Bangladesh and India have started a long-term project for researching and developing jute-based geotextiles, which will potentially prevent soil erosion and help the roads to last for a longer time.
   Geotextiles are permeable fabrics which, when used in association with the soil, have the ability to separate, filter, reinforce, protect or drain.
   Officials at the Jute Diversification and Promotion Centre told New Age that the project was launched in India recently.
   ‘Under the project, 26 field trials — 16 in India and 10 in Bangladesh — will be conducted to certify and standardise the effectiveness of jute geotextiles,’ said centre’s executive director, KR Hasan.
   Hasan, whose centre is owned by the Bangladesh government and funded by the European Commission, attended the launching ceremony of the project in Delhi recently.
   The $3.6-million research project will aim at standardisation of design, methodology and specifications for use of jute geotextiles.
   The Indian government will provide $1.25 million as counterpart contribution for implementation of the project in India, and the Bangladesh government will contribute $0.57 million.
   The Common Fund for Commodities, Amsterdam, an inter-governmental body within the framework of the UN, will finance the project.
   The Jute Study Group is the supervisor of the project while Kolkata-based Jute Manufacturers Development Council is the secretariat.
   Hasan told New Age that the Army Engineering Core would conduct six field studies and the rest would be conducted by the LGED, Roads and Highways and the Water Development Board.
   The long-term field experiments will mainly monitor the effectiveness of jute geotextiles in prevention of erosion by rivers and landslides from hills, he said.
   Studies will also monitor the effectiveness of using jute geotextiles in sustainable road construction.
   At present one of Bangladesh’s state-owned jute mills produces around 2,500 tonnes of jute geotextiles annually for export only as the use of geotextiles is yet to begin here.
   Shahedul Islam Helal, the former president of Bangladesh Jute Goods Exporters Association, said that there is already a global market for at least 3,00,000 tonnes of jute geotextiles which
   are made from waste-grade jute fibre, but its price is almost similar to jute goods of fine grade fibres.
   Indian textiles minister Dayanidhi Maran told the attendees at the launching ceremony that jute geotextiles command a business potential of around $300 million in the Indian railways only.

The country’s premium sea port in Chittagong is likely to have Malaysia’s Penang sea port as its ‘sister’ to enhance trade and relationships between two nations.
   Shipping minister Shahjahan Khan, now leading a delegation to Malaysia, welcomed the suggestion of making Chittagong port as ‘sister port’ of the Malaysian port by Penang Port Authority at a meeting, according to messages received in Dhaka Tuesday.
   ‘We welcome the idea of a sister port relationship to enhance co-operation and increase trade and commerce between our two countries,’ the Malaysian media quoting Khan said.
   Khan said that he was expecting to strike a deal in this regard after approval from Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.
   The government has taken the initiative to develop Chittagong port as a regional hub to cater the needs of neighbours like India, Nepal and Bhutan.
   Penang Port Commission chairman Tan Cheng Liang Tan said the deal could be signed soon as it would help enhance the development of the ports.
   ‘If we sign the memorandum of understanding with Chittagong port, it will help strengthen the relationships between the two nations in terms of port operations,’ she added.
   She said Penang port’s handling capacity increased by 3.1 per cent to 958,476 twenty-foot containers last year from 929,639 TEUs in 2008.

