Bhutan is keen to make a free trade agreement with Bangladesh to boost economic relation between the two countries, the Economic Affairs Minister of Bhutan said on Saturday.
   Lynopo Khandu Wangchuk spoke of Bhutan’s keenness during his meeting with the Dhaka Chamber of Commerce and Industry at the DCCI auditorium this morning.
   DCCI president Zafar Osman chaired the meeting. The Bhutanese Minister said they had proposed a free trade agreement with Bangladesh and the Bangladesh government also showed a positive attitude.
   He also said that Bhutan has undertaken a plan to produce 10,000 MW of hydroelectricity in the next 12 years and sought investment from Bangladesh in this regard. Regarding the foreign direct investment in Bhutan, the Minister said they are revising the current FDI policy and hope that it would be finalized in a couple of months.
   ‘We are revising our FDI policy,’ we have to open up our FDI.’ He also offered a joint collaboration tourism system between Bhutan and Bangladesh. ‘Under this system, we will encourage tourists in Bhutan to visit Bangladesh and the same will be done from Bangladesh,’ he said.
   Lyonpo Khandu Wangchuk urged the private sector from both countries to come forward to increase the trade volume between two countries. In 2007-08 fiscal, Bangladesh imported goods worth US$ 13.73 million from Bhutan while its exports to Bhutan amounted to only US$ 1.35 million.
   Speaking at the meeting, DCCI president Zafar Osman said that Bhutan might consider exporting hydropower to Bangladesh as the country has vast potential of generating hydroelectricity. ‘Bhutan can import world standard pharmaceuticals and ceramic products from Bangladesh to increase the existing trade volume.’

Bangladesh and India will open 13th land port at Belonia today to expedite export and import business with the landlocked eastern Indian states known as Seven Sisters.
   Shipping minister Shahjahan Khan will inaugurate the new land port that is about 170 kilometres away from Dhaka and a strategically important place in Tripura, one of the seven landlocked Indian states.
   Tripura minister for finance Badal Chowdhury and commerce minister Jiten Chowdhury would inaugurate the Muhuripur LCS on the Indian side.
   Bangladesh and India operated 12 land ports at Benapole, Banglabandha, Burimari, Hili, Sonamasjid, Tamabil, Akhaura, Haluaghat, Darshana, Birol, Bhomra and Bibirbazar. There is another land port at Teknaf operated between Bangladesh and Myanmar.
   Businessmen who have long been demanding for a land port facility at Belonia observed that it would provide better business facilities to Bangladeshi traders from Chittagong, Feni and Noakhali.
   Traders from Tripura, Assam, Nagaland, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh would be able to use the port on Indian side.
   The export and import costs will be reduced by one fourth from the existing costs, said India-Bangladesh Chamber of Commerce and Industry president Abdul Mutlab.
   He hoped that the port would enable Bangladesh to increase its exports to $1 billion to India by 2011.
   Bangladeshi products like cement, plastic goods, processed food items, fish, ceramics and toiletries have a good demand in the Seven Sisters. Timbers, bamboo and stones are the most sought after items by Bangladeshi businessmen that can be imported from the landlocked Indian states.
   According to Indian state news agency PTI, the volume of trade would increase to worth Rs 200 crore from the present level of Rs 93 crore between Bangladesh and the Seven Sisters.
   The balance of trade between Bangladesh and India is now heavily titled in favour of the latter. The two-way trade balance was $968.71 million in favour of India in the 2001-02 fiscal year, when Bangladesh exported goods worth $50.19 million to India against her imports of $1.01 billion. The gap increased to $3.03 billion in 2007-08.
   Bangladesh Land Port Authority chairman KAM Haroon told New Age that a full-fledged operation of the land port would take time. His organisation will have to acquire land to build infrastructure facilities to make it operative.

