Word: hugeness
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Riding the Downturn That's certainly true for Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky. Classmates at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), they moved to San Francisco a few years ago with the vague intention of starting a business. Their eureka moment occurred in October 2007 when a huge design conference decimated the supply of hotel rooms in the city. They decided to try their idea without mapping it out. (See which businesses are bucking the recession...
Even so, not every shareholder is thrilled at the prospect of selling to the Chinese. Chinalco is a huge consumer of iron ore, and mining companies fear that the investment in Rio Tinto could give China more influence over the price. During the boom years, when Chinese companies' appetite for virtually every metal was voracious, they got stuck with stiff price increases. The deal could give Chinalco, which already owns 9.3% of Rio, better access to the company's choicest deposits of copper, iron ore and bauxite. The secretary-general of China's Iron and Steel Association, Shan Shanghua...
...China's huge appetite is making some foreign governments nervous. Australia blocked the Minmetals deal with Oz, citing national security, forcing the Chinese firm to revise the offer to exclude a valuable gold and copper mine. And Libya exercised its option to buy Venerex Energy, a producer based in Calgary, Canada, whose biggest asset is an oil and gas field 100 miles (160 km) southwest of Tripoli. That thwarted a $390 million bid that China National Petroleum Corp. had made to acquire Venerex. Beijing hasn't done itself any favors either. It blocked--on antitrust grounds that analysts considered flimsy...
...Brazilian deal, Beijing agreed to lend $15 billion to cash-strapped Rosneft, Russia's largest oil company, and an additional $10 billion to Transneft, Russia's biggest pipeline company. The loans will be paid off not in cash but in crude--300,000 bbl. a day from the huge east Siberian oil fields. That's about 4% of China's current demand for crude oil. Over the 20-year life of the deal, Beijing will effectively be paying about $20 per bbl. With oil expected to return to $70 or $80 per bbl., it could be the steal...
...Travis pointed past the empty cul-de-sac toward a huge, silent box of a building. "That's where I worked," he said, "the plant with no smoke coming out of it." Even without a college degree, he had been making $24 an hour there, at the Boise Cascade paper mill, which was the town's largest employer. And then he was fired, along with most of the other employees, in January. Kristy had been running a home day-care center, but that income vanished when laid-off millworkers started taking care of their kids themselves. Douglas...