Kraft Foods agreed a recommended deal to buy Cadbury for around 11.9 billion pounds ($19.6b), creating the world’s top confectioner after frantic last-minute talks broke an impasse over price.
   Kraft’s CEO Irene Rosenfeld had to inject more cash into her bid and drop the number of new Kraft shares in the offer to win over Cadbury chairman Roger Carr and mollify her top shareholder, billionaire investor Warren Buffett.
   Kraft’s cash-and-share deal values each Cadbury share at 840 pence, with shareholders also set to get a 10p special dividend, bringing it to a total of 850p, which prompted a unanimous recommendation from the Cadbury board in favour of the deal.
   Cadbury shares hit a record high of 838 pence in early trade and were up 3.7 per cent 837-1/2p by 1003 GMT.
   ‘Kraft has got a very good deal here. 850p is predicated on the current Kraft share price, and I would expect Kraft’s shares to rise today on the back on substantially less Kraft shares being issued as part of the deal,’ said Panmure Gordon analyst Graham Jones.
   Kraft said the deal would be accretive to earnings in 2011 by around 5 cents on a cash basis and give a mid-teens percentage return on investment, well in excess of Kraft’s cost of capital.
   The new bid consists of 500p of cash and 0.1874 new Kraft shares, compared to Kraft’s original offer of 300p cash and 0.2589 new Kraft shares, which valued the shares in September when the deal was first proposed at 745p.
   Buffett, who owns a near-10 per cent stake in Kraft had warned Rosenfeld not to overpay and issue too many new Kraft shares.
   Kraft said on Tuesday it was issuing 265 million new Kraft shares compared with its original plan to issue 370 million.
   The deal would create the world’s largest confectionery group ahead of privately owned Mars-Wrigley.

US ambassador to Bangladesh James F Moriarty has said the United States seeks to join existing efforts and inspire new efforts to promote entrepreneurship and innovation in Muslim majority countries and Muslim communities across the world.
   He was speaking as guest of honour at a roundtable on entrepreneurship, organised by the American Chamber of Commerce in Bangladesh, in a city hotel on Tuesday.
   The US envoy said US president Barack Obama had recently announced that he would host a Summit on Entrepreneurship in the coming months involving innovators from the globe including Bangladesh in order to find new ways to inspire entrepreneurship.
   AmCham president Aftab ul Islam moderated the session and also delivered the welcome address.
   Former adviser of the caretaker government Rokia A Rahman, Asif Ibrahim of New Age Group, spoke as discussants while executive director of AmCham A Gafur delivered the introductory speech.
   Speakers stressed the need for educational and training facilities well equipped with entrepreneurial skills for the youth of the country in order to develop entrepreneurship.
   Besides, access to funds, advanced and updated knowledge on technologies and information communication technology, market access, infrastructure for investments and industries, policy frameworks, change of mindsets are very much essential to help build up strong entrepreneurship, they said.
   Moriarty said as part of his efforts to deepen ties between business leaders, foundations and social entrepreneurs in the US and Muslim communities around the world, president Obama asked Ambassadors in countries with Muslim majorities to start dialogue on entrepreneurship.

Top mobile operator Bharti Airtel is set to announce flat quarterly profit growth after a vicious price war in the world’s fastest-growing wireless market began eating into its market share and margins.
   Rival Reliance Communications, which has been more aggressive in cutting call prices, is expected to be the worst-hit by the price competition and may report its quarterly profit has almost halved.
   ‘I don’t think there is room for the situation to worsen, but the pressure on earnings may continue for the next one or two quarters until some consolidation happens,’ said KK Mital, head of wealth management at Globe Capital.
   ‘I think it is better to stay away from telecoms stocks for the time.’

Post and telecommunications minister Rajiuddin Ahmed Raju on Tuesday urged the global telecom giants to invest in Bangladesh as an investment friendly atmosphere is prevailing in the country’s telecommunications sector.
   He said this while visiting Grameen Phone Ltd chairman Sigve Brekke called on him at his secretariat office.
   Mentioning the government’s various steps including amendment of the telecommunication act, broadband policy and stopping illegal VoIP and formulating policy on international long distance telecommunications service, Raju said these steps have created a favourable atmosphere for investment in the telecommunication sector.
   Post and telecommunications secretary Sunil Kanti Bose, additional secretary M Rafiqul Islam, BTRC chairman Zia Ahmed, among others, were present.