Europe must move to clean-up its banks after testing their financial stability, the International Monetary Fund said on Saturday amid the worst global economic crisis since World War II.
    ‘It’s time to clean the banks,’ Marek Belka, head of the IMF’s European department, said in Istanbul as finance chiefs from the G7 richest world economies gathered in Turkey’s biggest city for talks on the economic crisis.
    ‘We need a more resolute approach to addressing the balance sheet risks faced by banks and to take action for recapitalisation or restructure viable institutions and dissolve others as necessary,’ he said.
   Bank tests were ‘very helpful’ but there should now be action, he added.
   The European Union’s Swedish presidency on Thursday said tests on 22 European banks had shown lenders were ‘sufficiently capitalised’ despite credit losses for 2009 and 2010 estimated at 400 billion euros (583 billion dollars).
   The results of the tests, conducted by the Committee of European Banking Supervisors, showed that capital ratios would be well above a minimum requirement of 4.0 per cent — hovering at between 6.0 and 9.0 per cent.

Small-scale tea growers in the country’s northern most district, Panchagarh, are now facing manifold problems that hinder the expansion of such cultivation, considered the most suitable for the area.
   Tea cultivation was initiated in Panchagarh in 1999. Seeing the growing tea gardens on bordering Indian land, some retired officials of Bangladesh Tea Board pioneered tea plantations there and found the land suitable.
   They were hopeful that unlike large-scale tea estate in Sylhet and Chittgong, small holding tea plantations would gain ground in Panchagarh.
   After a decade, small and medium-sized Panchagarh tea planters now point out that the dreams remain unimplemented with large-scale tea planters grow well only while small ones face many problems including finance and expansion.
   Visiting different areas of Tetulia and other areas Panchagarh district New Age also found last week that shortage in the supply of seed tea plants, which have become exorbitantly costly, threatening expansion of tea plantation.
   ‘Per piece of seed tea plant is now sold at around Tk 5, more than double as against a year ago,’ said Layek Ali, a medium-sized tea planter.
   Layek, who and whose relatives own a 33-acre land at the shore of River Korotoa, initiated tea plantation four years back.
   Land of Layek and his relatives were never cultivated but he started dreaming to be a tea planter. About 15 years back, he began to nourish the dream when he noticed growing tea gardens in the Indian border areas, just on the other shore of Kortora.
   ‘I dream to buy entire 33-acre plot and turn it as a tea garden,’ said Layek who earns around Tk 50,000 per month from his still immature gardens and reinvest that in extension.
   Kudrat Ali, a farmer at Tetulia, said he was thinking to turn his two acres of land into a tea garden. Kudrat is now convinced that tea would open scopes for earnings more that he gets from ever fluctuating price of paddy.
   ‘Really substantial amounts of money that required for first couple of years, during sowing and early growing tea plants, discourage farmers from tea plantation,’ Kudrat said.
   Many farmers in Tetulia and other areas of Panchagarh told New Age that availing finance from banks was quite difficult. Procedural hassles especially documentations of personal land ownerships discourage farmers from taking loan.
   Official survey confirms that at least 6,000 hectares of Panchagarh land are very much suitable for tea cultivation. But less than 2,000 hectares, mostly owned by large-estate owners, have so far been planted, said a senior official of Bangladesh Tea Board.
   It is officially categorised that farmers having 1-5 acres of tea farming would be termed as “small growers”, above 5 acres up to 20 acres as “small holding” and above 20 acres as “Tea Estate”.
   An official of the Panchagarh Department of Agricultural Extension said motivation and extension support programmes for potential and small tea planers had been dampened during the past few years.
   ‘Constant and effective supports to small tea planters are required,’ said the official, seeking anonymity.
   In the past fiscal year ended in June, Panchagarh tea gardens produced more than one million kilograms which is more than one sixth of the country’s entire tea productions.
   Moreover, the Panchagarh gardeners and officials hope within the next couple of years, production would be doubled as plants in growing gardens will be maturing, eventually yielding more leaves.

