Nelson will preside over a 70th anniversary celebration in Las Vegas this week for Carlson, the travel, lodging, restaurant and marketing business that began as the Gold Bond Stamp Company in 1938.
Peter van Stolk
Ms. Nelson’s father, Curtis L. Carlson, started the company in Minneapolis with a $55 loan, according to the Carlson Web site. In 2006, the company, which is still based in Minnesota, had sales of $37.1 billion; it employs almost 200,000 people under operations that include T.G.I. Friday’s and Radisson Hotels.
In 1998, Ms. Nelson took over the chief executive post from her father, who died the next year. Last month, the company named Hubert Joly, head of Carlson Wagonlit Travel, to succeed Ms. Nelson as chief executive; she will remain chairwoman.
That announcement came after a legal battle began between Ms. Nelson and her son, Curtis Carlson Nelson, former president and chief operating officer. Mr. Nelson left the company in 2006 and contended that he had been led to believe he would become chief executive. The company and a spokesman for Mr. Nelson both said that all legal issues had been resolved. The company would not comment further.
In a phone interview last week, Ms. Nelson, 68, said she was disappointed that a family member would not be running Carlson. She said she expected that over time, the job would be held at various times by “family candidates and external candidates, whoever can best lead what has become a very large company.”
The Las Vegas celebration will include speeches by Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, the departing chief executive of Christine Lagarde, the French finance minister; and Klaus Schwab, founder of the An evening gala will feature entertainment by the appropriately Minnesotan A CHARITY REMEMBERED When chief executives resign, their severance agreements usually reflect a concern for them and only them. But Peter van Stolk, the founder and departing chief executive of , appears to have considered people less fortunate than himself when he negotiated the terms of his departure this month.
Along with $450,000 in severance, Jones agreed to pay $100,000 to Mr. van Stolk to give to Vitamin Angels, a charity focused on the nutritional health of children in underdeveloped countries. He has supported Vitamin Angels through Jones for years.
Last year, the company posted a video on YouTube and pledged to give 25 cents to the charity every time somebody watched the video, up to a limit of one million viewings. PATRICK McGEEHAN
RUSSIAN TYCOONS TANGLE Alisher Usmanov, a Russian billionaire who made a fortune in distressed assets of mines and steel mills, has entered a takeover struggle for Norilsk Nickel, one of the world’s largest producers of nickel and platinum group metals.
It is the most ambitious maneuver yet for Mr. Usmanov, who rose from inside in the 1990s and survived a purge at the company after President came to power in Russia.
Now, Mr. Usmanov’s ties to Gazprom are seen as auspicious in Moscow, where reliable connections to the Kremlin are essential for business survival and success.
Mr. Usmanov’s entry threatens the ambitions of another of Russia’s richest men, the aluminum tycoon Oleg Deripaska, who is trying to gain control of Norilsk.
The two longtime owners of Norilsk, Vladimir Potanin and Mikhail D. Prokhorov (each worth about $21 billion, according to Finans magazine in Russia) said last year that they would divide their assets, setting off the current struggle. Mr. Prokhorov subsequently sold most of his stake to Mr. Deripaska.
Norilsk, which is based in Siberia, began as a gulag slave labor camp. Today it has a market capitalization of $57 billion. ANDREW E. KRAMER
PAY DELAY Many corporations allow their senior executives to defer the receipt of some of their pay and collect it later, plus interest. For Ara K. Hovnanian, the chief executive of , the company’s deferred-compensation program has not been a can’t-lose proposition.
The value of Mr. Hovnanian’s deferred-pay account dropped more than $13 million last year, according to the company’s proxy statement. To some degree, he suffered with the shareholders as the battering of the home-building industry took more than 75 percent off the price of Hovnanian’s stock in 2007. But unlike the rest of them, Mr. Hovnanian was able to cushion the blow with a gain of $4.6 million from exercising options on the company’s stock.
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Fear of Insurance Trouble Leads Many to Shun or Hide DNA Tests
Victoria Grove wanted to find out if she was destined to develop the form of emphysema that ran in her family, but she did not want to ask her doctor for the DNA test that would tell her.
She worried that she might not be able to get health insurance, or even a job, if a genetic predisposition showed up in her medical records, especially since treatment for the condition, alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, could cost over $100,000 a year. Instead, Ms. Grove sought out a service that sent a test kit to her home and returned the results directly to her.
