Author: Deep

Squeezed by falling oil prices, Russia is talking about privatizing its major companies to close its budget shortfall. Nigeria is seeking a World Bank loan to cover its $11 billion budget gap. Even Saudi Arabia has been drawing down reserves and discussing selling a stake in its national oil company Saudi Aramco. There’s no doubt the oil producing nations and energy companies are feeling the pain of a 75 percent drop in oil prices in the past 1½ years. Now their actions are being viewed as the early signs capitulation is coming. Oil prices have been volatile for weeks but…

Acer is venturing outside PCs with new products to update car software and prevent accidents. The company’s first products for cars, including a headset that monitors brainwaves for driver fatigue, are being shown at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week. The Taiwan company is also showing a telematics product to track car movement and keep in-vehicle software updated. Acer is entering the automotive business as a way to make money outside the slumpingPC business. Success in PCs has eluded Acer, whose computer shipments have been falling since the netbook boom ended with the expansion of the tablet market in…

Less than two months after the Fed enacted its first rate hike in more than nine years, market talk already has turned to whether the central bank’s future may not be more hikes, but rather negative rates. Intensifying recession fears, volatile financial markets and moves toward negative rates by other central banks have triggered speculation over whether the Fed may have to reverse course on its tightening policy. Negative rates in the U.S. would be a highly unusual move. However, several high-ranking Fed officials, including Chair Janet Yellen, Vice Chair Stanley Fischer and New York Fed President Bill Dudley all…

Apple CEO Tim Cook isn’t ready to confirm longstanding rumors that the company is designing a car, but he didn’t exactly deny it, either, in an interview with Fortune. Asked about Apple’s plans to build a car, Cook talked about the company’s interest in many products and technologies. “The great thing about being here is we’re curious people,” he told Fortune. “And we’re always thinking about ways that Apple can make great products that people love, that help them in some way.” However, Apple doesn’t “go into very many categories,” Cook added in a rare media interview. “We edit very…

Savings from lower gasoline prices have not boosted retail spending as much as investors would expect, CNBC’s Jim Cramer said on Thursday. “I didn’t think [Kohl’s] was as bad as it was doing because a lot of people feel, including me, that at a certain point lower gasoline should help,” said Cramer on “Squawk on the Street.” “This plus Ralph Lauren tells you that lower gasoline is still not a factor. It is spotty in retail.” Department store chain Kohl’s, with the ticker symbol KSS, cut its full-year earnings estimate, citing weak sales during the holiday quarter and “significantly” lower…

Sony wants to put the “smart” in smartphones with its new Xperia X series handsets, which come packing new “intelligent” predictive features, better battery management, and a greater focus on design. The company introduced the first three phones revolving around that vision—the Xperia X Series featuring the Xperia X, Xperia X Performance, and the Xperia XA—during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Monday. Sony says the Xperia X Series is part of the company’s new approach to add “layers of intelligent technology.” What that means in practice: To begin with, the phone’s camera will get new predictive capabilities to take better…

After three more days of buying, Warren Buffett’s Phillips 66 shopping spree is nearing a billion dollars for the year. In a new filing, Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway reveals that on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of this week the company purchased another 1.7 million shares of the energy giant for almost $132 million. Over 15 days of buying since Jan. 4, Berkshire has spent $964 million to add 12.5 million shares to its Phillips 66 stake. ‹ Warren Buffett digs deeper into his big oilbet Buffett on track to lose $2 billion in Fridayrout Warren Buffett plans to webcast annualmeeting ›…

the digital-transformation imperative looms large in the business world, but it’s not always clear how on-premises software and data fit into the picture. IBM says it can help. The company on Monday announced a new series of “connect” tools for IBM Cloud that are designed to make it easier for companies to extend existing IT investments to the cloud. “There are billions of dollars of investment and install-days in IT that will not and should not disappear,” said Jim Comfort, CTO and general manager for architecture with IBM Cloud. “But we must make it easier to make it more relevant…

Now that the first major oil company has slashed its dividend, what other energy companies could be planning to do so, and whose dividends are safe? ConocoPhillips on Thursday cut its quarterly dividend from 74 cents per share to 25 cents per share. “While we don’t know how far commodity prices will fall, or the duration of the downturn, we believe it’s prudent to plan for lower prices for a longer period of time,” CEO Ryan Lance said in a statement. “The decision to reduce the dividend was a difficult one.” In some ways, Wall Street expected the news. ConocoPhillips’…

GitHub’s popular code-sharing service for developers has long been available in a self-hosted enterprise version, and now it’s coming to IBM’s Bluemix cloud platform. Thanks to a new partnership announced Monday, IBM and GitHub will deliver GitHub Enterprise as a dedicated service on Bluemix across private and hybrid cloud environments. The service gives corporate developers a new way to code and work with GitHub’s collaborative development tools in a private, controlled environment. “It’s essentially GitHub as a service,” said Jim Comfort, CTO and general manager for architecture with IBM Cloud. GitHub Enterprise will be available as a service through IBM’s…