AUTOMOTIVE

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

AUTOMOTIVE

Nissan, NEC to Make Battery for 'Green' Cars

Nissan's joint venture with electronics maker NEC will invest $115 million to start mass-producing lithium-ion batteries, a technology widely viewed as key for next-generation "green" cars.

Nissan Motor Executive Vice President Carlos Tavares said the Japanese automaker wanted to be a global leader in "zero-emission vehicles."

The new batteries will be more powerful than nickel-metal hydride batteries commonly used in electric and hybrid cars today, and will be half their size, Nissan officials said.

The joint venture, called Automotive Energy Supply, will make batteries for electric vehicles, hybrids and fuel cells.

The battery plant, set to be running by 2009, will have annual production capacity of 65,000 and starting capacity of 13,000, Nissan said. The investment will cover three years, it said.

The first commercial products to feature the new batteries will be Nissan forklifts in 2009, but electric vehicles produced for the U.S. and Japanese markets will follow in 2010, Tavares said.

Toyota Production Restarts After Quake

Production restarted at Toyota's joint venture auto plant in China after it was halted for a week by a deadly earthquake that struck nearby.

Toyota Motor's joint venture with Chinese carmaker FAW Group has restarted the daytime shift and is taking things "one step at a time" before restarting the night shift, said Paul Nolasco, a Toyota company spokesman in Tokyo.

None of the employees was injured and all family members were accounted for, but Toyota needed to check on the machinery and the well-being of the workers before giving the go-ahead to start production, he said.

Peugeot, Mitsubishi Team Up in Russia

French carmaker PSA Peugeot Citroen said it signed an agreement with Mitsubishi Motors, one of Japan's biggest automakers, to create a joint venture in Russia.

The venture will make midsize sport-utility vehicles under the Citroen, Peugeot and Mitsubishi brands, and midsize cars for Peugeot and Citroen at a factory in Kaluga, a city southwest of Moscow.

Production is scheduled to begin in 2011 for a capacity of up to 160,000 vehicles, the French carmaker said.

japan

Hello Kitty Named Tourism Ambassador

Japan's tourism ministry named Hello Kitty as its choice to represent the country in China and Hong Kong, where the toy character is wildly popular among children and young women. Officials hope tapping into that fan base will entice tourists to visit Japan and bring the country closer to its goal of attracting 10 million overseas visitors every year. Foreign tourism hit a record high of 8.35 million visitors last year.

Arrivals from China and Hong Kong accounted for 16.5 percent of them.

INVESTING

Buffett Scouts Europe For Acquisition Targets

Warren E. Buffett, whose business and investment acumen has made him one of the world's wealthiest men, has embarked on a European tour to look for possible acquisitions for his firm Berkshire Hathaway.

Starting in Frankfurt, continental Europe's financial hub, the chairman and chief executive of Berkshire said he wanted to put his company "on the radar screens" of family-owned German businesses should they ever consider selling themselves. Buffett, 77, said his trip to seek out opportunities among Europe's biggest family-owned companies would include stops in Switzerland, Spain and Italy.

pharmaceutical

Glaxo Gets E.U. Approval For Bird Flu Vaccine

GlaxoSmithKline said it received permission from European regulators to market a human bird-flu vaccine, the first pharmaceutical to receive a license for pre-pandemic use in all 27-member European Union states.

Glaxo, which has spent some $2 billion developing the vaccine that targets the H5N1 virus, already has orders for 8 million doses from Switzerland, enough to cover that country's entire population, and an order for 27.5 million doses from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Experts think H5N1, an influenza virus subtype that has killed at least 241 people worldwide since 2003, is the most likely candidate to mutate into a pandemic virus.

Emmanuel Hanon, vice president of the Influenza Vaccine Franchise at Glaxo, said Finland and several other European countries had also placed orders.

JAPAN

Central Bank Leaves Interest Rates on Hold

The Bank of Japan kept interest rates on hold at its first meeting after slashing its growth estimate and shelving a two-year policy of seeking higher borrowing costs. Governor Masaaki Shirakawa and his six colleagues left the overnight lending rate at 0.5 percent in a unanimous decision, the central bank said Tuesday. The rate is the lowest among major economies.

Growth in gross domestic product accelerated to 3.3 percent in the three months ended March 31, the Cabinet Office said last week. The number didn't change economists' views that the economy's longest postwar expansion will cool this year.

russia

1st Post-Soviet Plane Makes Maiden Flight

The SuperJet, Russia's first post-Soviet passenger airplane, completed its maiden flight, boosting government hopes of restoring the nation's status as a global aircraft manufacturer.

The regional jet flew for more than an hour and reached an altitude of 4,000 feet, the Moscow-based company Sukhoi said. The test of the 95-seat SuperJet-100 took place in Komsomolsk-on-Amur, the former closed city built by Joseph Stalin in the 1930s in the Far East.

Russia is spending more than $1.4 billion developing the SuperJet in an effort to make its civil aviation industry competitive worldwide. State-owned Sukhoi and partner Finmeccanica, Italy's biggest defense company, have a target of selling at least 1,800 SuperJets over 20 years.

Compiled from reports by Washington Post staff writers, the Associated Press and Bloomberg News.