Word: firming
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...this Mandarin lesson is taking place at the headquarters of Benelli motorcycles. Once one of Europe's most revered bikemakers, it was also the first Italian firm to be bought outright by a Chinese company when, in October 2005, the Qianjiang Group, China's third-largest scootermaker, purchased Benelli for $24 million. At the time of the bid, Qianjiang's purchase of the storied brand from its last Italian owner was seen as another sign of the country's industrial decline, with local newspapers deriding the sale as a "disaster" and an "ugly story." Indeed Italy's manufacturing model - built...
...Benelli's design and production. That would give them a foothold in the European market, and the move had an industrial logic: unlike Japan three decades earlier, China still lags well behind the Western motor industry in know-how and design, which means the Chinese saw the small Italian firm as a vehicle for the improvement of Qianjiang's own products back in China. Dai Wei, Benelli's export manager, and one of just two Chinese employees on-site in Pesaro, spends time chaperoning colleagues from China. "Here they know how to make motorcycles better and faster," says...
...sell virtual stuff for real money. The ballyhoo surrounding this online community has led multinational brands from Reebok to Toyota to establish beachheads on Second Life to interact with consumers and be a part of the next wave in social networking. In April market-research firm Gartner predicted that by the end of 2011, 80% of active Internet users will have some sort of presence in a virtual world, with Second Life currently one of the most populous. Business Week last fall put on the cover a real estate agent whose virtual land deals made her the first person...
...Chrysler shocked the marketplace when it appointed Robert Nardelli, most recently known as a symbol of CEO excess, to run the flagging car company, just days after it was bought by the private-equity firm Cerberus Capital Management. Here are the big questions surrounding the appointment...
Nowhere is the drug war's resurgence more stunning than in Monterrey, a city of 3 million where 1,200 U.S. businesses have major operations. As recently as 2005, the global consulting firm Mercer ranked it Latin America's second safest city (behind San Juan, Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory). But then the Zetas arrived. They terrorized the border by day and retired by night to garish mansions in Monterrey and suburbs like San Pedro, not far from the city's business nobility. "No one wanted to admit that we'd become a dormitory for drug lords," says Monterrey publisher...