Nor did she tell her doctor when the test revealed that she was virtually certain to get it. Knowing that she could sustain permanent lung damage without immediate treatment for her bouts of pneumonia, she made sure to visit her clinic at the first sign of infection.
But then came the day when the nurse who listened to her lungs decided she just had a cold. Ms. Grove begged for a chest X-ray. The nurse did not think it was necessary.
“It was just an ongoing battle with myself,” recalled Ms. Grove, of Woodbury, Minn. “Should I tell them now or wait till I’m sicker?”
The first, much-anticipated benefits of personalized medicine are being lost or diluted for many Americans who are too afraid that genetic information may be used against them to take advantage of its growing availability.
In some cases, doctors say, patients who could make more informed health care decisions if they learned whether they had inherited an elevated risk of diseases like breast and colon cancer refuse to do so because of the potentially dire economic consequences.
Others enter a kind of genetic underground, spending hundreds or thousands of dollars of their own money for DNA tests that an insurer would otherwise cover, so as to avoid scrutiny. Those who do find out they are likely or certain to develop a particular genetic condition often beg doctors not to mention it in their records.
Some, like Ms. Grove, try to manage their own care without confiding in medical professionals. And even doctors who recommend DNA testing to their patients warn them that they could face genetic discrimination from employers or insurers.
Such discrimination appears to be rare; even proponents of federal legislation that would outlaw it can cite few examples of it. But thousands of people accustomed to a health insurance system in which known risks carry financial penalties are drawing their own conclusions about how a genetic predisposition to disease is likely to be regarded.
As a result, the ability to more effectively prevent and treat genetic disease is faltering even as the means to identify risks people are born with are improving.
“It’s pretty clear that the public is afraid of taking advantage of genetic testing,” said Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health. “If that continues, the future of medicine that we would all like to see happen stands the chance of being dead on arrival.”
She worried that she might not be able to get health insurance, or even a job, if a genetic predisposition showed up in her medical records, especially since treatment for the condition, alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, could cost over $100,000 a year. Instead, Ms. Grove sought out a service that sent a test kit to her home and returned the results directly to her.
Nor did she tell her doctor when the test revealed that she was virtually certain to get it. Knowing that she could sustain permanent lung damage without immediate treatment for her bouts of pneumonia, she made sure to visit her clinic at the first sign of infection.
But then came the day when the nurse who listened to her lungs decided she just had a cold. Ms. Grove begged for a chest X-ray. The nurse did not think it was necessary.
“It was just an ongoing battle with myself,” recalled Ms. Grove, of Woodbury, Minn. “Should I tell them now or wait till I’m sicker?”
The first, much-anticipated benefits of personalized medicine are being lost or diluted for many Americans who are too afraid that genetic information may be used against them to take advantage of its growing availability.
In some cases, doctors say, patients who could make more informed health care decisions if they learned whether they had inherited an elevated risk of diseases like breast and colon cancer refuse to do so because of the potentially dire economic consequences.
Others enter a kind of genetic underground, spending hundreds or thousands of dollars of their own money for DNA tests that an insurer would otherwise cover, so as to avoid scrutiny. Those who do find out they are likely or certain to develop a particular genetic condition often beg doctors not to mention it in their records.
Some, like Ms. Grove, try to manage their own care without confiding in medical professionals. And even doctors who recommend DNA testing to their patients warn them that they could face genetic discrimination from employers or insurers.
Such discrimination appears to be rare; even proponents of federal legislation that would outlaw it can cite few examples of it. But thousands of people accustomed to a health insurance system in which known risks carry financial penalties are drawing their own conclusions about how a genetic predisposition to disease is likely to be regarded.
As a result, the ability to more effectively prevent and treat genetic disease is faltering even as the means to identify risks people are born with are improving.
“It’s pretty clear that the public is afraid of taking advantage of genetic testing,” said Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health. “If that continues, the future of medicine that we would all like to see happen stands the chance of being dead on arrival.”
Monday, February 18, 2008
Tax Scandal in Germany Fans Complaints of Inequity
FRANKFURT — For wealthy Germans, many of whom have long hidden their money outside the country to avoid its high taxes, this has been a weekend of high anxiety. For their fellow citizens, it has been a riveting spectacle, dominating the public discussion for days.
