初级商务英语听力2007
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The city council of Birmingham, England, is prosecuting candy and beverage company Cadbury Schweppes for manufacturing and selling chocolate contaminated with salmonella bacteria last year. The company recalled more than one million chocolate bars, but did not inform authorities of the problem until five months after discovering it. Dozens of people got food poisoning, and the bad publicity cost
初级商务英语听力2007
Millions of people in North America, Asia, and Europe lost access to their email for up to 12 hours when a software upgrade caused problems with central systems at Canadian company Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry email device. The software upgrade had not been tested enough. BlackBerry users, who are known for sometimes checking their email every few minutes, were very angry with the
初级商务英语听力2007
Computer company Apple Inc. had claimed that it was the record companies decision, not theirs, to offer music on their iTunes service that could only be played on their iPod player. Apple and the EMI music company have just announced that songs from EMI artists will now be available in higher quality audio and without copy protection for thirty cents more than the 99 cents that each song currentl
初级商务英语听力2007
Subprime loans are high-interest loans made to borrowers with bad credit ratings. Now that the US housing market bubble has burst, more of these borrowers are defaulting on their mortgages, and this is causing big problems for subprime lenders and perhaps, eventually, for the US economy. New Century Financial Corporation, the largest independent subprime lender in the US, is nearly bankrupt; thei
初级商务英语听力2007
The British Broadcasting Corporation became the first international broadcaster to cut a deal with Google-owned video website YouTube. By showing three channels of their news and entertainment content on YouTube, the BBC hopes to drive web traffic to their own web site, and YouTube benefits from the high-class image of the state-owned BBC, which has the largest audience of any broadcasting corpor
初级商务英语听力2007
The Shanghai stock index went down 9% last Tuesday and then brought down European and American stock markets with it. Rumors that the Chinese government would impose a 20% capital gains tax encouraged a sell-off. A report by the US Commerce Department of a big drop in orders for durable goods (that is, goods that last more than three years such as cars and furniture) combined with the effect of t
初级商务英语听力2007
The German automaker DaimlerChrysler made over $7 billion last year, but the American Chrysler division that they acquired in 1998 lost nearly $1.5 billion and has announced plant closings and a cut of 13,000 US jobs. Now, there is talk of Chrysler splitting off from the German company, either to be acquired by another auto company or to become an independent operation. While some Indian and Chin
初级商务英语听力2007
Former captain of the English national football team David Beckham is moving to Los Angeles this summer to play with the LA Galaxy team in the United States Major League Soccer league. As the biggest star ever to play in this league, the 31-year-old midfield player will also be the highest paid, with a contract for $10 million in salary per year. Along with the salary, endorsement deals and a pro
初级商务英语听力2007
In April of 2005, Jacques Chirac and the German Chancellor at the time, Gerhard Schröder, announced plans to spend over a billion euros on a joint French-German search engine to compete with the American company Google. The project would be called Quaero, which is Latin for "I seek." After Angela Merkel replaced Schröder, the new German government never announced support for Q
初级商务英语听力2007
An undersea earthquake off the coast of Taiwan damaged underwater communications cables, hurting technology and banking services in much of Asia. All data and voice traffic had to go through the remaining undamaged cables and satellites, slowing down or cutting off a lot of communication and transactions. With many executives and traders taking time off for the holiday season, the impact was not
初级商务英语听力2007
Rupert Murdoch's media conglomerate the News Corporation has bid $5 billion for Dow Jones, the parent company of the Wall Street Journal newspaper. There had been no announcement that Dow Jones was available for sale. Although the Dow Jones board of directors announced that 52% of the voting shares of the company were against the sale, Murdoch is not giving up. He announced that he would create a
初级商务英语听力2007
The News Corporation is not the only media conglomerate trying to buy a well-known financial news publisher. British news and financial information provider Reuters announced that Canada's Thomson Corporation has made a bid to buy them out. Thomson has grown from a small newspaper publisher to a worldwide publisher of scientific, healthcare, tax, and especially legal research information. They pu
初级商务英语听力2007
Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez celebrated May Day, the international workers' holiday, by issuing a decree that transferred control of the country's last privately owned oil fields to government control. The state will own at least 60% of every oil field in the country, and Chávez encouraged the companies owning the remainder to retain their minority holdings in order to help deve
初级商务英语听力2007
When investigations began looking into corruption charges at 160 year-old German technology company Siemens AG, Chief Executive Klaus Kleinfeld pledged to restore the company's reputation. When the company's supervisory board wanted to postpone discussions about extending Kleinfeld's contract, he told them not to bother. According to Kleinfeld, "In times like these, the company needs clarity
初级商务英语听力2007
For the first quarter of 2007, Toyota sold 2.35 million cars, more than any other auto maker in the world. U.S. company General Motors had held the title of world's top auto seller since 1931, not counting two brief periods in the 1970s and 1980s when labor troubles led to production problems. GM sold 2.26 million cars worldwide in the first quarter of this year. While Toyota's sales have been gr
