segunda-feira, 27 de abril de 2009
Volume transportado da ALL no Brasil sobe 10,4%
De acordo com nota, a expansão foi impulsionada por ganhos na participação de mercado no segmento industrial e pelo mercado agrícola favorável
InvestNews
27/04/2009
O volume transportado da América Latina Logística (ALL) Brasil cresceu 10,4% no primeiro trimestre de 2009, na comparação com o mesmo período do ano anterior, somando 7.759 milhões de TKU (toneladas por quilômetros úteis), conforme prévia divulgada pela empresa.
De acordo com nota, a expansão foi impulsionada por ganhos na participação de mercado no segmento industrial e pelo mercado agrícola favorável.
O Ebitda (lucro antes de juros, impostos, depreciações e amortizações) atingiu R$ 251,1 milhões de janeiro a março deste ano, representando um incremento de 6,4%, em relação aos mesmos meses do ano anterior. “Refletindo o crescimento de volume, fretes mais pressionados no mercado spot em janeiro e fevereiro”, conforme comunicado.
Já na Argentina, o volume recuou 4,5% no primeiro trimestre de 2009, em meio a um cenário político e de mercado adverso. O Ebitda ficou negativo em R$ 2 milhões.
O volume total transportado pela ALL no trimestre, somando Brasil e Argentina avançou 8,7%, totalizando 8.602 milhões de TKU. Enquanto que o Ebitda foi de R$ 249,1 milhões.
Em relação a 2009, a companhia mantém o guidance de volume no Brasil, que deverá crescer entre 10% e 12%. A ALL acredita no potencial de ganhos de participação de mercados e as boas perspectivas de ganhos em produtividade na malha ferroviária.
Presidente da CE diz que crise financeira começa a ceder
EFE
27/04/2009
O presidente da Comissão Européia (CE, o braço executivo da União Européia), José Manuel Barroso, afirmou nesta segunda-feira em Atenas, na Grécia, que a crise da economia mundial começou a ceder e que a implementação de medidas levará à estabilização.
"Apoio totalmente as declarações dos ministros de Economia do Grupo dos Sete (G7, os sete países mais desenvolvidos do mundo) no fim de semana de que a gravidade da crise financeira mundial começou a diminuir, e que após as medidas assumidas avançamos rumo à estabilização", disse Barroso depois de se reunir com o primeiro-ministro grego, Costas Caramanlis.
"Agora devemos cumprir as decisões anunciadas e cuidar de reduzir as repercussões da crise nas camadas mais frágeis", acrescentou.
Barroso declarou também que a Grécia enfrenta dificuldades no setor financeiro fiscal e que apoia as mediadas implementadas pelo Governo grego.
O presidente da CE se encontra em Atenas para assistir a uma conferência do organismo hoje e amanhã para debater novas medidas proteção da biodiversidade, com a participação de 230 delegados da União Européia (UE), de ONGs, da ONU e do mundo empresarial europeu.
Petrobras bate recorde de produção de petróleo em março
Folha Online / Cirilo Junior
27/04/2009
A Petrobras registrou em março produção doméstica média recorde em um mês. Foram extraídos 1,992 milhão de barris/dia dos campos nacionais, alta de 2,68% frente aos 1,940 milhão de barris/dia observados em fevereiro.
Trata-se da terceira vez consecutiva que a estatal estabelece recorde na produção brasileira de petróleo. No primeiro trimestre, a produção média de petróleo da companhia foi de 1,952 milhão de barris/dia.
Segundo a Petrobras, o volume recorde na produção de petróleo no Brasil foi obtido em função, principalmente, da entrada de poços nas plataformas Cidade de Niterói, P-53 e P-54, situadas na bacia de Campos.
Somada a produção internacional de 126 mil barris/dia no exterior, a produção de petróleo da Petrobras em março foi de 2,118 milhões de barris/dia.
Já a produção de gás natural no Brasil cresceu 5,2% na comparação com o mês anterior, ficando em 51,407 milhões de metros cúbicos/dia. Segundo a Petrobras, essa variação é decorrente de flutuações de demanda do mercado.
No exterior, a produção de gás natural caiu 3%, ficando em 16,378 milhões de metros cúbicos/dia. A queda, segundo a Petrobras, ocorreu pela menor demanda pelo gás boliviano.
Ao todo, a produção de petróleo e gás da companhia, somados os campos nacionais e internacionais, chegou a 2,538 milhões de boe/dia (barris de óleo equivalente/dia), 2,54% acima dos 2,474 milhões de boe/dia registrados em fevereiro.
Nova regra para térmicas pode encarecer tarifa
Gazeta Mercantil
27/04/2009
A tarifa de energia elétrica do Brasil é uma das mais altas do mundo. A afirmação é de Ricardo Lima, presidente da Associação Brasileira de Grandes Consumidores Industriais de Energia e de Consumidores Livres (Abrace), que diz que a conta de luz pode subir ainda mais nos próximos reajustes autorizados pela Agência Nacional de Energia Elétrica (Aneel). "Com as novas regras anunciadas pelo governo federal para o licenciamento de térmicas, a tarifa pode subir mais no País", completa.
