BGN Entrepreneur

As gold turnover surges in China, the Shanghai Futures Exchange is studying ways to add institutional investors including trusts and funds as members and extend trading into evening hours.
According to the China Futures Association, it is revealed that in January, gold futures trading hs more than doubled to November as prices reached a record high and investors sought a haven amid falling equipties, depreciating currencies and Europe’s debt crisis.

The global coffee chain–Starbucks is betting that coffee is an indulgence austerity-era Brits are unwilling to forgo. Following an aggressive expansion backfired badly in 2008, the company now plans to open 300 new outlets in the UK over the next five years and hire 5,000 more staff.
The move is at odds with other parts of the food and drink industry which are being forced to pull down the shutters with cash-strapped consumers curb spending and raw material inflation casting great influence on the profit margins.
UK sales of the company have grown for nine quarters in a row on a like-for-like basis. Despite of such dramatic growth, the group still lost £34.2m at the net level in the year to September 30, 2010.

US luxury carmakers are locked in a fierce-than-ever battle for market share, rolling out an array of holiday season promotions that in a lot of cases are earlier and more generous than usual.
The scramble for sales comes along with the signs of slackening customer demand for upscale cars, which is partly due to the tough economic conditions, as well as ageing baby-boomers’s turning towards smaller and less expensive models.
According to New Jersey-based Autodata, it was revealed that in October, US luxury car sales slipped by 1.5% from a year earlier, compared to a 7.9 per cent% advance in the overall light-vehicle market. For the year to date, the luxury market has grown by 1.8%, compared to 8.6% overall.

The world’s largest soft-drink maker–Coca-Cola, is co-operating with Chinese authorities in an investigation of the death of a child who are reported by state media to fall ill after drinking one of Coke’s popular Minute Maid milk beverages in northern China.
Coke responded that it was taking the incident very seriously and had removed the product from shelves in Jilin province. However, the company insisted that it had tested the product line and found no problems.

The roll-out of fourth-generation mobile technology and growing demand for high-speed data services are boosting the interim pre-tax profits at Anite, which sells and maintains software to test mobile devices and telecoms networks, by almost 40%.
First-half revenues and turnover at the company has beat the consensus expectations of analysts in spite of last month’s 20% upgrade in full-year forecasts.

If you have passion for fashion, then there is money to be made. It is possible for one to turn what has been a drain up into a positive money spinner.
The first step is to stop hoarding. Go through your closet and take a good look at what you actually wear and weed out the one that have been ignored for quite a while as they don’t fit any more or you lose your love in them after purchasing them. The clothes, shoes, and accessories that you don’t need any more, could bring pleasure to someone else and make you some extra money at the same time.
EBay is the best place for turning your trash into someone else’s treasure. People acutally put a wide range of items up there for sale. It is simple to list your items on this platform.
You could also go through the closet of your mum or even grandmother for vintage. These items could either be sold online, or offline in charity stores, car boots and antique centers, etc.

The body set up to take care of the taxpayers’ interests in the bailed out banks, UKFI manages £65bn of taxpayer money used to purchase stakes in Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Banking Group, as well as what is left of Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley. But, is it time to question the longevity of UK Financial Investments, in its current guise at least?
It is not that UKFI has completed its work. It is more that the nature of its work has changed. No longer is it about pushing the button on a share sale, but more about taking a long-term view concerning how the banks should be run.
So, more than ever, it is also about behaving like a shareholder and handling corporate governance decisions, such as pay and bonuses. It casts the votes on behalf of taxpayers at annual meetings.