The subscription of the initial public offering of Grameenphone Ltd begins today.
   The country’s largest mobile phone operator will float 6,94,39,400 ordinary shares to raise around Tk 486 crore from public.
   This will be the largest IPO offered by any company in the history of the country’s stock market.
   The subscription closes for the local people Thursday next. For the non-resident Bangladeshis, the deadline, however, will be October 18, according to its prospectus.
   The face value of the shares of the company is Tk 10 each and the issue price is Tk 70 with a premium of Tk 60. Market lot has been fixed at 200 shares, meaning that investors will have to submit Tk 14,000 for each application.
   On August 20, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the stock market regulator, gave its final nod to the private telecom company’s application for floating its IPO.
   The company’s pre-IPO size is Tk 486.07 crore, each of which is priced at Tk 10 in face value, with an additional Tk 64 in premium.
   Through the IPO, Grameenphone is selling 5.14 per cent of its total paid-up capital and through the pre-IPO 4.86 per cent of its total paid-up capital.
   Incorporated on October 10, 1996, Grameenphone commenced its business on March 26, 1997.
   The authorised capital of the company is Tk 4,000 crore and the pre-IPO paid up capital around Tk 1,215 crore.
   Telenor of Norway owns 62 per cent of Grameenphone and the rest 38 per cent is owned by Grameen Telecom, a subsidiary of Grameen Bank.
   The Citigroup Global Markets Bangladesh Private Limited is the manager to the issue.

M Khairul Hossain joined the Investment Corporation of Bangladesh as chairman of its board of directors recently.
   Khairul is a professor of finance at Dhaka University. He obtained PhD degree from the Moscow Institute of National Economy in 1983. Earlier, he completed his MS degree in economics from the institute. He pursued his post-doctoral research work on regulatory framework of stock markets at A&M University, Prairie view, Texas, USA under Senior Fulbright Scholarship Programme.
   Khairul has extensive experience of working in various administrative capacities in public universities and financial institutions, said a press release.

Faruk Ahmad Siddiqi, a former secretary to the government joined Southeast Bank Limited recently as Capital Market Division chief after his normal retirement.
   An MA in English from Dhaka University, Siddiqi started his career by joining erstwhile Pakistan taxation service in 1969. During his long career in government service, he held important positions. He was member of National Board of Revenue, secretary of posts and telecommunications ministry, secretary of education ministry and secretary of commerce ministry, a news release said.

Europe put pressure on the United States to support a weak dollar as finance chiefs from the Group of Seven richest economies gathered in Istanbul on Saturday for talks on the economic crisis.
    ‘Everyone needs a strong dollar,’ French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde said on Friday ahead of the G7 talks in the run-up to annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Turkey’s biggest city.
   The IMF has said that a tentative global economic recovery has begun but has also warned that the economic crisis is not yet over as the financial sector remains badly battered and unemployment in many countries continues to rise.
   The G7 finance chiefs were to discuss ‘the next steps and implementation’ of a roadmap agreed at the G20 summit last week for recovery from the worst recession since World War II, a US Treasury official said earlier.
   Signs of recovery have pushed down the value of the dollar, which is traditionally seen on currency markets as a safe haven in tough economic times and whose status as the world’s main reserve currency has been questioned.
   The current state of the dollar has also led some experts to conclude that Washington is now allowing the currency to lose value as a way of boosting US exports by making them cheaper — a tactic that would weaken European exports.
   US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has sought to dampen these fears, saying recently that ‘a strong dollar is very important’ to the US economy.
   The dollar meanwhile fell against both the yen and the euro on Friday, going down to 1.4590 dollars to the euro in late trading in London.
    ‘Excessive volatility and disorderly movement in exchange rates has adverse implications for economic and financial stability,’ European Central Bank chief Jean-Claude Trichet warned earlier this week.
   Trichet is set to attend the Istanbul talks, along with finance ministers and central bank governors from the G7 members: Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States.
   This grouping of rich global economies has now been eclipsed by the G20 which includes major emerging markets such as Brazil, China, India and Russia.
   Leaders at a G20 summit in the US city of Pittsburgh last week agreed the wider grouping was the main forum for international economic cooperation.
   Stressing the decline of the G7, IMF managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn disparaged the group in an interview on Friday.
    ‘The old G7 — I was about to say the late G7,’ the former French Socialist finance minister told news television network France 24.
   G7 meetings were ‘a bit without substance’ and ‘floating in the clouds with communiques which no longer interest anyone,’ he added.
   The US Treasury official however said the G7 remained ‘a valuable format for finance ministers’ by bringing together ‘the largest creditors in the system.’
   Though the meeting on Saturday is of the G7, Russian Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin is expected to participate. The G7 meeting will also be the first for the new Japanese finance minister, Hirohisa Fuji.