The Sonali Bank Limited has adopted a special credit project for uplifting the mango farming and its trade for the first time in the country.
   Main thrust of the program titled ‘Mango-village Development Credit’ is to facilitate the mango farmers and the mango-orchard purchasers to make the mango farming more intensive.
   In the preliminary stage, the target has been set to extend loan of Taka two crore to the mango farmers and traders of seven districts- Rajshahi, Chapainawabganj, Natore, Naogaon, Dinajpur, Thakurgaon and Satkhira in the current season.
   Assistant general manager of the bank Hasanuzzaman in Rajshahi told the news agency that the Rajshahi and Chapainawabganj are famous for mango and many people depend on mango farming and trading for their livelihood.
   Besides, modern and scientific mango farming requires huge money and the farmers face financial hardship to meet up the expenditures.
   To boost the mango yield and to encourage more people towards the cash crop farming, he said the SBL has launched the special credit programme under its agricultural and non-agricultural credit scheme.
   Terming the present allocation is negligible in comparison to the demand he said steps would be taken to enhance the allocation in future.
   Shibganj branch manager Osman Ghani said around 60 per cent lands in all upazilas especially Shibganj under Chapainawabganj district is occupied by mango orchards.

German Technical Cooperation has set up some 1.75 lakh fuel saving and environment-friendly cooking furnaces in the rural areas of the country.
   This was stated by training and monitoring officer of GTZ Mohammad Sagar while visiting the fuel saving and environment-friendly furnaces at 15 households in Mithapukur upazila in Rangpur on Monday.
   Sagar led a GTZ team that visited beneficiaries in different adjoining villages in the upazila.
   While talking to the beneficiaries and local journalists, the GTZ officials said that the cooking furnaces, Bandhu Chula, had enormous beneficial properties like saving fire woods, no environmental pollution and smoke-related diseases of the womenfolk.
   Non-governmental organisation SAFE has set up 170 such Bandhu Chulas in different villages of Mithapukur upazila alone in the district with the assistance of the GTZ as various other NGOs have set up the same in many other areas in the country.
   The GTZ official said that popularizing such cooking furnaces in the rural areas as well as in the urban areas could
   save huge quantities of fire woods annually side by side with improving the environmental and ecological balance in the country.

AKTEL Mymensingh regional office organised an exchange of views with its channel partners at a hotel in Mymensingh town Tuesday.
   AKTEL managing director Michael Kuehner addressed the view exchange as chief guest.
   Among others, chief of regional operation of AKTEL Jabid Ahsan, its chief commercial officer Bidhut Kumar Bose addressed the meeting. The officials of AKTEL in Mymensingh region and distributors were present.
   Michael Kuehner told the meeting that AKTEL had achieved the second position in this region.
   He urged the AKTEL officials to extend the network coverage of AKTEL to reach it at every door step. He thanked the officials for their good performances.

World stock markets fell Tuesday as Japan Airlines filed for bankruptcy protection and investors awaited a raft of fourth-quarter US corporate earnings with a degree of unease following a fairly mixed start to the results season.
   In Europe, the FTSE 100 index of leading British shares was down 47.77 points, or 0.9 per cent, at 5,446.62 while Germany’s DAX fell 49.39 points, or 0.8 per cent, at 5,869.16. The CAC-40 was 35.12 points, or 0.9 per cent, higher at 3,,942.34.
   Wall Street was poised for a subdued start to the week after being closed Monday for the Martin Luther King public holiday. Dow futures were down 13 points, or 0.1 per cent, at 10,550 while the broader Standard & Poor’s 500 futures fell 1.2 point, or 0.1 per cent, to 1,131.10.
   In the run-up to Wall Street’s open, investors will be turning their attention to the next batch of fourth quarter corporate earnings — so far, earnings have been fairly mixed, with upside surprises from the likes of Intel Corp offset by disappointments elsewhere, most notably Alcoa Inc.
   Citigroup Inc will take centre stage Tuesday, to be followed later in the week by others including Goldman Sachs Group Inc, Bank of America Corp and Morgan Stanley.
   Michael Hewson, an analyst at CMC Markets, said investors will be paying particular attention to loan loss provisions at Citigroup and any comments on possible further write downs.
   Over the week, 65 companies in the S&P 500 post their results this week, constituting about a fifth of the S&P’s total value. As well as the banks, earnings from Google Inc, IBM Corp and McDonald’s Corp will be closely monitored.
   Though attention is primarily on the US, investors in Europe have had plenty of news to digest.
   On the corporate front, Kraft Foods Inc finally succeeded in persuading Cadbury PLC’s board to accept and recommend to shareholders a takeover offer after improving its bid to $19.5 billion.
   Cadbury topped the list of risers on the FTSE 100, gaining just under 4 per cent to 837 pence a share, more or less in line with the offer price of 840 pence a share.