Klaus Zumwinkel was the first to fall in the tax investigation.
Prosecutors are investigating hundreds of people, including several who are household names in Germany, on suspicion that they evaded taxes by steering money to Liechtenstein, a postage-stamp principality known for its striking Alpine scenery and discreet banks.
The fast-spreading scandal has already brought down one of Germany’s most powerful business figures, Klaus Zumwinkel, who resigned Friday as the chief executive of the German postal service after the police raided his home. He is suspected of evading $1.46 million in taxes.
The scandal bears the hallmarks of a Robert Ludlum novel, with a mysterious informant who was paid by German intelligence to turn over a data disc containing evidence of tax fraud on a vast scale.
The ripples are extending far beyond Germany’s moneyed elite, inflaming the suspicions many ordinary Germans have long felt toward well-paid corporate bosses and the free market in general.
A leftist party that campaigns against the excesses of business has made notable inroads in recent German state elections, raising hurdles for the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is viewed as pro-business but has been sharply critical of the suspected tax evasion.
Evidence that Germany’s rich tucked away their cash in Liechtenstein and other tax havens is creating a new narrative in German politics: the betrayal of the elites, who have spent the last decade calling for a painful reform of the welfare state, even as they apparently avoided paying their fair share.
“The political implications of this are going to be great,” said John C. Kornblum, a former American ambassador to Germany who is a banker here. “In the U.S., we send people off to prison and say ‘good riddance,’ but it doesn’t actually shake people’s belief in the system. Here, it does.”
German authorities say they began unraveling the scandal in 2006, when a person, whose identity has not been disclosed, approached the country’s Federal Intelligence Service, its equivalent of the Central Intelligence Agency, offering a CD-ROM with data on German clients of a bank in Liechtenstein.
After checking out a sample of the information on the CD, the German finance minister, Peer Steinbrück, authorized a payment of about 5 million euros ($7.3 million) for the information.
By late last year, the material had passed through the tax agency in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, officials said, and landed on the desk of a special financial crimes group in Bochum, a gritty industrial city.
There, the investigators recognized a kind of tax dodge they knew existed but could seldom document.
Liechtenstein, a tiny German-speaking principality wedged between Switzerland and Austria, has strict banking secrecy laws and grants favorable treatment to foundations. Many are filled with cash spirited out of Germany through various means, some as crude as stuffing a suitcase with cash and driving across the border. Smugglers are arrested regularly.
Foundations are taxed in the low single digits and are permitted to disburse money to their founders and to founders’ family members. The foundations are also permitted to open bank accounts in their own names outside the principality, which gives the owners access abroad to their cash.
Any effort to trace the owners of the foundations runs up against Liechtenstein’s tough banking secrecy laws.
Data from the LGT Group, a Liechtenstein bank with a subsidiary that specializes in foundations, appears to have formed the basis of the German investigation. The bank, which is owned by the royal family of Liechtenstein, has said it cannot confirm its part in the investigation.
But on Friday, the bank said that the German scandal might be linked to data stolen by a disgruntled employee in 2002, and it conceded that it was not sure how many clients had been exposed. “The scope of the presumed data transfer cannot be determined,” LGT said.
In Bochum, the prosecutors had enough information to obtain 13 search warrants against three people, Mr. Zumwinkel among them. With television cameras in tow, they arrived at his villa in an affluent suburb of Cologne on the morning of Feb. 14 and carted away boxes of documents.
Prosecutors announced that they had obtained an arrest warrant for Mr. Zumwinkel but did not execute it after he agreed to cooperate with them and posted a large bond
Klaus Zumwinkel was the first to fall in the tax investigation.
Prosecutors are investigating hundreds of people, including several who are household names in Germany, on suspicion that they evaded taxes by steering money to Liechtenstein, a postage-stamp principality known for its striking Alpine scenery and discreet banks.
The fast-spreading scandal has already brought down one of Germany’s most powerful business figures, Klaus Zumwinkel, who resigned Friday as the chief executive of the German postal service after the police raided his home. He is suspected of evading $1.46 million in taxes.
The scandal bears the hallmarks of a Robert Ludlum novel, with a mysterious informant who was paid by German intelligence to turn over a data disc containing evidence of tax fraud on a vast scale.
