* DLA offers movies, series from U.S. entertainment housesBy Cyntia Barrera DiazMEXICO CITY, Oct 17 (Reuters) - Mexican tycoon Carlos
Slim’s America Movil, one of the world’s biggest cell phone
companies, is buying a digital media firm to bring movies, TV
series and music to its growing base of smartphone, tablet and
pay-television customers across Latin America.The purchase of Miami-based DLA Inc suggests a more
aggressive move from America Movil into video-on-demand and
streaming services in Latin America, where it dominates pay
television services with more than 11 million subscribers.”They have the distribution means, but lack the content,”
said Actinver analyst Martin Lara. “There is an explosion of
content (use) through multiple platforms: cell phones,
blackberries, iPads … the content market is no longer limited
to pay television.”America Movil did not say how much it is
paying Claxson Interactive Group for DLA and could not
immediately elaborate on its brief statement to the stock
exchange. The deal is pending approval from authorities but is
expected to close in the last quarter of 2011.According to DLA’s website, the company distributes movies
and television series from top U.S. entertainment houses like
Walt Disney Co , as well as music to televisions and
smartphones alike.Claxson and DLA are owned by the Cisneros Group of
Companies, pioneers in the television market in South America.America Movil’s chief executive, Daniel Hajj, told Reuters
recently he expected the company to expand its online video
services in the region, adding Peru and Argentina to its
existing offerings in Colombia and Brazil.With the DLA deal, America Movil would join a growing
number of companies trying to lure in viewers with more
attractive programming in a pay-as-you-go format.Netflix Inc recently launched its online video
rental in more than 40 countries and Cuevana, a free service,
is also very popular in the region. Last month, Maxcom
Telecomunicaciones launched its live television
and video rental service in Mexico.GROWING THE BIZAmerica Movil is the biggest cell phone company in Latin
America, with 230 million customers. It is also the leading
provider of pay television services, via cable or satellite,
and expects to double its client base by 2013.Content was one of the pieces missing to round America
Movil’s offer. With DLA, the Mexican company could bring adult
entertainment Playboy TV, music channel DMX or The Concert
Channel to clients’ screens in most of Latin America.DLA has three business branches: video-on-demand with a
vast library of titles to watch and pause at will; a broadband
service available via any device with Internet access; and
pay-per-view, offering 18 channels with top Hollywood
productions.It was not immediately clear if America Movil was offering
this new service in Mexico, where earlier this year its sister
company Telefonos de Mexico lost a battle
to get a government permission to offer television services in
the country.Shares in America Movil in Mexico were down 1.39 percent at
15.58 pesos while its New York-traded shares were down 2.3
percent at $23.30.
* Super committee urged to stay away from defense cuts* Farm subsidy cuts likely to be proposedBy Donna Smith and Richard CowanWASHINGTON, Oct 14 (Reuters) - Whether the special “super
committee” of Congress will succeed in its mission to slash
U.S. deficits is up in the air, a panel member said on Friday,
as some lawmakers tried to fence off large budget items like
defense.U.S. Representative Chris Van Hollen, a Democratic member
of the special panel, said he was “absolutely convinced” the
six Democrats and six Republicans would try hard to reach
agreement on a plan by its Nov. 23 deadline. The panel has been
asked to find at least $1.2 trillion in savings over 10 years.”Whether we are able to overcome some of the obstacles by
the end of the day is still unclear,” Van Hollen said at an
event sponsored by the National Journal.The panel of senators and U.S. House of Representatives
members has been meeting, mostly behind closed doors, for more
than a month in an effort to put together a deficit reduction
package. They have said very little publicly about their
deliberations or whether any progress has been made on the
politically explosive issues of tax hikes and spending cuts for
government healthcare and and retirement programs.During bitter debt limit negotiations that led to an August
agreement creating the super committee, Republicans firmly
refused to consider Democratic demands that tax increases be
part of any package that included spending cuts for Medicare
