DAVOS, Switzerland, Jan. 25--Corporate responsibility rather than profit was set to take center stage in Davos on Friday, as the annual get-together of business chiefs turns its attention to issues of health, aid and development.
Rock star activist Bono, billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates and UN chief Ban Ki-moon were to steer the conversation away from the global economy and geopolitics, towards issues such as malaria eradication, poverty alleviation and climate change, AFP wrote.
The Davos event has long prided itself on showing the caring side of capitalism, although participants have often been criticized for trumpeting big ideas on big issues in public, while actually expending most of their energy on corridor schmoozing and backroom deals.
Gates was scheduled to update delegates on the agricultural projects funded by the charitable foundation he founded with his wife Melinda, before joining Bono, Ban and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown for a debate on progress--or the lack thereof--in reaching the UN Millennium Development Goals.
A perennial participant at Davos, Gates on Thursday pitched a new form of capitalism to forum delegates that would better serve the neglected poor.
“The challenge here is to design a system including profit and recognition to do more for the poor,“ he said, calling for a new form of “creative capitalism.“
“Creative capitalism is an approach where governments, businesses and NGOs (non-government organizations) work together to stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit or gain recognition doing work that eases the world’s inequalities,“ he said.
“I’d like to ask everyone here ... to take on a project of creative capitalism and see where you can stretch the reach of market forces,“ he added.
This year’s Davos event has drawn nearly 30 heads of state or government, more than 110 cabinet ministers and several hundred corporate titans.
The first day was taken up with talk of a looming US recession--a subject that was to be revisited on Friday with a round-table discussion on the theme of “Global Economic Shocks: Perfect Storm Ahead?“

NEW YORK, Jan. 25--Global stocks regained vigor Thursday with European shares staging a powerful rebound and Wall Street rallying for a second day as investor jitters eased amid a tentative deal for a US economic stimulus plan.
The gains in Europe and New York came after a mixed day in Asian markets and worry over a massive fraud at French bank Societe Generale, where a rogue trader racked up losses of 4.9 billion euros ($7.15 billion), AFP wrote.
The leading blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average closed up 0.88 percent at 12,378.61. The tech-rich Nasdaq jumped 1.92 percent to 2,360.92 while the broad-market Standard & Poor’s 500 index added 1.01 percent to 1,352.07.
US shares notched up their gains despite a report showing the ailing US housing market remained in a downturn.
Some of the worst fears of traders appeared to be eased as US lawmakers in the House of Representatives struck a deal with the White House setting the stage for quick action on a 150-billion-dollar stimulus plan aimed at preventing or easing a recession.
“Some investors’ economic fears may have been eased by reports that congressional leaders and President (George W.) Bush have reached an agreement on the terms of a proposed economic stimulus package,“ said Elizabeth Harrow at Schaeffer’s Investment Research.
Europe’s main stock markets leapt higher, recovering some of the massive losses from earlier this week.
London’s FTSE 100 index jumped 4.75 percent to 5,875.80 while the CAC 40 index in Paris rose 6.04 percent to 4,916.98 and the Frankfurt the DAX added 5.93 percent at 6,821.07.
In other markets, Brazil’s Bovespa surged 5.95 percent, while the Mexican Bovespa added 1.03 percent. In Canada, the S&P/TSX index rallied 1.97 percent.
In Asia on Thursday, Hong Kong share prices reversed course and closed sharply lower as its finish coincided with news of the huge fraud and subprime-related losses at Societe Generale. The Hang Seng index lost 2.3 percent.
Tokyo’s benchmark Nikkei-225 index rose 2.06 percent to above 13,000 points, two days after it had slid under the key level for the first time in 28 months.
Seoul finished up 2.1 percent, Taipei gained 1.47 percent and Sydney rose 3.1 percent.

Public service employees demonstrate in Toulouse on Thursday to protest against job cuts and low wages.