The ripples are extending far beyond Germany’s moneyed elite, inflaming the suspicions many ordinary Germans have long felt toward well-paid corporate bosses and the free market in general.
A leftist party that campaigns against the excesses of business has made notable inroads in recent German state elections, raising hurdles for the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is viewed as pro-business but has been sharply critical of the suspected tax evasion.
Evidence that Germany’s rich tucked away their cash in Liechtenstein and other tax havens is creating a new narrative in German politics: the betrayal of the elites, who have spent the last decade calling for a painful reform of the welfare state, even as they apparently avoided paying their fair share.
“The political implications of this are going to be great,” said John C. Kornblum, a former American ambassador to Germany who is a banker here. “In the U.S., we send people off to prison and say ‘good riddance,’ but it doesn’t actually shake people’s belief in the system. Here, it does.”
German authorities say they began unraveling the scandal in 2006, when a person, whose identity has not been disclosed, approached the country’s Federal Intelligence Service, its equivalent of the Central Intelligence Agency, offering a CD-ROM with data on German clients of a bank in Liechtenstein.
After checking out a sample of the information on the CD, the German finance minister, Peer Steinbrück, authorized a payment of about 5 million euros ($7.3 million) for the information.
By late last year, the material had passed through the tax agency in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, officials said, and landed on the desk of a special financial crimes group in Bochum, a gritty industrial city.
There, the investigators recognized a kind of tax dodge they knew existed but could seldom document.
Liechtenstein, a tiny German-speaking principality wedged between Switzerland and Austria, has strict banking secrecy laws and grants favorable treatment to foundations. Many are filled with cash spirited out of Germany through various means, some as crude as stuffing a suitcase with cash and driving across the border. Smugglers are arrested regularly.
Foundations are taxed in the low single digits and are permitted to disburse money to their founders and to founders’ family members. The foundations are also permitted to open bank accounts in their own names outside the principality, which gives the owners access abroad to their cash.
Any effort to trace the owners of the foundations runs up against Liechtenstein’s tough banking secrecy laws.
Data from the LGT Group, a Liechtenstein bank with a subsidiary that specializes in foundations, appears to have formed the basis of the German investigation. The bank, which is owned by the royal family of Liechtenstein, has said it cannot confirm its part in the investigation.
But on Friday, the bank said that the German scandal might be linked to data stolen by a disgruntled employee in 2002, and it conceded that it was not sure how many clients had been exposed. “The scope of the presumed data transfer cannot be determined,” LGT said.
In Bochum, the prosecutors had enough information to obtain 13 search warrants against three people, Mr. Zumwinkel among them. With television cameras in tow, they arrived at his villa in an affluent suburb of Cologne on the morning of Feb. 14 and carted away boxes of documents.
Prosecutors announced that they had obtained an arrest warrant for Mr. Zumwinkel but did not execute it after he agreed to cooperate with them and posted a large bond
Smugglers Return iPhones to China
SHANGHAI — Factories here churn out iPhones that are exported to the United States and Europe. Then thousands of them are smuggled right back into China.
Ryan Pyle for The New York Times
Deals for the iPhone advertised at a market in Shanghai.
The strange journey of Apple’s popular iPhone, to nearly every corner of the world, shows what happens when the world’s hottest consumer product defies a company’s attempt to slowly introduce it in new markets.
The iPhone has been swept up in a frenzy of global smuggling and word-of-mouth marketing that leads friends to ask friends, “While you’re in the U.S., would you mind picking up an iPhone for me?”
These unofficial distribution networks help explain a mystery that analysts who follow Apple have been pondering: why is there a large gap between the number of iPhones that Apple says it sold last year, about 3.7 million, and the 2.3 million that are actually registered on the networks of its wireless partners in the United States and Europe?
The answer now seems clear. For months, tourists, small entrepreneurs and smugglers of electronic goods have been buying iPhones in the United States and then shipping them overseas.
There the phones’ digital locks are broken so they can work on local cellular networks, and they are outfitted with localized software, essentially undermining Apple’s effort to introduce the phone with exclusive partnership deals, similar to its primary partnership agreement with AT&T in the United States.
“There’s no question many of them are ending up abroad,” said Charles R. Wolf, an analyst who follows Apple for Needham & Company.
For Apple, the booming overseas market for iPhones is both a sign of its marketing prowess and a blow to a business model that could be coming undone, costing the company as much as $1 billion over the next three years, according to some analysts.