Stocks could hit more speed bumps next week if the start of the third-quarter earnings season offers little evidence that the economic recovery is gaining strength.
   With second-quarter earnings primarily boosted by cost-cutting, investors want to see if the latest quarterly results will show an improvement in revenues. That’s a priority for investors because revenue growth is deemed a crucial indicator of consumer and corporate spending.
   Aluminum company Alcoa Inc, a Dow component, is scheduled to post quarterly results on Wednesday after the market’s close, marking the unofficial kickoff of the latest earnings parade.
   The other marquee names on next week’s brief earnings calendar are PepsiCo, Yum Brands Inc, Costco Wholesale Corp and Monsanto Co. Investors are clamoring for more solid signs of economic stability after the Standard & Poor’s 500 has climbed 51.5 per cent from a 12-year closing low on March 9.
   By that score, the latest quarterly earnings are a high-stakes endeavor, with investors saying to Corporate America: ‘Show us the money.’
   William Rutherford, president and chief investment officer of Rutherford Investment Management in Portland, Oregon, said that ‘earnings have to be good enough to justify the run-up we’ve had.
   ‘We haven’t got all the problems solved by any means,’ he added. ‘We’re still going to see bumps along the way.’
   Indeed, a string of surprisingly weak economic reports in recent days gave investors a cold reminder that the recovery will not be without hitches, even with the massive stimulus from the government.
   On Friday, dour news came from the government’s non-farm payrolls report showing that US employers shed far more jobs in September than expected. The jobs data put the stock market’s bulls on the defensive. And next week could be just as daunting if there are few positive surprises.
   The benchmark S&P 500 suffered its second straight weekly drop on Friday, and it is down 4.3 per cent from its September 22nd close, its highest finish since the current rally began.
   ‘The next big thing we’re going to talk about is earnings,’ said Ryan Detrick, senior technical strategist at Schaeffer’s Investment Research in Cincinnati, Ohio. ‘Usually after the first couple of days, you get a feel as to what the overall trend is going to be.’
   Thomson Reuters data show that third-quarter earnings are forecast to drop 24.7 per cent from a year earlier, a projection that gives companies a low hurdle to overcome following a surprisingly improved second quarter.
   More takeover deals could also dictate next week’s market action — if there are any, according to analysts.
   A flurry of takeovers over the last two weeks has dominated the headlines as companies jostle to bolster their revenue streams in an uncertain economy.

The US economic recovery train lost momentum in September as job losses accelerated to 263,000, sending the unemployment rate to a 26-year high of 9.8 per cent.
   Friday’s shockingly weak Labor Department report showed the critical labor market reversed course after months of improvement, stunning analysts who had been calling for a ‘V-shaped’ recovery from recession.
    ‘This report is dismal and disappointing,’ said Sung Won Sohn, economist at California State University.
    ‘The ‘green shoots’ in the economy are withering. Technically, the economy may have bottomed, but the job market is lagging behind and struggling.’
   The unemployment rate was up one-tenth of a point from August and in line with most forecasts, but would have been higher if not for 571,000 people dropping out of the labor force.
   But payroll losses were far worse than expectations for a loss of 175,000 jobs. The number of job cuts rose sharply after a revised loss of 201,000 in August.
    ‘This confirms that this is going to be a frustratingly slow recovery and it’s not going to make a lot of people happy for a long time,’ said Robert MacIntosh, economist at Eaton Vance, who argued that stimulus efforts are fading.
    ‘This economy needs to grow on its own and it’s going to take a long time.’
   David Rosenberg, chief economist at Gluskin Sheff & Associates, said the numbers ‘far from validate the overwhelming consensus view that the recession has come to an end.’
    ‘Sustainability is the key and there can be no durable recovery without net job creation and organic wage growth,’ Rosenberg added.
   Cary Leahey, senior economist at Decision Economics said all components of the report were grim with a reversal in payroll trends and slowing income gains.
   The report showed the average workweek in the private sector edged down by 0.1 hour while wages were up a tepid 0.1 per cent, or 2.5 per cent annualized.
   Leahey said these details show weakness going forward which will prompt the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates near zero.
    ‘The Fed is going to see the rate of change in earnings has slowed, and that’s good for inflation but it suggests you don’t have any foundation for consumer spending growth,’ he said.
   Since the start of the recession in December 2007, the figures showed the number of unemployed has increased by 7.6 million to 15.1 million, and the jobless rate has doubled to 9.8 per cent, according to the Labor Department.
   The US economy contracted at a 0.7 per cent pace in the second quarter, nearly emerging from the recession that slashed output by 6.4 per cent in the first quarter, based on the most recent official data.
   Most economists expect growth to return in the third quarter but say the recovery could fade without job growth. Robert Brusca at FAO Economics said that some backtracking in recovery is not unusual, ‘but usually the backtracking comes after more progress has been made.’
    ‘Where is the stimulus money?’ Brusca said. ‘This demonstrates about a clearly as possible how badly designed the stimulus plan was. We spent over one trillion dollars...and one of the objectives was to stabilize state and local employment. That obviously was not done.’
   Others said the recovery is still on track but will be a rocky ride.
   Dean Maki at Barclays Capital said the weakness in jobs has come from aggressive cost cuts from companies retrenching during the recession.
    ‘Corporate cost-cutting has been far more intense than usual in this cycle,’ he said.
    ‘The intense cost-cutting helped restore profit growth, but was probably based on overly pessimistic assumptions. We expect business investment spending to recover briskly as the economic recovery continues.’