PARIS, Jan. 25--Hundreds of thousands of teachers, nurses, civil servants and other public workers marched in cities across France on Thursday during a one-day strike against President Nicolas Sarkozy’s reform plans.
France’s largest union, the CGT, said some 400,000 people had taken part in marches nationwide, fewer than the 700,000 people who turned out for protests in November, AFP wrote.
Police put the figure for Thursday’s nationwide protests at 217,500.
Seven of the eight unions representing the nation’s 5.2 million state employees had called for the one-day strike to protest job cuts and low wages that they say are eroding purchasing power.
“Sarko, stop the shows, give us euros!“ chanted protesters in the northern city of Lille. “We don’t want Cecilia, we don’t want Carla, we want spending power,“ chanted protesters in Paris.
Sarkozy’s divorce from Cecilia and new romance with ex-model Carla Bruni has been the target of much media attention over the past months, prompting complaints that the president has been distracted from his political agenda.
In Paris, police said 17,000 people took part in protests, but the unions put the figure much higher at 35,000.
Classes were cancelled in many schools and colleges after one in three teachers stayed away, the education ministry said. Unions said around 53-55 percent of teachers had taken part in the strike.
Union officials said they were hoping to repeat the show of force of Nov. 20, when almost one-third of public employees walked off the job and hundreds of thousands marched in the streets.
The strike call was heeded by some 20 percent of civil servants, said budget and public service minister Eric Woerth.
The unions are protesting low wages and Sarkozy’s plans to streamline the public service by not replacing half of all retiring civil servants.
The education ministry will be the hardest hit by Sarkozy’s plan, with nearly half of the total 22,900 job cuts to come from the ranks of teachers and school administrators.

HAMBURG, Germany, Jan. 25--A goods train from Beijing arrived in Hamburg on Thursday after having crossed six countries in a journey organizers said could ring in a new era of rail transport between Asia and Europe.
The “Beijing-Hamburg Container Express“ left the Chinese capital on Jan. 9 with its cargo of shoes, toys and electronic goods and covered the distance of 10,000 kilometers (6,200 miles) in 15 days, Germany’s state-owned rail operator Deutsche Bahn was quoted by AFP as saying.
The company’s logistics chief, Norbert Bensel, said the inaugural journey on the new rail route had delivered its cargo in roughly half the time it would have taken to arrive in the northern German port city by sea. The sea journey takes about 30 days.
“The test train was a success. We have demonstrated that we can transport goods by rail between China and Germany safely, reliably and yet twice as fast as compared with ships,“ Bensel said. “At the same time, we are considerably cheaper than air freight for many types of cargo.“
The “Container Express“ made its way from China to Germany through Mongolia, Russia, Belarus and Poland.
It is the brainchild of Deutsche Bahn chief Harmut Mehdorn who wants to improve and increase rail transport between Europe and China as the Asian giant establishes itself as a vital trade partner for the continent.
Mehdorn said administrative cooperation with the transfer countries needed to be finetuned and infrastructure improved, but he believed that “by the end of the decade we can aim at launching regular freight transport services along this axis.“

Bank of Japan Governor Toshihiko Fukui

TOKYO, Jan. 25--Japan’s central bank chief on Friday dismissed a call for an interest rate cut in coordination with the US Federal Reserve, saying that current policies were enough to keep the economy firm.
Central banks’ job is to “select appropriate policies by analyzing outlooks of each country’s economy and prices even when there is a growing sense of crisis,“ Bank of Japan Governor Toshihiko Fukui said in parliament, AFP wrote.
He made the remark in reply to a question by a ruling party lawmaker who argued that Japan’s central bank should immediately follow this week’s emergency US rate cut.
On Tuesday, the Bank of Japan’s policy board unanimously kept the benchmark cost of borrowing at 0.50 percent, already by far the lowest among the world’s major economies.
Later Tuesday the US central bank took surprise action and cut its key rate by an unprecedented three quarters of a percentage point amid increasing fears of a recession.
“The Bank of Japan should have gone for a rate cut in coordination, given this emergency, plunges in stock prices and a clear US economic slowdown which would affect Japan’s economy,“ lawmaker Kozo Yamamoto charged.
Fukui refuted his charge, arguing there is a “high probability that the Japanese economy will continue its gradual expansion towards the next fiscal year (from April) with stable prices.“
“We are carrying out financial policies strongly confident that we will be able to have a stable economy ... by continuing to provide the current accommodative financial environment for the time being,“ Fukui said.
The Bank of Japan until 2006 kept the unusual policy of keeping interest rates effectively at zero.
Fukui has in the past called for higher rates but his efforts have been put on the backburner due to domestic political uncertainty and volatility on financial markets.

