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With about 390 million users smartphone user penetration in India is the second highest after China. WalMart, Amazon are looking for new online customers with large investments. New tech rules from the government require these companies and Google to store data in India. This means companies that store data in servers located all over the world such as Google have to change the way they store Indian data. Under the new regulations in draft form data created by users in India from online sellers, search engines and social media must be stored exclusively in India, with government granted access.

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The thinking is that a slight drop in the year to year increase in GDP from 11.4% to 10%, according to both IMF and Goldman Sachs group forecasts, isn't going to do much in reducing China's demand growth for oil. For one thing China's industry is very energy intensive and consumes a lot of energy to produce a give amount of output. Its estimated that it takes about 1% of increase in energy demand to produce 1% rise in GDP. It ranks as the largest consumer of coal and the second largest user of oil. It takes in about 8 million barrels a day of the 84 million barrels a day, that is 9.52%. Even as China's export sector slows down because of lower demand from the industrialized countries, the Chinese government can use its large cash reserves to build roads and bridges and ports and upgrade infrastructure to maintain employment levels. Major refiners margins have swung wildly from $30 in May 2007 from $10 in the last few years. Before the recent boom in refinery margins the margins average $5, and it looks like the boom in refinery building in Saudi Arabia, India and China and the US that resulted from shortage of refinery capacity, will bring margins back to their longterm average. A surge in oil prices that has outpaced the rise in prices of gasoline and refined products is shrinking margins and lowering profits and stock price of refiners like Tesoro and Valero. and upgrade its infrastructure ...

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How cell phone companies and software makers are keeping up with trends in the young user market. Content Links 1. Using information collected from teenagers cell phone companies can provide new services that interest them and get them excited about. 2. As cell phone market is getting saturated, it helps to tailor products to younger users as they are more likely to replace older models with new ones and new exciting features. The replacement market and new features for teens is becoming an increasingly important market.

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CNBC partners with Yahoo Finance to increase its reach for digital web users. CNBC.com is No. 11 in business-finance news and research sites . It lags behind Dow Jones, AOL, MSN, Forbes, Bloomberg, CNN. Yahoo Finance is No. 1 at 37.5 million users and CNBC.com has 6.5 million unique visitors in the U.S. CNBC.com shares video and articles with the New York Times site.

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Tom Friedman explains why Applied Materials is one of the largest solar panel manufacturers in the world but makes its panels in 5 factories in Germany, four in China and one each in India, Taiwan and Italy. With no factory in the USA. And all 14 factories put up in the last 2 years, put up overseas. Applied Materials is opening its largest worldwide research facility in Xian, China, in October 2009. Applied develops the knowhow for solar energy at its research facilities for manufacturing technology. These solar panel factories says Applied CEO Splinter go for about $200 million each. Solar panels technology can vary from thin film coated onto glass with nanotechnology using crystalline silicon, to other technologies. Germany is at the forefront of the world solar energy industry. It is the second largest industry in Germany employing some 50,000 people. China is putting a new emphasis on pollution free energy. What Germany has done says Friedman after visiting Applied Materials research facilities, is to allow any business or homeowner to generate solar energy, and if they decide have the power utility to connect them to the grid as well as buy the solar power at apric and duration attractive to the homeowner or business user. Something the USA has still to do. As a result solar energy consumption in the USA lags way behind these countries. Applied Materials largest USA customer is a German owned company in Oregon says Applied CEO Splinter. Splinter points to the fact that solar energy is becoming an important industry, similiar to the way the auto industry assumed importance. For Applied Materials this means revenues of $1.3 billion in the last 12 months, according to Splinter. ...

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This New York Times editorial says the U.S. Obama administration and its Housing Secretary Donovan should stop pretending that its settlement is the best way to help homeowners under water. The editorial asks the serious question- how far would the $20 billion settlement the banks would provide under the deal help, when 14.6 million homeowners owe $753 billion more on their mortgages than the value of their homes? The Obama administration is pressuring New York Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman, to accept the settlement with the largest U.S. banks for questionable foreclosure practices, including robo-signing. It asks Schneiderman to resist these pressures and not support the settlement. Schneiderman has resisted this pressure because he and other prosecutors would be restricted from pursuing their investigations into wrongdoings in housing mortgages. The proposal from the Times to the Obama administration is to make principal reductions for underwater homeowners who are currrent in their payments through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The proposal to help homeowners uner water on their mortgages was first proposed by Martin Feldstein during the mortgage financial crisis in 2008-2009 with repeated op-eds in leading newspapers including the Wall Street Journal. Paul Krugman called attention to the failure of the Obama administration on this issue in recent op-eds. Peter Coy of Business Week pointed to some form of loan forgiveness as an essential part of restoring the economic health of the U.S. and Europe in the August issue of Bloomberg Business Week. Higher unemployment has made the foreclosure crisis worse, and has created a strong headwind for the U.S. economy by erasing chances of an early recovery in American housing markets. The Obama administration's Home Affordable Modification Program has been a dismal failure in helping homeowners facing foreclosure and was a huge missed opportunity to take the correct action early....