But those economic realities do not play into the mind of Daniel Pan, a 22-year-old Web site designer in Shanghai who says a friend recently bought an iPhone for him in the United States.
He and other people here often pay $450 to $600 to get a phone that sells for $400 in the United States. But they are happy.
“This is even better than I thought it would be,” he said, toying with his iPhone at an upscale coffee shop. “This is definitely one of the great inventions of this century.”
Mr. Pan is among the new breed of young professionals in China who can afford to buy the latest gadgets and the coolest Western brands. IPhones are widely available at electronic stores in big cities, and many stores offer unlocking services for imported phones.
Chinese sellers of iPhones say they typically get the phones from suppliers who buy them in the United States, then have them shipped or brought to China by airline passengers.
Often, they say, the phones are given to members of Chinese tourist groups or Chinese airline flight attendants, who are typically paid a commission of about $30 for every phone they deliver.
Although unlocking the phone violates Apple’s purchase agreement, it does not appear to violate any laws here, though many stores may be avoiding import duties.
Considering China’s penchant for smuggling and counterfeiting high-quality goods, the huge number of iPhones being sold here is not surprising, particularly given the popularity of the Apple brand in China.
Indeed, within months of the release of the iPhone in the United States last June, iPhone knockoffs, or iClones as some have called them, were selling here for as little as $125. But most people opt for the real thing.
“A lot of people here want to get an iPhone,” says Conlyn Chan, 31, a lawyer who was born in Taiwan and now lives in Shanghai. “I know a guy who went back to the States and bought 20 iPhones. He even gave one to his driver.”
Negotiations between Apple and China Mobile, the world’s biggest mobile-phone service operator with more than 350 million subscribers, broke down last month, stalling the official release of the iPhone in China. Long before that, however, there was a thriving gray market.
“I love all of Apple’s products,” said a 27-year-old Beijing engineer named Chen Chen who found his iPhone through a bulletin board Web site. “I bought mine for $625 last October, and the seller helped me unlock it. Reading and sending Chinese messages is no problem.”
An iPhone purchased in Shanghai or Beijing typically costs about $555. To unlock the phone and add Chinese language software costs an additional $25.
Ryan Pyle for The New York Times
Deals for the iPhone advertised at a market in Shanghai.
The strange journey of Apple’s popular iPhone, to nearly every corner of the world, shows what happens when the world’s hottest consumer product defies a company’s attempt to slowly introduce it in new markets.
The iPhone has been swept up in a frenzy of global smuggling and word-of-mouth marketing that leads friends to ask friends, “While you’re in the U.S., would you mind picking up an iPhone for me?”
These unofficial distribution networks help explain a mystery that analysts who follow Apple have been pondering: why is there a large gap between the number of iPhones that Apple says it sold last year, about 3.7 million, and the 2.3 million that are actually registered on the networks of its wireless partners in the United States and Europe?
The answer now seems clear. For months, tourists, small entrepreneurs and smugglers of electronic goods have been buying iPhones in the United States and then shipping them overseas.
There the phones’ digital locks are broken so they can work on local cellular networks, and they are outfitted with localized software, essentially undermining Apple’s effort to introduce the phone with exclusive partnership deals, similar to its primary partnership agreement with AT&T in the United States.
“There’s no question many of them are ending up abroad,” said Charles R. Wolf, an analyst who follows Apple for Needham & Company.
For Apple, the booming overseas market for iPhones is both a sign of its marketing prowess and a blow to a business model that could be coming undone, costing the company as much as $1 billion over the next three years, according to some analysts.
But those economic realities do not play into the mind of Daniel Pan, a 22-year-old Web site designer in Shanghai who says a friend recently bought an iPhone for him in the United States.
He and other people here often pay $450 to $600 to get a phone that sells for $400 in the United States. But they are happy.
“This is even better than I thought it would be,” he said, toying with his iPhone at an upscale coffee shop. “This is definitely one of the great inventions of this century.”
Mr. Pan is among the new breed of young professionals in China who can afford to buy the latest gadgets and the coolest Western brands. IPhones are widely available at electronic stores in big cities, and many stores offer unlocking services for imported phones.
Chinese sellers of iPhones say they typically get the phones from suppliers who buy them in the United States, then have them shipped or brought to China by airline passengers.