SEOUL, South Korea, Jan. 25--South Korea’s economy expanded faster than economists forecast in the fourth quarter, driven by the biggest increase in exports in four years and a pickup in business investment.
Growth accelerated to 1.5 percent from the third quarter’s 1.3 percent, the central bank said in Seoul on Friday. That beat the median estimate of 1.3 percent in a Bloomberg News survey of 14 economists. The economy advanced 5.5 percent from a year earlier, the fastest pace in almost two years.
South Korea’s stocks and currency climbed as the report fanned confidence that rising shipments to China, eastern Europe and the Middle East will help Asian nations weather the US slump. As global growth cools, the economy will be increasingly reliant on spending by businesses and consumers to extend its longest expansion in more than 15 years.
“The Chinese economy is supporting economic growth in Korea and across Asia as the US slows,“ said George Worthington, chief Asia-Pacific economist at Thomson IFR in Sydney.
Deputy Finance Minister Cho Won Dong said on Friday that the nation’s increasing trade with China and Asia “will help us be less affected“ by a slump in the world’s biggest economy.
The Kospi index climbed 1.8 percent to 1,692.41 at close of trading in Seoul, recording its first three-day advance in seven weeks and reducing this year’s decline to 10.8 percent. The won rose 0.3 percent to 946.45 per dollar.
South Korea’s exports surged 7.3 percent in the three months ended Dec. 31 from the previous quarter, the biggest increase since the fourth quarter of 2003, the report showed.
Companies benefiting from higher global demand include LG Electronics Inc., Asia’s second-largest mobile-phone maker, which on Thursday posted a record quarterly profit.
Samsung Heavy Industries Co., the world’s second-largest shipyard, on Friday signed an agreement to build two drill ships for $1.3 billion. Shipyards in South Korea won about half of the global $187.3 billion in vessel orders last year.
Samsung Electronics Co., whose overseas sales account for 16 percent of South Korea’s total exports, has tapped demand in China and India.

SEATTLE, USA, Jan. 25--Microsoft Corp reported a rise in quarterly profit on Thursday, boosted by strong computer sales that are driving sales of its Windows operating system and Office software.
The world’s largest software maker said net profit in its fiscal second quarter rose to $4.7 billion, or 50 cents per diluted share, from $2.6 billion, or 26 cents per diluted share, in the year-ago period. Revenue rose 30 percent to $16.37 billion.
Analysts, on average, had forecast Microsoft to earn 46 cents per share on revenue of $15.94 billion, according to Reuters Estimates.
Microsoft posted strong sales of Windows Vista, helped by double-digit percentage growth rates in computer sales in the December quarter. A strong performance at its Windows units drove Microsoft’s first-quarter results, which far exceeded Wall Street’s expectations.
Shares of Microsoft surged to their highest levels since 2001 after the September-quarter results. As of the close of trade on Wednesday, the stock had fallen more than 10 percent since then due in part to economic concerns and declines in the broader market.

MUNICH, Germany, Jan. 25--“Make money, but not at any price!“ Shareholders of the German industrial giant Siemens were impressed Thursday by strong profits but called for an end to corruption within the group.
“We want to make money, but not at any price,“ small shareholder representative Harald Petersen of the association SdK exclaimed during a Siemens general assembly in the Bavarian capital.
Before almost 10,000 investors, Daniela Bergdolt, from the DSW group of small investors, judged that “the reputation built by Siemens for 160 years has been reduced to ashes.“
Albrecht Kinkelin, a 64-year-old investor from Munich, told AFP however that “corruption in the economy is not exceptional,“ and estimated that “the group’s image is certainly damaged, but not forever.“
All the same, he felt Siemens ought to have “acted more frankly.“
The sprawling industrial group has been battling for more than a year since successive revelations of corruption began to tarnish its hard-won image.
“It is not satisfactory that the affair has not been wrapped up after more than a year,“ complained Hans Hirt, who represented the British pension fund Hermes.
Siemens has uncovered at least 1.3 billion euros ($1.9 billion) in dubious transactions in its accounts, mostly undisclosed payments to obtain international contracts.
The group is under investigation in several countries, has lost its boss and spent 1.6 billion euros already in the form of fines and fees for an internal probe. That figure could explode if Siemens is hit by sanctions from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
The German group lists shares in the United States, and might have to pay up to four billion euros there, according to some German press reports.
Talks with US authorities, from the SEC and the Department of Justice, are to begin next month and last several months for a “case without precedent,“ in the terms of Siemens supervisory board president Gerhard Cromme.