Rabu, 10 Oktober 2012

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NST Online Business Times : latest

Posted: 10 Oct 2012 07:17 PM PDT

The global economic doldrums may have weighed on businesses around the world, but in Malaysia a luxury hand-crafted carmaker struggles to keep up with demand as orders pour in from China and the Middle East.

Some customers are willing to wait nearly two years for their Bufori vehicle, which costs anywhere from US$150,000-US$350,000 and can contain unique touches at the buyer's request, ranging from built-in vaults to pearl-studded interiors.

One such customer is eHong Tan, a Malaysian green technology entrepreneur and tea connoisseur, who asked for her Bufori to be fitted with tea-making and aromatherapy features.

"I love drinking Chinese tea. The car allows me to make tea and drink it while I'm traveling," said Tan, adding that both are "unique and satisfying" creature comforts that she had always wanted.

The hefty price tag does little to dampen the car's popularity among Asia's rich, whose number of high net worth individuals overtook North America for the first time last year as wealth in Thailand and Indonesia surged almost ten percent, according to the Asia-Pacific Wealth report.

Bufori's founder and managing director, Gerry Khouri, said he first started the company in his native Australia in 1987, but decided to move to Malaysia in the early 90s when demand from the region began to jump.

In the past three years, orders for his Buforis, which he says is the only fully handmade car produced in Asia, have steadily risen 15-20 percent each year.

"China and Middle East are probably our two biggest markets right now," said Khouri, adding that he also gets orders from Southeast Asian countries, Hong Kong, Japan and Europe.

"There's a lot of promise here — that's what brought us to Malaysia and kept us here," Khouri said. The country hosts Bufori's only plant where customers can visit to see their cars being made. Showrooms are found in Sydney and Shanghai.

"The beautiful thing is I get to see it built from the beginning to end, like watching a baby growing up," said Tan.

Khouri, who built his first car in his backyard at only 21, says that while the Bufori kept its trademark classic designs, the cars' performance itself is "in a class of its own".

The Geneva, a 4-door luxury limousine with elegant curves and a long running board, is powered by a 6.4-litre V8 engine boasting up to 470 horsepower and 630 Newton meters (Nm) of torque.

"These are exclusive, very elite. You've got to be very special to own one of these cars," he said.

But Khouri admits that the long waiting list can push some customers to competitors such as Bentley and Rolls Royce.

"These cars are made by hand. No machines — look around you, it's just people," he says, gesturing around the 50,000 square foot (4,645 square meter) factory in the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur where workers are busy fitting custom-made parts and molding the Bufori's classic body.

Upstairs, in the upholstery and interior section, leather is cut and stitched by hand while engineers put together electronic controls.

"You can't speed up people like a machine," he added.

With around a hundred workers, the factory makes only 60 cars worldwide per annum — a fraction of its 300 target, with the limited workforce and the long hours it takes to complete a car dragging down production.

"Our problem is our demand exceeds our capacity. We're not in the situation where we can produce enough vehicles to meet the demand worldwide," says Khouri.

"It sounds like a crazy problem to have - but it's serious because we are losing sales everyday."

Khouri wants to set up more factories to speed up production but is wary, wanting to preserve the quality.

"Bufori cars are very labor-intensive and dependent on people. We might compromise the quality which is something we don't want to do," he added.

The Bufori La Joya coupe takes 3,500 man hours to complete while the Geneva saloon needs 9,000 man hours.

"That's ridiculous in the overall scheme of things. If you look at a mass producer carmaker, even 50 man hours is taking too much," says Khouri.

But customers who chose to be patient have no regrets.

"It is worth the wait," says Tan, whose car took 20 months to finish. "It's more than a car. To me, the Bufori is an art." -- Reuters

AIA to buy ING 's Malaysian unit for US$1.7b

Posted: 10 Oct 2012 07:10 PM PDT

HONG KONG/AMSTERDAM: Pan Asian insurer AIA Group Ltd has agreed to buy ING's Malaysian insurance operations for US$1.73 billion in cash, handing the Dutch financial services firm its first deal in a nine-month drive to sell off Asian assets.

The sale of the Malaysian unit is expected to be followed soon by the divestment of ING's Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Thailand units, as the bailed-out Dutch financial firm offloads assets to repay 10 billion euros (US$12.9 billion) in state aid received during the 2008 financial crisis.

For AIA, the purchase of the Malaysian operations marks its second M&A deal in less than a month, and gives it a leading position in the fast growing Southeast Asian economy.

AIA was spun out of U.S. insurer AIG in 2010 through a US$20.5 billion IPO, and Hong Kong-based CEO Mark Tucker has been re-building the business after it lost agents and market share amid AIG's near collapse during the financial crisis.

"It's a good deal and they are paying up to buy a good quality business and to expand into a rapidly growing market," said Credit Suisse analyst Arjan van Veen, describing ING's Malaysian business as the "jewel in the crown".

AIA said it was paying a multiple of about 1.8 times embedded value for the Malaysian business, compared with AIA's own multiple of 1.5 times. Van Veen said the deal should add 5 percent to AIA's earnings per share.

Embedded value is a measure commonly used to gauge the value of insurance companies and includes the present value of future profit from long-term insurance contracts.

The deal, which confirmed a report by Reuters on Wednesday, marks ING's first sale after it announced plans to auction its Asian insurance operations in January as part of a global asset sell-off programme.

ING originally wanted to sell its entire Asia insurance operation, with a book value of 6.1 billion euros, to one buyer but said it was willing to split up the business if it could raise more money that way.