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The nuclear trade deal with India and approval by the Nuclear Suppliers Group. If passed by Congresas in September the deal goes into effect. At the NSG, New Zealand, Austria and China were the holdouts and had to be persuaded by the United States. Under the deal India cannot conduct nuclear weapons tests and if it does its upto the USA to decide if it will continue to supply India with nuclear materials and technologies. India is running short of uranium and other nuclear materials it needs for its civilian andnuclear weapons programs since it was refused access by the NSG after earlier tests decades before. It also depends on how the US sees China and Pakistan in relation to India and its nuclear programs. One thing is certain India will push forward aggressively with new nuclear energy programs and setup its own nuclear energy reactors to provide its growing energy needs and to reduce existing shortages and also lower its oil bill. So in the next couple of years or the next decade the world will certainly see the peaceful development of nuclear energy and development of new technologies in the nuclear energy field as India becomes a key user and developer of nuclear energy technologies. At that point India may become a part of the fabric of peaceful nuclear energy development in the world as it meets asignificant part of its energy needs through nuclear reactors. It will be a welcome development as it will ease the burden on oil supplies that in the case of China became a key part of the upward pressure on oil prices as China relied mostly on oil and gas for energy needs. This is probably the thinking in the current Republican administration as it pushed hard for this nuclear deal to supply India....

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China's production of 300 gigawatts of soalr and other renewable energy in 2023 makes it possible for the country to achieve earlier emissions reduction than planned, says this report in WSJ. Of this 217 gigawatts are solar and 77 gigawatts are wind. Such is the investment China is making that it showed an increase in solar energy of 55%. The increase was itself more the solar energy installed in the US, for 500 million solar panels. At this rate China can meet its entire increase in electricity demand each year from solar and wind, other renewables. This is the kind of story that should be given prominence because it puts the fight against climate change in the right direction with aggressive climate change action coming from China, the largest user of coal.

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Investors put in $136 billion into startup companies in 2018, and $141 billion in 2019, as reported in this WSJ article on startups. Before this it peaked at $75 billion in 2000 and did not recover after the 2009 financial crisis till 2014 when it reached about 75 billion dollars.  Much of the increase in money that did not go into infrastructure at low interest rates below zero appears to have been wasted as the ideas for startups declined in quality in the years 2014-2019. Softbank put up a Vision Fund which has run up billions of dollars in losses including a disastrous investment in WeWork. The resistance to shifting all the money at low interest rates to infrastructure has faded with the election of president Trump supported by a Republican party that puts the American worker first for job retention and expansion, and America first in world trade. The pandemic has changed the environment for startup companies as most startup companies are not likely to survive the environment they are in. The big ones such as Uber have built up losses, and ones such as Airbnb are borrowing $2 billion at 10 percent interest in emergency funding. Experience and sound thinking for investments were left behind as capital was wasted in many projects. The time has come to return to investments that have built the basis of the twentieth and twenty first century's advances in quality of life, in infrastructure and strong public services. ...

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Questions about the whereabouts of Masataka Shimizu, president of Tokyo Electric Power Company, which owns the Fukushima nuclear plant. Shimizu was last seen in public appearances at a news conference on March 13, 2011. The chairman of the upper house of Japan's Diet, the parliament, calls this "inexcusable." The governor of Fukushima prefecture, Yuhei Sato, tells Japanese television that the people there cannot accept apologies, "because their anger and anxiety are extreme." Protestors walk past Tepco headquarters, chanting "No more Hiroshimas."Toko Kanoh, a former Tepco vice president, and for 12 years member of the Diet upper house, says Shimizu should talk to the public as soon as possible. This kind of disappearance is not uncommon in Japanese corporate circles. During the Toyota recall crisis, the chief of Toyota was also unavailable. Shimizu like other senior executives in the corporate elite is a lifer, having joined Tepco at 23, after graduating from Keio University. Because of the size and influence of Tepco, it produces one third of Japan's energy, he is also vice chairman of the Nippon Keidanren, the Japan Business Federation. Shimizu's role at Tepco was marked by an effort to restore profitability after the 2007 earthquake that damaged a nuclear plant. Shimizu decribed Tepco's core mission in the last annual report as "cost-cutting. He describes the need to construct "disaster resistant nuclear power stations," but at the same time in somewhat of a contradiction, says that the company had cut the cost of inspections not "by postponing them but by reducing their frequency." Just as Toyota went through a wrenching crisis after cost cutting and insulated corporate executive behaviour, which combined with technology and user behaviour put its safety reputation in risk, Tepco finds itself in severe shock. Tepco has lost two thirds of its value on the Tokyo stock exchange, and is looking for $25 billion in emergency loans. ...

