controlled by a single company, Switzerland-based Glencore and its subsidiaries. “We may be shifting our reliance on foreign oil into a reliance on foreign critical materials,” says Matthew Stepp, a clean-energy policy analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation in Washington, D.C.
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