"Today's announcement is the first major step in the divestment of our Asian insurance and investment management businesses and shows that ING continues to make steady progress in the restructuring of our company," said Jan Hommen, chief executive, in a statement. -- Reuters

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US House hearing investigates terror attack in Libya - CNN International

Posted: 10 Oct 2012 07:54 AM PDT

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

NEW: Top State Department official addresses criticism in congressional hearing testimony
The Sept. 11 attack killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans
Republicans argue President Obama's policies caused vulnerability to such an attack
The administration changed description of event from a protest gone awry to a terror attack

Washington (CNN) -- At a congressional hearing Wednesday loaded with political implications, a top State Department official will defend the administration's handling of the terrorist attack in Libya that killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans on the anniversary of 9/11.

Prepared testimony made public before the House Oversight Committee hearing showed that Under Secretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy will address specific criticism by Republicans of an alleged lack of preparedness ahead of the Benghazi consulate attack and a shifting response by the Obama administration following the assault.

"The Department of State regularly assesses risk and allocation of resources for security; a process which involves the considered judgments of experienced professionals on the ground and in Washington, using the best information available," Kennedy's prepared statement said. "The assault that occurred on the evening of September 11, however, was an unprecedented attack by dozens of heavily armed men."

U.S. official sought more security for Benghazi post

He also will tell the Republican-led panel that initial assessments by administration officials about what happened that night were based on available information that has since changed.

Critics accuse the administration of trying to cover up or play down the attack through initial statements that described it as a spontaneous act stemming from protests over an anti-Muslim film rather than a planned terrorist assault.

"We have always made clear that we are giving the best information we have at the time. And that information has evolved," Kennedy's prepared statement said, citing remarks by U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice on September 16 that critics alleged were deceptive. "The information she had at that point from the intelligence community is the same that I had at that point. As time went on, additional information became available."

GOP challenger Mitt Romney has made the Libya attack a focus of his criticism of President Barack Obama's foreign policy.

With polls showing more people favor Obama over Romney on foreign policy, the former Massachusetts governor seeks to gain ground by arguing the president has made America less influential and more vulnerable around the world.

The assault in Benghazi occurred 11 years to the day after the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon. After initially blaming the violence on the protest over the film produced in America, the Obama administration conceded it was a terrorist attack.

In Kennedy's prepared statement, he noted that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appointed an Accountability Review Board that includes well-known figures such as former Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen to report on whether proper security systems and procedures were in place or implemented

"Until these investigations conclude, we are dealing with an incomplete picture, and, as a result, our answers today will also be incomplete," Kennedy's prepared statement said.

State Department officials: Benghazi attack 'unprecedented'

The House panel scheduled the hearing even though Congress is on recess until after next month's election. Also set to testify were Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Programs Charlene Lamb; Regional Security Officer Eric Nordstrom, who was stationed in Libya before the attacks; and Lt. Col. Andrew Wood, a Utah National Guardsman who was leading a security team in Libya until August.

Issa's committee had asked Clinton to take part, and she sent Kennedy and Lamb to appear.

Democrats accuse Issa of planning a partisan hearing, a similar allegation leveled against the panel for its past investigations of the botched "Fast and Furious" gun-running program and the failed Solyndra clean energy company that received about $500 million in government loan guarantees.

On Tuesday, two senior State Department officials provided reporters with the most detailed explanation yet of the attack in Benghazi, telling a conference call that there was no prior indication such an assault was imminent.

The officials, who briefed reporters on condition of not being identified by name, said there was "nothing unusual" throughout the day of the attack.

What Obama administration has said about Libya attack

Stevens held an evening meeting with a Turkish diplomat and then retired to his room in one of the compound's buildings at 9 p.m., according to the officials. The first sign of a problem came 40 minutes later when diplomatic security agents heard loud talking outside the compound, along with gunfire and explosions.

Asked whether the attack was a spontaneous assault taking advantage of a demonstration, as originally asserted by Obama administration officials, one senior official said, "That was not our conclusion."

The two senior officials offered riveting detail of the attack by what one of them described as "dozens of armed men" who marauded from building to building in the enormous complex and later fired mortars on a U.S. annex less than a mile away.

In the havoc at the compound, which had four buildings, Stevens and two of his security personnel took refuge in a fortified room that the attackers were able to penetrate, one official said.

The attackers doused the building with diesel fuel and set it ablaze, and the three men decided to leave the safe haven and move to a bathroom to be able to breathe, according to the official. Stevens became separated from the security personnel in the chaos and smoke, and eventually turned up at a Benghazi hospital, where he was declared dead.

Hospital personnel found his cell phone in his pocket and began calling numbers, which is how U.S. officials learned where he was, the State Department officials said.

The officials echoed what administration officials have maintained since the attack: that U.S. and Libyan security personnel in Benghazi were outmanned and that no reasonable security presence could have fended off the assault.

"The lethality and the number of armed people is unprecedented," one official said. "There had been no attacks like that anywhere in Libya -- Tripoli, Benghazi or anywhere -- in the time that we had been there. And so it is unprecedented, in fact, it would be very, very hard to find precedent for an attack like (it) in recent diplomatic history."

Romney knew ex-SEAL slain in Benghazi

CNN's Jill Dougherty, Elise Labott and Tom Cohen contributed to this report.

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Obama, Romney face most narrow electoral map in recent history - Washington Post

Posted: 10 Oct 2012 08:30 AM PDT

Despite an apparent bounce for Mitt Romney in recent weeks, the fundamental dynamic of the electoral map appears to be locked in for now — with both campaigns focused on the nine states that have dominated for most of this year, according to interviews with strategists on both sides.

The Republican presidential nominee has enjoyed some momentum after a winning performance in the first debate that has seemingly put previously written-off states such as Pennsylvania and Michigan back in the mix, according to polls out this week. But the Romney campaign appears to be resisting pressure from supporters to broaden the fight and is not expanding their path to 270 electoral college votes — at least for now.

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Rabu, 10 Oktober 2012