Often, they say, the phones are given to members of Chinese tourist groups or Chinese airline flight attendants, who are typically paid a commission of about $30 for every phone they deliver.
Although unlocking the phone violates Apple’s purchase agreement, it does not appear to violate any laws here, though many stores may be avoiding import duties.
Considering China’s penchant for smuggling and counterfeiting high-quality goods, the huge number of iPhones being sold here is not surprising, particularly given the popularity of the Apple brand in China.
Indeed, within months of the release of the iPhone in the United States last June, iPhone knockoffs, or iClones as some have called them, were selling here for as little as $125. But most people opt for the real thing.
“A lot of people here want to get an iPhone,” says Conlyn Chan, 31, a lawyer who was born in Taiwan and now lives in Shanghai. “I know a guy who went back to the States and bought 20 iPhones. He even gave one to his driver.”
Negotiations between Apple and China Mobile, the world’s biggest mobile-phone service operator with more than 350 million subscribers, broke down last month, stalling the official release of the iPhone in China. Long before that, however, there was a thriving gray market.
“I love all of Apple’s products,” said a 27-year-old Beijing engineer named Chen Chen who found his iPhone through a bulletin board Web site. “I bought mine for $625 last October, and the seller helped me unlock it. Reading and sending Chinese messages is no problem.”
An iPhone purchased in Shanghai or Beijing typically costs about $555. To unlock the phone and add Chinese language software costs an additional $25.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Fund Managers
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Saxo Capital Markets develops original technology to facilitate investment management and trading. For private bankers, brokers and other financial professionals this means access to a platform that combines both portfolio trading and portfolio management.
This aggregated solution enables your firm to establish a Managed Fund Program investing in a broad set of investment instruments traded on the same platform you, as Fund Manager, would use to establish and manage your fund. The unit-based fund platform simplifies entry cost and profit/loss calculations.
Diverse products and trading technology
Saxo Capital Markets supports a diverse trading product range and advanced trading technology that automates fund administration and distribution to clients. You take care of your investment activities — Saxo Capital Markets technology takes care of the rest.
Exciting new concept in managed funds
Saxo Capital Markets offers an exciting new concept in managed funds where clients can buy and sell managed fund units directly through the SaxoTrader online trading platform. Clients can now open and close investments in funds immediately without administration time, knowing the exact prices they are buying and selling at.
Introduce clients directly to Saxo Capital Markets to earn volume rebates from their trading activities.
Trade on behalf of clients (through Power of Attorney) to lucrative
Fund Management through Saxo Capital Markets
Diverse investment product range and advanced trading technology, ideal for establishing many types of Managed Funds
New concept in Managed Funds allows clients to make immediate investments in your fund online
Fund capital automatically block allocated between across your investments
Potential access to thousands of existing clients
How have we done this?
Saxo Capital Markets develops original technology to facilitate investment management and trading. For private bankers, brokers and other financial professionals this means access to a platform that combines both portfolio trading and portfolio management.
This aggregated solution enables your firm to establish a Managed Fund Program investing in a broad set of investment instruments traded on the same platform you, as Fund Manager, would use to establish and manage your fund. The unit-based fund platform simplifies entry cost and profit/loss calculations.
Diverse products and trading technology
Saxo Capital Markets supports a diverse trading product range and advanced trading technology that automates fund administration and distribution to clients. You take care of your investment activities — Saxo Capital Markets technology takes care of the rest.
Exciting new concept in managed funds
Saxo Capital Markets offers an exciting new concept in managed funds where clients can buy and sell managed fund units directly through the SaxoTrader online trading platform. Clients can now open and close investments in funds immediately without administration time, knowing the exact prices they are buying and selling at.
Introduce clients directly to Saxo Capital Markets to earn volume rebates from their trading activities.
Trade on behalf of clients (through Power of Attorney) to lucrative
Monday, February 4, 2008
Creative Clusters
Business news from the West reaches Kathmandu slower than the 'bikase' news and political 'basibinyalo,' but Creative Clusters Conference 2007 that took place in London this month was a modest event worth some pondering by policy makers. Even the political soap opera between the SPA and the Maoists can wait for one more minute before it gears up for yet another climax of farce.