Japan Airlines went bankrupt Tuesday with $26 billion of debt in one of the country’s biggest ever corporate failures, beginning a painful overhaul involving more than 15,000 job cuts.
   JAL, Asia’s biggest carrier, reassured passengers that its flights would not be interrupted after it sought court protection from its creditors and moved to delist its shares from the stock exchange.
   The government announced a $3.3-billion injection of public funds and fresh emergency loans of $6.6 billion for the airline, which will slash about 15,600 jobs — 30 per cent of its workforce.
   JAL went bust with debts of about 2.32 trillion yen ($25.7b), becoming one of the highest profile victims of Japan’s long economic malaise.
   But the airline said it was confident it could swiftly revitalise its business under the Corporate Rehabilitation Law and ‘be reborn as a leading airline group that could again lead the global airline industry’.
   ‘Effects on customers will be avoided,’ it added.
   Japan Airlines shares will be delisted from the Tokyo Stock Exchange on February 20 or earlier, the bourse said on its website, a move expected to result in shareholders losing most or all of their investment.
   The bankruptcy is Japan’s biggest corporate failure outside the financial sector since World War II, according to Tokyo Shoko Research, an advisory firm.
   JAL has been hit hard by industry turbulence unleashed by the September 11, 2001 terror attacks in the United States, the Iraq war and the global financial crisis, as well as global health scares in the past decade.
   JAL shares plunged to an all-time low of just three yen (three US cents) at one point earlier Tuesday, reducing the market value of the group to about $90 million — far less than even the cost of a new jumbo jet.
   The government has tapped Kazuo Inamori, a 77-year-old entrepreneur and ordained Buddhist monk, to run the stricken airline during its overhaul, replacing Haruka Nishimatsu who resigned as president Tuesday.
   Inamori is one of Japan’s most respected business executives and management gurus, having founded both high-tech parts supplier Kyocera Corp and a company that later became part of KDDI Corp, now Japan’s number two telecoms firm.
   ‘He seems to have charisma, which is a good thing,’ said Makoto Murayama, an analyst at Nomura Securities.
   ‘At the moment JAL employees don’t really want to admit that they work for the company. If someone can restore their pride and lead them, the chances of a recovery could increase.’
   Eyeing its lucrative Asian landing slots, US carriers American Airlines and Delta Air Lines are now in a bidding war for a slice of JAL.
   The Japanese airline made no announcement Tuesday about which US carrier it would tie up with.
   Dutch carrier KLM said on Monday that talks involving Air France-KLM and Delta on JAL’s future were ‘going well’, after reports that the Japanese airline had agreed to tie up with Delta and switch to the SkyTeam alliance.
   Experts say radical downsizing is long overdue at JAL, which has been hobbled by high costs since its days as a state-owned flag carrier and is overexposed to unprofitable domestic and overseas routes.
   ‘The problem is that the government lacks a clear vision on what to do with JAL’s international network,’ said Yasuhiro Matsumoto, a credit analyst at Shinsei Securities. ‘They are focused on assisting JAL.’