Tesco, Britain’s biggest stores group, launched a clothing web site on Saturday to tap one of the few fast-growing retail markets and win new customers with a more up market focus.
   Tesco said it was set to go along with a vogue for getting top designers and celebrities to create fashion ranges.
   The move will step up competition to supermarket rival Asda, which sells its popular George range online, as well as clothing retailers like Marks & Spencer and Next.
   It may also pose a challenge to small but fast-growing online fashion group ASOS whose catwalk-inspired fashions had been seen as being safe from Tesco’s plans.
   Tesco head of clothing Terry Green said he was aiming for a fashionable appeal while keeping the group’s focus on value, and was working with top brands and talking to top designers. ‘It’ll be a different experience, so I do expect to get a lot more customers,’ he told reporters at a fashion show launch.
   Tesco is Britain’s fourth-biggest clothing retailer by volume of goods sold with a 3 per cent market share and annual sales of over 1 billion pounds ($1.6 billion), Green said.
   Sales growth is currently limited by store space, with around 60 per cent of stock unavailable in 80 per cent of shops and so putting the full range online will significantly boost availability of Tesco’s clothes.
   Green, who started the ‘Designers at Debenhams’ ranges which are still driving growth at the British department stores group, is aiming to leapfrog rivals Asda, Primark, and Marks & Spencer, and to grow online sales to 10 per cent of group clothing sales, though he did not say by when.
   web site is launching with around 3,500 product lines and more than 20 brands, including Nike and Timberland, as well as hip East London label Liquorish and handbags by actress-turned-designer Mischa Barton.
   Green said these numbers would increase rapidly and Tesco would put more emphasis on premium ranges of its F+F brand.
   Online retail sales rose 16 per cent year-on-year in August, according to industry body IMRG and consultants Capgemini, versus 2.1 per cent growth in total British retail sales, and with clothing and footwear growing just above the online total.
   Green said Tesco was in talks about launching so-called diffusion brands whereby designers do limited ranges for a retailer.’ We may bring in one or two big, famous names as well,’ he said.
   Fashion retailers have sparked a surge in sales, drummed up publicity and added cachet to their brands by signing up top designers and celebrities for limited periods of time.
   Earlier this week, Sweden’s Hennes & Mauritz, which has pioneered such collaborations, said it had signed up French designer Sonia Rykiel for two collections.