The Creative Clusters Conference had representatives from fourty one countries around the globe and the event took off with somewhat unusual a retrospection that the artist is a generator of economic value. In creativity business, the artist, the historian or the thinker is no longer a peculiar outsider who the State or the rich must protect, but an economic contributor in his own right.
The idea of creativity-based industrialisation might sound strange to many who think of economic growth as something totally distinct from cultural wealth and power. In reality, the rapid globalisation has made the creative sector one of the fastest-growing in the world. The world's biggest companies in 1950 used to be all industrial manufacturers and raw materials suppliers: Ford, Standard Oil, General Electric, Philips, General Motors. Now there are some completely new names: Time Warner, Disney, Bertelsmann, News Corporation - television broadcasters, publishers, entertainers. In fact, these sectors are showing annual growth rates between 5 to 20 percent in the world's advanced economies.
Creative production is more about distinction - be it the distinction of value, taste or style. Even the mass producers like Nike and Coca Cola are edging towards distinction, or what some philosophers call 'semiotics.' Their whole manufacturing process is outsourced; the only thing the Nike and Coca Cola manage are the narratives. For this, their language must be analytic and impersonal but intuitive and aesthetic. It is the language of the artist, the creator.
Because creative products are information-based, they cannot grow until digital technologies, communications networks and means of transportation do not take off. All these are public goods and the State is responsible for building the hard and soft infrastructures so that creative businesses have an enabling environment.
If we think about it, the industries that have worked best in Nepal have less to do with mass production and more to do with creative production. The 2000s have shown us, as clearly as the 1990s did, that American-style mass production model of capitalism is not the game for Nepal . Our geographic and cultural comparative advantages lie elsewhere. Tourism, handicraft and art industries are all creative industries. Let us have yet one more round of stock-taking if we are still unconvinced by what our history reminds us time and again that Nepalis are better artisans, better philosophers and better service-providers than better manufacturers.
Maybe modest events like CCC will allow us a moment to consider distinction and creativity as our industrial strategies than continue on the blind race of homogenisation and mass manufacturing. Let's hope that the rise of creative industries on both sides of the Atlantic and the Pacific will be our eye-opener that smart production easily outweighs large production.
The Creative Clusters Conference had representatives from fourty one countries around the globe and the event took off with somewhat unusual a retrospection that the artist is a generator of economic value. In creativity business, the artist, the historian or the thinker is no longer a peculiar outsider who the State or the rich must protect, but an economic contributor in his own right.
The idea of creativity-based industrialisation might sound strange to many who think of economic growth as something totally distinct from cultural wealth and power. In reality, the rapid globalisation has made the creative sector one of the fastest-growing in the world. The world's biggest companies in 1950 used to be all industrial manufacturers and raw materials suppliers: Ford, Standard Oil, General Electric, Philips, General Motors. Now there are some completely new names: Time Warner, Disney, Bertelsmann, News Corporation - television broadcasters, publishers, entertainers. In fact, these sectors are showing annual growth rates between 5 to 20 percent in the world's advanced economies.
Creative production is more about distinction - be it the distinction of value, taste or style. Even the mass producers like Nike and Coca Cola are edging towards distinction, or what some philosophers call 'semiotics.' Their whole manufacturing process is outsourced; the only thing the Nike and Coca Cola manage are the narratives. For this, their language must be analytic and impersonal but intuitive and aesthetic. It is the language of the artist, the creator.
Because creative products are information-based, they cannot grow until digital technologies, communications networks and means of transportation do not take off. All these are public goods and the State is responsible for building the hard and soft infrastructures so that creative businesses have an enabling environment.
If we think about it, the industries that have worked best in Nepal have less to do with mass production and more to do with creative production. The 2000s have shown us, as clearly as the 1990s did, that American-style mass production model of capitalism is not the game for Nepal . Our geographic and cultural comparative advantages lie elsewhere. Tourism, handicraft and art industries are all creative industries. Let us have yet one more round of stock-taking if we are still unconvinced by what our history reminds us time and again that Nepalis are better artisans, better philosophers and better service-providers than better manufacturers.
Maybe modest events like CCC will allow us a moment to consider distinction and creativity as our industrial strategies than continue on the blind race of homogenisation and mass manufacturing. Let's hope that the rise of creative industries on both sides of the Atlantic and the Pacific will be our eye-opener that smart production easily outweighs large production.
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