The morning newswire of Exame (Editora Abril, Brazil) suffers from a defect common to a lot of online news portals here: Flash-powered roll-down ads that fail to roll back up, obscuring your view of the headlines if you happen to prefer the Firefox browser. The proportion of non-events — “[São Paulo governor] Serra has not decided yet what to do about CESP” – mere press release rewrites, and reheated wire copy without much of a local angle is fairly high.
Let’s do our best Pat Kiernan imitation and review the morning headlines from the Lusophone city so nice they named it twice — São Paulo, São Paulo. (Tucuruvi’s up and Jabaquara is down.)
The clipping service of the Ministry of Planning is often a good place to start, followed by a scan of the major dailies before heading to the official diaries and the material events newswire of the CVM and — if you can find it on the exchange’s Web site — the Bovespa’s Plantão Empresas. Of the press release wires, Portal Fator and Maxpressnet are maybe the most interesting.
The Informativo Bovepa section in the print edition of Valor repays close attention, but you need high-powered reading glasses to make it out. Valor leads today with an impending speech by central bank president Meirelles (late of Bank Boston) today.
The official announcement of the Brasil Telecom-Oi merger is widely reported (all from the same wire story by the Agência Estado, mind you) to be coming any day now. Tupi consumer confidence is at all-time high, reports the National Council of Industries (CNI). Statistics have only been collected since (we partied like it was) 1999.
Relatório Reservado reports that the federal government “is studying opening Dataprev“– a state-owned technology supplier to the ministry of social security — “to private investment.”
It predicts a major merger in the ceramics industry, and describes signs that the states of Paraná and the Zona Franca de Manaus are engaged in open warfare over which will host the factory of a major domestic home electronics manufacturer. It reports that the Brazilian armed forces are thinking of replacing the Land Rover Defender with a locally produced model that costs 40% less.
Among other interesting (but usually unsourced) tips and market rumors.
A simmering intellectual property dispute with a German firm over the rights to the term rapadura are coming to a boil, the Gazeta Mercantil reports, meanwhile:
A Ordem dos Advogados do Brasil (OAB) nacional vai entrar com processo para anular o registro da rapadura como marca na Alemanha e nos EUA. O depósito da marca foi feito pela empresa alemã Rapunzel Naturkost AG. Segundo o presidente da Comissão Nacional de Relações Internacionais da OAB, Roberto Busato, o registro contraria o disposto no Tratado de Paris. “Segundo o tratado, os países consignatários do documento não podem registrar como marca algo que faça parte do patrimônio de um país”, afirma o advogado. Hoje, a Presidência do Brasil e o Ministério da Cultura receberão informe a respeito.
The national Order of Brazilian Attorneys (OAB) will sue to cancel the registration of ‘rapadura‘ as a trademark in Germany and the United States. The trademark was applied for by the German firm Rapunzel Naturkost AG. According to the chair of OAB’s international relations committee, Busato, registering the trademark violates the provisions of the Treaty of Paris. “According to that treaty, the signatories cannot register a trademark that belongs to the [public domain] of another nation,” the attorney says. Today, the president of Brazil and the minister of culture will receive information about the case.
I noted this dispute in a post to a previous online notebook that is no longer online. I have the MySQL database here somewhere, I need to dig that up.
Basically, rapadura is a distinctive raw sugar product of the centuries-old, slave- and ox-powered, sugar industry of the Brazilian Northeast. I like to shave it into coffee brewed as thick as heavy crude oil to get my heart jump-started in the morning.
As I recall, the German product that will use rapadura as a brand name is some sort of variant on Sugar in the Raw (turbinado cane sugar). Memory might not be serving me, though. Best check that.
Rapadura.
And compare the dispute — a tempest in a teapot, mostly — about whether the flesh of bos indicus can properly be called “beef.”
Intellectual property disputes often seem whimsical, but as international trade issues, they are dead serious, and you are still hard-pressed sometimes to find coverage that treats them as such.
The Venezuelan “nationalization” of the cement industry consists in buying out 60% of the equity in companies in that industry rather than a total Maoist-Stalinist appropriation of private property by the Bolivarian red tide. (About 55% of the equity in Petrobras is state-owned, I think.)
Cemex has issued a press release on the subject this morning.
Might be an interesting sector analysis to compare with the Iraqi cement industry after Wolfowitz’s magically self-financing War Won in a Waltz, in this 2007 report from USAID (your gift from the American people.)
Current design capacity for the Iraqi cement industry is estimated at some 16.9 million tonnes per annum, in 2004, with a further 2.6 million tonnes in the Northern region administered by the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG). However actual current production in the non-KRG area is estimated at some 2.5 million tonnes in 2004, or less, dependent upon source, and perhaps some 3 million tonnes in 2005.
I remember seeing on CNN, I think it was, that massive orders for barriers against suicide-bombers (or “homicide bombers,” for you New York Post readers) were supposed to revitalize that industry.
Iraq is something of a sea of gypsum, and nary a flake of yellowcake to refine, while manufacturing cement is not exactly splitting the atom. And yet, as of this 2007 report, it was reportedly having to import the concrete needed to balkanize Baghdad and keep the barbarian hordes out of the Green Zone’s ample food court,.
Per capita consumption in Iraq is variously estimated by Cembureau for example in 1999 at some 165 Kg falling to some 161 Kg in 2005. This report indicates perhaps some 185 Kg, however this compares, in regional terms with Iran with an estimated consumption of 459 Kg per capita and Egypt with 405 kg per head. Regional countries, which were in a developmental reconstruction stage are the Lebanon with a per capita (all figures 2005, unless otherwise stated) of 930 kg and countries with significant building programmes, Kuwait 1,224, Libya 973 and Oman 929. The overall status of the domestic industry reflects the economic constraints evident in the economy as a whole through two Gulf wars and the long period of imposed sanctions. Whereas as the industry was being developed and expanded through the 1970,s and 1980’s, and became a net exporter, within a decade the industry was effectively destroyed. Issues now concerning the industry are lack of consistent sources of power and fuel, old technology, lack of servicing and maintenance.
I read an interesting interview yesterday in Imprensa magazine with the editor in chief of Época Negócios magazine (catchphrase: “Inspiration for Innovation.” Globo tends to promote magical thinking to the detriment of 99% perspiration, I find.) On which see also
It pretty much stinks, I tend to find.
Globo and Record have gone to the national advertising self-regulation body (CONAR) and settled a dispute over advertising claims by the latter to now be leading the perennial ratings champion “morning, noon and night.” See also
Other items of interest I generally post to the del.icio.us-powered “Tupiwire,” at left. I have more agonizing oral surgery to undergo today, however, so don’t expect miracles from me. This is a blog. You get what you pay for.
Filed under: Brazil, Infrastructure, Journalism, Legal Affairs, Media, Mining & Minerals, Nationalization, Northeast, PR & Advertising, Privatization, Software, Telcommunications Tagged: | Intellectual Property