and Medicaid healthcare programs for the elderly and poor.Some Republicans on the super committee now appear open to
the idea of closing some corporate tax breaks to increase
revenues and lower corporate income tax rates, according to
lobbyists familiar with the discussions.Van Hollen declined to discuss the tax issues being
considered by the super committee. But he said tax code reform
is one way to raise revenues.”One way to address the revenue piece of the puzzle is
through tax reform,” Van Hollen said. “You can apply that
concept equally through the individual side and the corporate
side.”While the super committee is unlikely to have enough time
to write an overhaul of the tax code, it could instruct the
tax-writing committees of Congress to undertake such an effort
next year.RARE AGREEMENT: DEFENSE CUTSThe panel is reviewing a large number of budget proposals
from the regular committees of Congress.Most of the committees split along party lines in their
suggestions with Democrats urging the super committee to avoid
cuts in health and retirement benefits and Republicans urging
an overhaul of those programs to put them on a more sustainable
financial footing.Senate Finance Committee Republicans called for a series of
tax cuts that they have long advocated and asked the super
committee to cap the individual and corporate tax rates at 25
percent. The current top rates are 35 percent.Democrats meanwhile continued their push for more revenues
to relieve pressure on domestic government programs that have
shouldered the burden of two previous budget-cutting efforts.But in a rare show of agreement, Democrats and Republicans
on the House Armed Services Committee urged the panel to reject
further defense spending cuts. In separate letters to the super
committee they argued that such a move would hurt military
preparedness as well as the economy.”If further cuts to the military are implemented … these
cuts would pose a serious threat to the nation’s readiness to
respond to current and future global security challenges, break
the back of our armed forces while slowing our economic
recovery, and do little to resolve our debt crisis,” said
committee Chairman Howard McKeon.Walling off the military from spending cuts would make the
super committee’s work an even tougher uphill climb.Failure by the super committee to reach agreement would
trigger $1.2 trillion in spending cuts, starting in 2013,
evenly divided between military and domestic programs.Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told McKeon’s panel on
Thursday that defense spending cuts beyond the $450 billion
over the next decade that lawmakers have already approved would
“devastate our national security.”Meanwhile Senate and House agriculture committees, possibly
hoping to head off even deeper cuts by the super committee, are
expected to propose about $23 billion in farm subsidy
reductions. The proposal would be tied to the creation of a new
crop subsidy system, according to farm lobbyists..
By Andrea Shalal-EsaWASHINGTON, Oct 13 (Reuters) - Northrop Grumman Corp on Thursday pulled out of the 2012 international air
show in Farnborough, England, a dramatic move underscoring the
company’s drive to cut costs as it prepares for leaner times in
the global defense market.Northrop has participated in the air shows — which
alternate between Paris and Farnborough — each year since it
merged with Grumman in 1994, said spokesman Randy Belote.Belote said the company had already been reducing its
footprint at the international air shows in recent years, but
pulling out completely would save millions of dollars.He said it did not diminish the company’s commitment to
Britain or other international customers.Virginia-based defense consultant Loren Thompson said it
would be the first time in decades that the company — one of
the five largest U.S. defense contractors — was not present at
the big international showcase of commercial and military
aircraft.”This is just the latest indication of how determined
Chairman Wes Bush is to cut costs,” Thompson told Reuters.
“They’re going to break the model in terms of what is expected
in terms of industry leaders.”Bush has realigned the company around four business areas
focused on cybersecurity, logistics, communications and
intelligence, and unmanned systems, and recently spun off the
company’s shipbuilding business.Belote said Northrop was reevaluating its participation in
other international air shows as well, but was only prepared to
announce its decision about Farnborough at this point.