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The merger between U.S. based Omnicom Group and France based Publicis Groupe SA, two of the largest ad agencies. The merger is a response to the increasing shift to digital advertising, the shift to advertising being sold in automated trading, and data driven analysis. In all these shifts digital companies such as Google and Facebook have strong advantages. Around 22% of global ad spending is now digital, according to emarketer, with forecasts showing this going up to 27% by 2017. Automated buying of ad space is taking off. U.S. advertisers are expected to spend $3.4 billion on real-time bidding. Omnicom's CEO, John Wren tells analysts: "Digital buying of media is done by machines, as if you are standing on the floor of the Nasdaq as opposed to traditional media shop. I hold the long term belief that eventually traditional media, or a lot of traditional media is going to be purchased that way." Just as computers have upended the environment for traditional players such as the NYSE creating new opportunities for Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), computers and the internet are changing the advertising environment. CEO Levy of Publicis Groupe SA says the data explosion, Big Data, is also creating a new playing field in which companies such as Google and Facebook have advantages. In a statement about the deal he says: "the communication and marketing landscape has undergone dramatic changes in recent years, including the exponential development of new media giants, the explosion of Big Data, blurring of roles of all players and profound changes in consumer behaviour." The merger will provide the new company the scale to develop these resources to compete with digital companies like Google and new entrants such as Salesforce.com and Adobe Systems. Omnicom has agencies BBDO, TBWA Worldwide, media buyer OMD. Publicis has Leo Burnett and Saatchi & Saatchi, media buyer Starcom MediaVest and digital agency Razorfish. The new Publicis Omnicom Group will have combined revenue of about $23 billion for 2012, and passes WPP Group PLC's $15.95 billion revenue. It will still be much smaller than Google with about 3 times WPP's revenue, and Google's advantage in storing trillions of pieces of data about user behaviour....

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Complacency from the Bush Administration reflected in the remarks of Edward Lazear the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors in the outgoing Bush administration. He sees no recession in the USA. "I would be very surprised if the NBER looking back at this period would date this as a recession" is what he is quoted as saying to reporters. He went on to say that the $152 billion stimulus of government checks mailed to the people, and Fed interest rate cuts should make the second half of the year a "solid growth period." What this means is that the moves by Congress to help homeowners stave off a new wave of foreclosures through a bill that just passed through Congress on May 7, 2008, is likely to be vetoed by Bush and efforts along the lines suggested by Martin Feldstein, Chairman of Council of Economic Advisors under Reagan, and Sheila Bair at FDIC, to help homeowners avoid foreclosure in her proposal may remain just that as proposals. This situation is likely to be turned over to a new President and make for an election that may revolve around economic issues, as the next wave of foreclosures lead to the start of a declining spiral in home prices leading to further loses in the credit markets and corporate bankruptcies of weaker firms and resulting losses in employment. Rising crude oil prices may result in much of the stimulus being eaten up by paying of some of the debt burden of consumers and rising costs of gasoline at the gas pump. And Feldstein has been very vocal, as have others, about the ineffectiveness of interest rate cuts in the current situation, even doing an oped piece titled "Enough of Interest Rate Cuts." In this sense the current spell of calm in the financial markets may be deceiving, giving Paulson an others in the administration a false sense of hope, and deprive the world economy of some reasonable action to prevent the wave of foreclosures and falling home prices that could set things distinctly downward in the world's largest economy and impacting the rest of the world....

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Apple iWatch sales are about 11 million -15 million units in last 4 quarters. The iWatch sales are a small fraction of sales overall. Apple quarterly profit declines by 22.5%, as revenue declines and iPhone sales decline. Half of the quarterly revenue decline comes from China. This has hurt the share price by May 2016.

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With the popularity of Apple iPhones and smartphones, Nokia has lost ground. Its share price is down 73% from 2007 end. It is looking for a new CEO. The lack of new mobile phones to compete with the iPhone and other smartphones and generate the kind of excitement that Apple's iPhone has generated, is Nokia's main problem.