No início da semana passada, o governo anunciou que, para conseguir a licença de operação, os empreendimentos que geram energia a partir de carvão ou óleo diesel terão que incorporar o custo dos projetos (como o plantio de árvores) que compensem as emissões de . "O custo extra para será repassado para o consumidor, fato que irá gerar alta na conta de luz", diz o executivo. "Com energia cara, o País não vai crescer e a indústria perderá cada vez mais sua competitividade", alerta.
Lima, que participou ontem do seminário "Infra 2009", em São Paulo, critica a alta carga tributária no País. "Hoje, 51,6% da tarifa da energia brasileira são encargos e tributos", frisa. "Trata-se de um produto mais onerado que cigarro e bebida. Parece que a energia faz mal à saúde", ironiza. Segundo o especialista em eletricidade, o imposto que mais pesa na fatura de luz é o ICMS (Imposto sobre Circulação de Mercadorias e Serviços).
De acordo com o presidente da Abrace, as altas mais expressivas nas contas de luz do brasileiro vieram após o racionamento de energia, em 2001. "Para garantir a segurança do sistema, o governo começou a criar cada vez mais novos impostos. Além disso, o despacho de térmicas começou a ser frequente para preservar o nível dos reservatórios das hidrelétricas", comenta. O custo de geração de uma térmica a óleo diesel pode chegar a até R$ 600 o megawatt-hora (MWh), enquanto um novo empreendimento hídrico, como as usinas do rio Madeira (Jirau e Santo Antônio), gera eletricidade a pouco mais de R$ 70 por MWh.
One Internet Village, Divided: In Developing Countries, Web Grows Without Profit
The New York Times
By BRAD STONE and MIGUEL HELFT
Published: April 26, 2009
Facebook is booming in Turkey and Indonesia. YouTube’s audience has nearly doubled in India and Brazil.
That may seem like good news. But it is also a major reason these and other Web companies with big global audiences and renowned brands struggle to turn even a tiny profit.
Call it the International Paradox.
Web companies that rely on advertising are enjoying some of their most vibrant growth in developing countries. But those are also the same places where it can be the most expensive to operate, since Web companies often need more servers to make content available to parts of the world with limited bandwidth. And in those countries, online display advertising is least likely to translate into results.
This intractable contradiction has become a serious drag on the bottom lines of photo-sharing sites, social networks and video distributors like YouTube. It is also threatening the fervent idealism of Internet entrepreneurs, who hoped to unite the world in a single online village but are increasingly finding that the economics of that vision just do not work.
Last year, Veoh, a video-sharing site operated from San Diego, decided to block its service from users in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe, citing the dim prospects of making money and the high cost of delivering video there.
“I believe in free, open communications,” Dmitry Shapiro, the company’s chief executive, said. “But these people are so hungry for this content. They sit and they watch and watch and watch. The problem is they are eating up bandwidth, and it’s very difficult to derive revenue from it.”
Internet start-ups that came of age during the Web 2.0 era, roughly from 2004 to the beginning of the recession at the end of 2007, generally subscribed to a widely accepted blueprint: build huge global audiences with a free service, and let advertising pay the bills.
But many of them ran smack into global economic reality. There may be 1.6 billion people in the world with Internet access, but fewer than half of them have incomes high enough to interest major advertisers.
“It’s a problem every Internet company has,” said Michelangelo Volpi, chief executive of Joost, a video site with half its audience outside the United States.
“Whenever you have a lot of user-generated material, your bandwidth gets utilized in Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, where bandwidth is expensive and ad rates are ridiculously low,” Mr. Volpi said. If Web companies “really want to make money, they would shut off all those countries.”
Few Internet companies have taken that drastic step, but many are exploring other ways to increase revenue or cut costs in developing countries.
MySpace — the News Corporation’s social network with 130 million members, about 45 percent of them overseas — is testing a feature for countries with slower Internet connections called Profile Lite. It is a stripped-down version of the site that is less expensive to display because it requires less bandwidth.
MySpace says it may make Profile Light the primary version for its members in India, where it has 760,000 users, although people there could click on a link to switch to the richer version of the site.
Perhaps no company is more in the grip of the international paradox than YouTube, which a Credit Suisse analyst, Spencer Wang, recently estimated could lose $470 million in 2009, in part because of the high cost of delivering billions of videos each month. Google, which owns YouTube, disputed the analysis but offered no details on the site’s financial situation.
Tom Pickett, director of online sales and operations at YouTube, says the company still hews to its vision of bringing online video to the entire globe. In the last two years, it has pushed to create local versions of its site in countries like India, Brazil and Poland.
But Mr. Pickett also says that YouTube has slowed the creation of new international hubs and shifted its focus to making money. He says that does not rule out restricting bandwidth in certain countries as a way to control costs — essentially making YouTube a slower, lower-quality viewing experience in the developing world.
“We may choose to set a limit to how much we are willing to pay in bandwidth cost,” Mr. Pickett said. In some countries, he said, “there may be particular peak times where instead of high definition, we might decrease the resolution.”