* Investors embrace clearing in boon for CME, LCH, ICE* CFTC inundated with thousands of industry lettersBy Jonathan Spicer and Ann SaphirCHICAGO, Oct 12 (Reuters) - Europe’s debt problems are
increasing anxiety about the vulnerability of global markets
because too many new U.S. derivatives rules intended to prevent
a repeat of the 2008 crisis have yet to be defined.Investors have responded in recent months by embracing the
clearing of swaps, essentially beating regulators to the punch,
to protect themselves in volatile markets.Clearing allows investors to avoid the credit risk of
trading with banks that appear newly vulnerable amid Europe’s
debt crisis. In 2008-2009 banks’ worries about the health of
their trading partners resulted in a widespread freezing of
credit, which nearly sank the global economy.Executives at a futures industry conference here urged
regulators to speedily adopt rules for trading and clearing in
the over-the-counter swaps market. The longer we wait, they
said, the more dangerous it becomes.”If we were the five senior staff on the Titanic, I’d like
to think we wouldn’t be standing back, looking at the safety
boats and thinking about whether we can design them better,”
CME Group Inc chief executive Craig Donohue said at the
Futures Industry Association.”We’d be thinking about how to get people on the boats and
get them to safety, and maybe we can improve on that in the
future,” he said.It has been three years since a U.S. financial crisis sent
the global economy into a tailspin, and more than a year since
lawmakers passed a bill designed to prevent a new crisis from
taking down the financial system in similar fashion. Regulators
are scrambling to finish writing the rules.Now, with Europe’s debt crisis showing some of the same
signs as the United States’ meltdown, investors have rushed
into clearing credit and interest rate swaps, a boon in
volatile markets for companies like CME and Europe’s
LCH.Clearnet.The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which must make
final about 50 new rules under the Dodd-Frank law, has
struggled to keep up with the rule-making process, having
finished only about a dozen of the rules.Several key rules, including capital and margin
requirements, will be pushed into the first quarter of 2012,
putting the agency well behind a July 2011 deadline Congress
had set.Regulators have benefited from public meetings that
provided input for the rules-writing, said CFTC Chairman Gary
Gensler. “But the American public needs us to move forward and
get the job done and finish these rules,” he told reporters.”The crisis emanating from Europe reminds us that the
public is still unprotected.“‘FISH OR CUT BAIT’Investor appetite for CME’s cleared swaps soared last
month, with trading in credit default and interest rate swaps
rising to $42 billion in September, from less than $1 billion
about a month earlier.CME’s futures business has also benefited, as swaps users
seek safer alternatives to their bilateral dealings with banks.
Asset managers are increasingly shifting their trades to CME,
doubling their use of CME’s short-term interest rate futures in
the past year for instance, and trading in currency futures
rose to records in September as investors sought safety through
clearing.”The trend is there,” said Jeffrey Sprecher, chief
executive of IntercontinentalExchange Inc , which began
clearing CDS in early 2009 and saw an 11 percent jump in
credit-related revenues from the second to the third quarter of
this year.”It’s obviously a very complicated global environment right
now for global exchange risk, and you are seeing a migration
towards futures more than the OTC market.”Despite delays by the CFTC and other agencies in defining
the Dodd-Frank rules, the expectation that they will eventually
come into force has allowed investors to begin clearing
products they never had before.In a global market of some $480 trillion in clearable
interest rate swaps, an estimated $180 trillion has yet to be
cleared.Yet some, including Donohue and Sprecher, cautioned in
interviews that it was important the CFTC takes the time to
sift through the thousands of comment letters and get the rules
right. “I think it’s well intentioned,” Sprecher said.There is also the real threat of lawsuits from the industry
once the rules — from limits on excessive speculation to
real-time reporting of trades to end-user exemptions — are
formally adopted.But based on interviews with several traders and industry
executives, the euro zone crisis is giving a new urgency to the
need to define how exactly regulators want to safeguard the
market.”Let’s fish or cut bait,” said Chris Hehmeyer, chief
executive of Chicago-based proprietary trading firm HTG Capital
Partners. “It’s time for them to go ahead and get the
definitions out there so that we can get on with it.”
DUC exports of natural gas rose to 390 million cubic
metres from 360 million in August and was down from 540 million
in the same month a year ago, Maersk said.DUC is responsible for most of the petroleum output from
Denmark’s North Sea oil and gas fields. Denmark is the
third-biggest producer in western Europe after Norway and
Britain.Danish shipping and oil group A.P. Moller-Maersk owns 39
percent of DUC. Royal Dutch Shell Group (RDSa.L) has 46 percent
and Chevron a 15 percent stake in the partnership.#
