IN BRIEF (Page 16)

Indian offer

A unit of Walt Disney Co and the founders of India's UTV Software Communications Ltd have made an open offer to buy another 20 percent in the Indian media firm, an advertisement in the Business Standard showed yesterday.

The open offer for 7.75 million shares at 860.79 rupees each would follow a proposed allotment of 9.35 million shares at the same price to Disney, the advertisement said.

Joint investment

Toshiba Corp and SanDisk Corp will jointly invest as much as 1.8 trillion yen ($16.7 billion) to build two new NAND flash memory plants in Japan, the Nikkei business daily reported yesterday.

The world's No 2 maker of the flash memory chips after South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co Ltd will begin construction of both plants in the business year starting in April and bring them up to full capacity as early as in the year starting in April 2013, the paper said without citing sources.

Profit warning

Global airlines are likely to see a further profit cut in 2008 as the global credit crisis deepens, while fuel costs remain near record highs, the International Air Transport Association said.

The association, which represents 240 airlines comprising about 94 percent of international air traffic, in December slashed its 2008 earnings forecast for members by more than a third to $5 billion, citing the two factors. It is due to revise the forecast in two months.

Auctioneer's offering

PriceMinister.com, an online auctioneer that competes with Ebay Inc, will seek between 300 million euros and 500 million euros by selling stock in an initial public offer in Paris, La Lettre de L'Expansion said.

The sale will take place in April or May, the newsletter said, without citing anyone.

Drugmaker surges

Merck KGaA, the German maker of the Erbitux cancer drug, said fourth-quarter profit surged on gains from the sale of its generics unit to Mylan Inc.

Net income climbed to 3.39 billion euros, or 15.58 euros a share, from 129.5 million euros, or 67 cents, the Darmstadt, Germany-based company said in a statement handed to reporters yesterday.

Orascom link-up?

Orascom Telecom Holding SAE, the biggest mobile-phone company in the Middle East and North Africa by number of subscribers, said it may merge with a Western telecom company in future.

Orascom Telecom reiterated it wasn't interested in selling the company, it said in a statement e-mailed to the Cairo & Alexandria Stock Exchanges. The Cairo-based company was confirming a report published by the Financial Times.

Russia's richest

Oleg Deripaska's net worth almost doubled to $40 billion, making him the richest on a list of Russian billionaires that ballooned to 101, Finans magazine said.

Deripaska, the 40 year-old founder of the world's biggest aluminum company by capacity, United Co Rusal, extended his lead over former partner Roman Abramovich on surging metals prices and investments in construction and car manufacturing, Moscow-based Finans said in its latest issue.

Unit sale

Ericsson AB, the world's largest maker of wireless networks, agreed to sell the division that makes office switchboards as it focuses on customers in the telecommunications industry.

Stockholm-based Ericsson will sell the enterprise PBX solutions division to Concord, Canada-based Aastra Technologies Ltd. for 650 million kronor ($103 million), and transfer about 630 workers, the company said in a release yesterday.

Agencies

(China Daily 02/19/2008 page16)