初级商务英语听力2007
The British pound's value reached its highest point against the US dollar in 26 years. On Tuesday, the pound was worth two United States dollars for the first time since 1992, and the dollar later slipped to its lowest point against the pound since 1981. Economists say that the slide was a result of predictions that the Bank of England will raise interest rates soon and that the US Federal Reserv
初级商务英语听力2007
Search engine Google has made the biggest deal in their history, outbidding Microsoft to pay $3.1 billion for web ad supplier DoubleClick. Until now, Google's advertising business has focused on small advertisers, but DoubleClick's relationships with big online ad agencies and publishers will bring much bigger advertisers to Google such as MTV Networks, the magazine Sports Illustrated, and the Fr
初级商务英语听力2007
A chocolate company is buying a baby food company from a drug company. Swiss company Nestle is the world's biggest food and drink company; they're known primarily in the United States for the brand of chocolate with the company's name on it. They have a large market share of infant nutritional products in the developing world, but none in the US. They're paying $5.5 billion to Swiss pharmaceutica
初级商务英语听力2007
European leaders are pressuring Paul Wolfowitz to resign his position as Wold Bank president. Wolfowitz, who has withheld World Bank loans from several countries until they show greater progress in fighting corruption, recently arranged for his girlfriend Shaha Riza to get a transfer to the US State Department and more than double the raise she was allowed under the rules of the World Bank, which
初级商务英语听力2007
Two North American mobile phone companies are trying to buy a controlling interest in Telecom Italia, Italy's largest telephone company, but there are complications. US company AT&T and Mexico's America Móvil have made a combined offer of €4.5 billion for a third of Olimpia, a holding company that owns 18% of Telecom Italia. Italian tire company Pirelli has been trying to sell the
初级商务英语听力2007
German sports car maker Porsche exercised an option on 3.6% of stock in German car maker Volkswagen. Because this puts their ownership in VW over 30%, German law required Porsche to make a takeover offer to other VW shareholders, so they did: €101 per share, which is the average price of VW stock over the last three months and therefore the minimum bid they were allowed to make. Because the
初级商务英语听力2007
An executive board member of the German technology company Siemens has been arrested as part of a bribery investigation. Johannes Feldmayer is accused of paying €34 million to Wilhelm Schelsky, the former head of the AUB trade union who is now in jail for tax evasion. Siemens has no record of Schelsky performing any services for them, but AUB was known to be much friendlier about Siemens cor
初级商务英语听力2007
After scheduling delays, wiring problems, and order cancellations, the Airbus A380 super-jumbo jet is finally ready to fly. For its maiden voyage, a Lufthansa A380 took about 400 Lufthansa and Airbus employees and 60 reporters and photographers from Frankfurt to New York's JFK airport. Arriving early, the plane had to circle for 20 minutes to wait for the media crews to be ready. Los Angeles offi
初级商务英语听力2007
Leading computer database software maker Oracle is suing SAP, the German company known for their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software. Oracle, which has been moving into the ERP market themselves, accuses employees at SAP's TomorrowNow subsidiary of logging into their website and downloading 10,000 files in four days. TomorrowNow offers software support for products from several companies
初级商务英语听力2007
European Union consumer affairs commissioner Meglena Kuneva recently criticized Apple Incorporated's iTunes service. She told the German weekly magazine Focus "Do you think it's fine that a CD plays in all CD players but that a song purchased from iTunes only plays in an iPod? I don't." Apple chief executive Steve Jobs recently published a letter telling European consumers that he doesn
初级商务英语听力2007
China's Forbidden City may become forbidden for the Starbucks chain of coffee shops. Chinese nationalists have protested the Starbucks outlet in the Imperial Palace since it opened in 2000, and an online campaign begun by a television host has led to a legislator's introduction of a bill to close that outlet. According to legislator Jiang Hongbin, "Starbucks must move out of the Imperial Pal
初级商务英语听力2007
For over twenty years, China has encouraged foreign investment by charging foreign corporations a tax rate as low as 15% while local businesses had to pay 33%. After mounting complaints from Chinese companies, the country's legislature has changed the law to charge a single rate of 25% to foreign and domestic companies. According to analysts at JP Morgan, Chinese banks will benefit the most from
初级商务英语听力2007
Airbus has made it official that they are selling all or part of six European plants and cutting 10,000 jobs in France, Germany, Spain, and Britain. Employees at three German plants and four French plants stopped working for several hours in protest, and French voters threatened to use the upcoming election to punish politicians who cooperated too much with Airbus's plans. An Airbus chief executi
初级商务英语听力2007
American retail giant Wal-Mart is even closer to setting up a chain of supermarkets across India in partnership with Indian mobile phone company Bharti Enterprises, and many people in India are not happy about it. Bharti chairman Sunil Mittal told reporters that they were very close to finalizing the deal, and that there were "zero" regulatory hurdles. Small shopkeepers and India's comm
初级商务英语听力2007
Rumors are flying about who will buy the American auto company Chrysler from DaimlerChrysler, their German parent company. Car makers Volkswagen, Hyundai, Mitsubishi, Fiat, and Renault-Nissan have all announced that they are not interested. Most rumors center around Detroit's General Motors, although more recent reports point to several American and European private equity firms interested in buy
初级商务英语听力2007
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