One year after the founder of Satyam Computer Services made an astonishing confession to the largest fraud in Indian corporate history, many say that what really sets R Ramalinga Raju apart is not his malfeasance, but the fact that he got caught.
   ‘To think there aren’t other companies that dabble in less than forthright practices, to believe that other companies are not doing this kind of thing is naive,’ said Sharmila Gopinath, research manager at Hong Kong’s Asian Corporate Governance Association.
   The group released a 55-page white paper on Indian corporate governance Tuesday, which suggests that many of the conditions that helped facilitate Raju’s $2.5 billion fraud still exist, despite efforts to reform.
   The Satyam scandal stunned India and raised questions abroad about the risks of investing in a country where improvements in regulations and corporate governance haven’t kept pace with its rapid rise in economic and financial clout. With creaking infrastructure and a fast-growing population, India more than ever needs reputable markets to attract and channel private investment capital.
   The report draws on the views of more than a dozen foreign institutional investors, like the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, auditors, like KPMG, and law firms, like White & Case.
   Their chief complaint? Controlling shareholders have too much power, a situation with roots in Indian culture and the nation’s corporate regulations.
   ‘The balance of power between the promoters and other shareholders is out of kilter,’ said Jamie Allen, the group’s secretary general.
   If that relationship isn’t better calibrated, he said, foreign institutional investors — who poured $17.5 billion into Indian equities last year — could lose confidence in India’s nascent capital markets. Some, he said, already have.
   Many Indian businesses are rooted in old family empires run by men who are happy to take money from public shareholders but loathe to cede control. As a result, minority shareholders and independent directors often have little real power. That, plus inadequate regulation and lax oversight, means controlling shareholders can often manipulate a public company for their personal profit, critics say.
   ‘India is undergoing a generational transformation,’ said Nishith Desai, one of Mumbai’s best-known corporate lawyers. ‘Twenty or 30 years ago, India was very feudalistic, full of black money, bad practices, and no accountability.’
   Punitive tax rates of up to 97.5 per cent in the late 1970s encouraged corporate sleight of hand. ‘Everybody did business in the black. You were not accountable to anybody. You showed poor results and false losses. You cheated the government, employees and shareholders,’ he said.
   Economic liberalisation in the early ‘90s — and corporate tax rates that plummeted to 34 per cent — began to change that culture, but, he added: ‘Some of the old habits and legacy continue.’

Job creation in the construction, import-export and hotel sectors drove Hong Kong’s unemployment rate below five per cent for the first time since late 2008, the government said on Tuesday.
   The city’s jobless rate fell to 4.9 per cent between October and December, which was also the fourth consecutive decline since the start of the global financial crisis, the Census and Statistics Department said.
   The seasonally adjusted jobless rate fell from 5.1 per cent in the September to November period, the government said. Hong Kong said it last recorded a jobless rate below five per cent in the period between November 2008 and January 2009.
   In the most recent period, the number of jobless declined by 8,200 to 172,800, while the overall workforce fell slightly from 3,678,600 to 3,669,900 in the three months ending December, the government said.
   Matthew Cheung, secretary for labour and welfare, said Hong Kong could see a further drop in unemployment as firms hire staff for the busy Chinese New Year holiday next month.
   ‘(But) a solid recovery of the labour market in the longer term would hinge on the pace of job creation in the corporate sector,’ he warned in a statement.

BRAC Bank opened its branch with 24-hour ATM service and online banking at Upashahar in Sylhet on Tuesday.
   Chairman of the bank Muhammad A (Rumee) Ali inaugurated the branch, said a news release.
   Bank’s managing director and chief executive officer AEA Muhaimen was present on the occasion.
   Local elites, business people, a good number of bank’s customers along with senior management of the bank attended the inauguration programme.

Singer Bangladesh held its sales conference 2010 in Dhaka from January 15 to 16.
   Managing director and chief executive officer of the company AM Hamim Rahmatullah, also vice-president of Singer Asia Limited, inaugurated the conference at Sonargaon Hotel, said a news release.
   Singer Corporation chairman, president and chief executive officer Stephen H Goodman and Singer Asia president and chief executive officer Gavin Walker were present on the occasion.
   Singer Corporation board members, Singer Bangladesh management committee members, sales and marketing executives, field personnel and business associates attended the conference.

IFIC Bank Ltd signed a participation agreement with Bangladesh Bank for Re-financing of solar energy, bio-gas and effluent treatment plant on Tuesday.
   Managing director of IFIC Bank Mosharraf Hossain and executive director of Bangladesh Bank Md Abul Quasem signed the agreement at the conference hall of the central bank in Dhaka, said a news release.
   IFIC Bank executive vice-presidents Fariduddin Al-Mahmud and Wakar Hasan were also present on the occasion.