- •Vocabulary Commentary
- •All yours Manufacturing companies are increasingly using the Internet to give customers the impression of personal service. But true customisation needs new production techniques as well
- •Vocabulary
- •Can Bayer Cure Its Own Headache? Shareholders would like it to shed everything but health care
- •Vocabulary
- •«Байер» перестраивается
- •Nokia's next act Can the Finnish giant stay on top in an age of commodity phones and stalling sales?
- •Vocabulary
- •Canon Cutting Edge By trimming down to four product lines, it's making record profits
- •Halfway down a long road Carlos Ghosn's efforts to meld Nissan with Renault have become the stuff of management legend. But the alliance faces some daunting challenges
- •Can Ford Fix This Flat?
- •Vocabulary
- •Vocabulary
- •A Challenge From the Nimble Newcomers
- •Mergers & Acquisitions Will the latest cycle of European mergers produce better results?
- •Vocabulary
- •Vocabulary Commentary
- •Independent directors at big public companies need to be tougher
- •Vocabulary
- •Vocabulary
- •U r Sakd
- •Is there a nice way?
- •Simon London finds the post of chief operating officer falling prey to a new breed of executive with greater powers and access to the boss
- •The Bottom Line on Options
- •Unit 13 Consolidation
- •Will ceOs Find Their Inner Choirboy?
- •Пролетая над Таити
- •Vocabulary
- •Useful Words and Phrases
- •«Нортел»
- •The Numbers Game Companies use every trick to pump earnings and fool investors. The latest abuse: "Pro forma" reporting"
- •Vocabulary
- •Unit 15
- •I swear… Oaths are only a small step in the business of cleaning up American companies
- •Something must be done
- •Vocabulary
- •Holier Than Thou European sanctimony over American accounting scandals is misplaced
- •Et, the extra-territorial
- •Vocabulary
- •Revenge of the Bean Counters No longer frail in the face of fraud, accounting firms are thriving on new u.S. Laws that give them real clout
- •Half Measures
- •Bad for cfOs, Good for Investors
- •Хранители прозрачности или слуга двух господ
- •Unit 16
- •Up from the ashes Amid a global wave of business failures, American firms are more likely to get a second chance. Unfair competition, or a lesson for Europeans?
- •Eurotunnel vision
- •Vocabulary
- •Var crash
- •Vocabulary
- •Европа уходит за рубеж
- •Goldman's German revolution
- •Have Fat Cats Had Their Day?
- •Unit 18
- •Stronger foundations New proposals for regulating banks are both a step in the right direction and evidence of how hard it is to monitor the riskiness of the banking system
- •Vocabulary
- •Vocabulary
- •Английский характер
- •Unit 19
- •Conflicts, conflicts everywhere Was America wrong to scrap the laws that kept commercial and investment banking apart?
- •Vocabulary
- •Care To Buy Some David Bowie Bonds
- •In Europe, securitization is the hottest way to raise cash
- •Beautifying Branches
- •Instead of axing their branches, banks are inventing new ways to make money out of them
- •Slippery
- •Coffee, Tea, or Mortgage?
- •Life Branches?
- •The world's biggest retailer edges into financial services
- •Гросс-банки сокращаются
- •Feeding Frenzy
- •Tough Questions for aig's Auditors Regulators are probing if PwC let the financial shenanigans slip through
- •Watchdogs with Eyes Wide Shut As investigators pore over the books of aig, it's becoming clear that for years regulators failed to detect lapses
- •Goldman's German Revolution
- •Another Year, Another Scandal
- •Digging out at Allianz The German financial-services giant is back in the black — but still struggling
- •A Dedicated Enemy of Fashion Most companies claim to run their business for the long term. Nestle is one of the few that really does
- •More Pain, Waiting for the Gains Drastic action as gm's cash pile runs down
- •«Морган Стэнли» увольняет сотрудников, чтобы оставшиеся лучше работали
Европа уходит за рубеж
Среди компаний, уводящих свои активы за границу, абсолютными лидерами оказываются европейские фирмы. К такому выводу пришел инвестиционный банк «Голдман Сакс» (Goldman Sachs), опросив ведущие компании в США, Европе и Азии. Опрос, цель которого — выяснить инвестиционные планы участников, показал, что наименее патриотично ведут себя европейские компании: они больше других склонны инвестировать за пределами Евросоюза, чтобы диверсифицировать валютные риски и снижать издержки.
Как утверждается в отчете «Голдман Сакс», подобная инвестиционная политика европейцев объясняет странное противоречие между стагнацией в Еврозоне и хорошими финансовыми результатами многих европейских компаний. По мнению аналитиков банка, объяснение заключается в том, что европейские предприятия все больше инвестируют и производят за пределами Европы. Это позволяет им быть привлекательными для инвесторов, однако мало помогает экономическому росту в европейских странах, особенно в государствах зоны евро.
Эксперт
Exercise 4. Translate the texts into Russian orally.
Goldman's German revolution
Anxious employees at Germany's huge retail drugstore chain Ihr Platz (Your Place) were braced for the worst a year ago. The $840 million company, based in northern Germany, had seen its sales shrink by over 40% in five years and losses mount as a new generation of family managers blundered and successive chief executive officers failed to stem the decline. The 125-year-old retailer was technically insolvent — a condition that would normally doom a German enterprise to liquidation.
But an unlikely rescuer appeared on the scene: Goldman Sachs Group Inc., the U.S. investment-banking giant. Ihr Platz's woes had hit the radar screen of Goldman's London-based restructuring group, a 30-strong team formed two years ago to develop a European business investing in distressed debts and turnarounds. Bv January of this year, a Goldman-led consortium had snapped up all of Ihr Platz's $144 million in bank debt and, working with the shareholders' trustees, sent in experts from Alvarez & Marsal, a New York turnaround specialist. When discussions with other creditors bogged down, Goldman bought out the remaining bank debt and in May pushed Ihr Platz into insolvency.
Goldman's maneuver would hardly raise an eyebrow in New York or London. But in Germany it was revolutionary: The American firm pioneering Germany's case of a Chapter 11-style restructuring under a little-used 1999 law — a test case that could well spur many more such workouts and galvanize industrial overhauls in Germany. Unlike Germans, Americans and British use insolvency as a strategic tool to implement a turnaround. They don't see bankruptcy as a stigma but as a viable alternative if out-of-court restructuring fails.
Business Week
Have Fat Cats Had Their Day?
Outside the conference centre in London, where GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) held its annual meeting on May 19th, there were activists protesting at the firm's drug-pricing policies in poor countries. Inside, for most of GSK's shareholders this week, there was only one topic of real importance: the severance arrangements of the firm's gallic, magnificently haughty boss, Jean-Pierre "J-P" Gamier.
Those arrangements, estimated to be worth $35.7m to Mr Gamier should he depart prematurely, have put GSK in a bit of a spot. Under new rules, shareholders in Britain get to vote each year on their firm's executive-pay plans. GSK's shareholders promptly voted against management.
This has left the firm's hapless board trying to balance shareholders' ire against its contractual obligations to Mr Gamier. The chairman. Sir Christopher Hogg, promised a full review of GSK's pay policies even as Mr Gamier was hinting that he and his lawyers might dig in.
It seems certain that the GSK vote will go down in history as a landmark in corporate governance. Some British activists think it may mark the moment when British capitalism decided to stop converging with its American counterpart — Mr Gander's pay package was like that of a typical American boss, not a British one. It might also mark the moment when shareholders in British companies finally realised that they could not rely only on the separation of chairman and chief executive to keep management on its toes, and had to do the job themselves.
The Economist