The Facebook social network is also considering lowering the quality of videos and photographs delivered to some regions in an effort to reduce expenses.
“We can decide, either on a country by country or user by user basis, to engineer the quality of the service for that cohort of users,” said Jonathan Heiliger, the executive who oversees Facebook’s computing infrastructure.
Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
In developing countries like India, Internet use is rising rapidly, but users lack the means to attract advertising dollars.
Facebook is in a particularly difficult predicament. Seventy percent of its 200 million members live outside the United States, many in regions that do not contribute much to Facebook’s bottom line. At the same time, the company faces the expensive prospect of storing 850 million photos and eight million videos uploaded to the site each month.
Facebook, which says it favors membership growth over profitability for now, is trying to increase revenue overseas by hiring advertising sales staff in countries like Britain, Australia and France.
In other parts of the world, Microsoft serves ads on the site and Facebook offers self-service tools to advertisers. But those ads are far less lucrative than the ones Facebook itself sells in the United States and Western Europe.
As a result, speculation has swirled about Facebook’s finances. Industry analysts wonder aloud how fast the company is losing money and whether it needs to solicit another round of investment.
Facebook said last month that it was on track to become profitable next year. But as it did, Gideon Yu, Facebook’s experienced chief financial officer, left the company. Three people familiar with the internal maneuverings at Facebook said Mr. Yu objected to such a rosy projection as the company was struggling to finance its expensive global growth.
Web entrepreneurs like Mr. Shapiro of Veoh, still struggling with his decision to restrict his site from much of the world, might have to find a way to soothe their battered consciences.
“The part of me that wants to change the world says, ‘This is unfair, it shouldn’t be like this,’ ” Mr. Shapiro said. “On the other hand, from the business side of things, serving videos to the entire world is just not supportable at this time.”
FACTBOX-Greenhouse gas goals for major nations
Mon Apr 27, 2009 1:00am EDT
April 27 (Reuters) - The major nations meeting for discussions on climate change in Washington on Monday and Tuesday each have different goals for curbs on greenhouse gas emissions.
China, the United States, the European Union, Russia and India are top world emitters. Targets they set will go a long way to decide the ambition of a new U.N. deal to fight global warming due to be agreed in Copenhagen in December.
Rich nations' plans cluster around cuts of roughly 15 percent below current levels by 2020. Many developing nations are trying to slow the rise of emissions, without caps that they say would stifle economic growth and their drive to end poverty. [ID:nN26492919]
DEVELOPED NATIONS
UNITED STATES - President Barack Obama favors cutting U.S. emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 -- about 15 percent below recent levels -- and by 80 percent below 1990 by 2050.
EUROPEAN UNION - European Union leaders agreed in December to cut emissions 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, a cut of about 14 percent from recent levels. EU leaders want rich countries to aim to reduce emissions by 60 to 80 percent by 2050 from 1990 levels.
-- Britain has committed to a legally binding target to cut greenhouse gases by 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.
-- Germany plans to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 40 percent by 2020 compared to 1990 levels.
RUSSIA - Has not yet set a 2020 goal.
JAPAN - Plans to outline 2020 cuts by June. The opposition Democratic Party has promised to cut emissions by 25 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 if it wins an election due by October.
CANADA - Aims to cut emissions by 20 percent below 2006 levels by 2020 and envisages cuts of 60 to 70 percent below 2006 by 2050. Emissions are now more than 20 percent above 1990 levels.
AUSTRALIA - Aims to cut emissions by 5 percent below 2000 levels by 2020 and by 15 percent below 2000 if there is a strong U.N. pact.
DEVELOPING NATIONS
CHINA - A 2006-10 plan aims to reduce energy consumption per unit of gross domestic product by 20 percent, curbing the rise of greenhouse gas emissions. Beijing also plans to quadruple gross domestic product between 2001 and 2020 while only doubling energy use.
INDIA - New Delhi says priority must go to economic growth to end poverty while shifting to clean energies, led by solar power. A climate plan last June set no greenhouse caps but said per capita emissions will never exceed those of rich nations.
BRAZIL - Plans measures including halving Amazon deforestation over 10 years to avert 4.8 billion tonnes of emissions of carbon dioxide, energy conservation and sustaining the share of renewable energies. Hydropower alone accounts for 77 percent of electricity generation.
INTERNATIONAL TARGETS
THE KYOTO PROTOCOL - Binds industrialized nations except the United States to cut emissions on average by at least 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12.
GROUP OF EIGHT - Leading industrial nations agreed at a G8 summit in Japan in July 2008 to a "vision" of cutting world emissions of greenhouse gases by 50 percent by 2050.
GLOBAL - About 190 nations agreed last year to work out a new treaty by the end of 2009 to succeed Kyoto, comprising deeper emissions cuts by rich nations and action by poor countries to slow their rising emissions. For related story, click [ID:nLR126811] -- For Reuters latest environment blogs click on: blogs.reuters.com/environment/ (Compiled by Alister Doyle, Nina Chestney, Gerard Wynn and Risa Maeda; Editing by Ralph Boulton)
