IN BRIEF (Page 16)

Sale on hold

Mining group Anglo American has postponed plans to sell its 3 billion-pound Tarmac road-covering business until turmoil on capital markets eases, Britain's Sunday Telegraph reported.

Anglo American announced last August it planned to sell Tarmac, saying it had received interest from trade and private equity firms.

Nintendo gets advantage

Nintendo Co sold three times as many Wii game machines in Japan last year as Sony Corp's PlayStation 3 consoles, researcher Enterbrain Inc said.

Nintendo sold 3.63 million Wii units last year, compared with PlayStation 3's 1.21 million, Tokyo-based Enterbrain said. Microsoft Corp's Xbox 360 game machines sold 257,841 units, the researcher's estimates showed.

Sell-off studied

Delta Air Lines Inc, the third-biggest US carrier, said it's still studying a possible sale of its Comair regional unit even as a board committee considers merger alternatives.

A tie-up with a rival and a Comair sale are among the most significant decisions pending for Chief Executive Officer Richard Anderson (above), who took over on September 1. Delta had left Comair's fate to be resolved after leaving bankruptcy last year.

Future offering

Future Capital Holdings Ltd, the financial services unit of India's Future Group, plans to raise as much as 4.9 billion rupees ($125 million) selling shares for the first time.

Future Capital plans to sell 6.42 million shares to the public between 700 rupees and 765 rupees apiece, according to share sale documents.

Singaporean shortlisting

Singapore's state investor Temasek Holdings has shortlisted up to nine companies as potential bidders for the sale of Tuas Power, which may fetch $2 billion, banking sources said yesterday.

The sale of Tuas will be the first of three power-generating companies that the city-state hopes to sell by June 2009, which analysts say could offer potential investors a low-risk route to steady profits.

Stake snapped up

Daimler AG will buy 26 percent in India's Sutlej Motors, the Business Standard said in an unsourced report yesterday, adding the German firm's proposal had been cleared by the Foreign Investment Promotion Board.

A spokesman for Daimler India declined comment on the report, saying: "Details of our association with Sutlej Motors will be shared once it is finalized."

Recession prospects

Harvard University economist Martin Feldstein, head of the group that dates US economic cycles, said the odds of a recession have risen to more than 50 percent after a report showing unemployment jumped in December.

"We are now talking about more likely than not," said Feldstein, president of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Growth peters out

Britain's financial services firms saw an end to a 2-year run of strong growth in the last months of 2007, with volumes dropping at their fastest rate since March 1991, when the economy was in recession, a survey showed.

The quarterly survey by the Confederation of British Industry and consultants PricewaterhouseCoopers, published yesterday, showed sentiment in the sector worsened over the three months to early December.

Agencies

(China Daily 01/08/2008 page16)