Free TV shows on the Internet could be harder to find if Comcast Corp succeeds in acquiring a majority stake in NBC Universal.
   Comcast would become a partner in Hulu the video website which allows viewers to watch TV shows on the Web for free, a business potentially worth billions of dollars if consumers had to pay to watch the shows.
   The video website is jointly owned by NBC Universal, News Corpand Walt Disney Co. Hulu is the most popular site in the United States for watching TV shows, according to comScore.
   Comcast is in talks with General Electric Co, to buy 51 per cent of NBC Universal, which would allow the cable operator to combine its cable assets with NBC’s cable networks, movie studio and theme parks, according to people familiar with the talks.
   Cable operators have downplayed investor fears that customers will drop cable for free TV on the Web. But privately they’ve warned TV networks they may stop paying affiliate fees if free TV shows keep cropping up on the Web.
   Hulu had nearly 40 million unique viewers in August, web measurement company comScore said. That is more than Comcast’s 24 million paying subscribers, which account for about $5 billion a quarter in revenue.
    ‘We suspect Comcast believes it needs content to protect its landline distribution platform,’ Richard Greenfield, analyst at Pali Research, wrote in a note to investors on Friday. ‘It wants to mitigate the risk of becoming that scary ‘dumb’ pipe.’
   Comcast, the largest US cable operator, has approached the Web’s free TV threat by getting behind a service called TV Everywhere with Time Warner Inc. The idea behind TV Everywhere is to allow consumers to watch shows on the web — so long as they are paying cable subscribers.
    ‘This deal (Comcast-NBC) has major implications on the success of TV Everywhere,’ said Thomas Eagan, an analyst at Collins Stewart. ‘Comcast may decide to change Hulu to some degree to facilitate a premium Hulu service much faster.’
   Comcast has even tried to match Hulu with its own free TV website, Fancast. But while Hulu has come from nowhere to become the sixth most visited video site in the US in just 18 months, Fancast hasn’t even cracked the Top 10.
    ‘Hulu was started by NBC and Fox so they could compete with Comcast. So this is a defensive move to some extent by Comcast,’ said Kaufman Bros. analyst Todd Mitchell. ‘Hulu will just become another choice of Comcast’s pay-TV buffet.’
   If Comcast has a stake in Hulu’s future, as Mitchell suggests, it effectively reduces competition to the cable sector.
   Since web video is still a fledgling sector, however, it is unlikely to raise the hackles of US regulators, said analysts.

IBM on Monday will begin offering businesses a basic ‘cloud computing’ e-mail service at a price that undercuts a plusher offering by Internet giant Google.
   IBM unabashedly pitched its new LotusLive iNotes as an alternative to e-mail service Google has been promoting as part of a campaign to win businesses over to using applications hosted as services on the Internet.
    ‘E-mail and other collaboration services are the right entry point for many companies to realize the promise of cloud computing,’ said IBM Lotus Software general manager Bob Picciano.
    ‘But, only if clients feel confident they’re getting business-grade service from a trusted leader in enterprise services.’
   Software provided online as a service instead of being purchased and installed on home or office computers has been a growing trend accelerated by tough economic times because it is cheaper to ‘rent’ than to buy software.
   Google has been enticing users to a suite of online applications
   offered as services, many of which compete with text, e-mail, accounting and other software sold by Microsoft.
   The California-based Internet titan stumbled last month when its web-based e-mail went offline for a couple of hours.
   IBM, based in New York State, is playing up its reputation as a business technology veteran and launching iNotes with ‘aggressive’ pricing of three dollars per employee per month.
   Google charges businesses slightly more than four dollars per user per month for an e-mail service with far more memory capacity than iNotes and added features like word processing and video.

Bank Asia held a daylong business conference in the Dhaka city on Friday.
   Chairman of the bank Anisur Rahman Sinha inaugurated the conference as chief guest, said a news release.
   Anwarul Amin and M Nurul Islam, vice-chairmen of the bank, and A Rouf Chowdhury, director, addressed the gathering. Erfanuddin Ahmed, president and managing director, gave welcome speech. Branch managers and departmental heads at corporate office of the bank attended the conference.

Transcom Digital, a multi-brand electronics retailer, inaugurated a showroom on SSK Road in Feni recently.
   Transcom Electronics national sales manager (retail) Jafrul Alam Khan inaugurated the showroom, said a news release.
   The officials of Transcom Electronics, customers and well wishers were present at the opening ceremony.

Holcim (Bangladesh) Ltd, a cement manufacturer, arranged a meeting of the members of the jury board of ‘Holcim Green Built Bangladesh’ contest in the Dhaka city recently.
   Architect Bashirul Hoq chaired the meeting, said a news release.
   ‘Holcim Green Built Bangladesh’ contest, an initiative of Holcim (Bangladesh), is open to all Bangladeshi nationals above 18 years of age. The total prize value of the contest is Tk 20 lakh. The contest will be held under two categories — built projects and idea projects. The last date of the submission of project is December 31, 2009.