Reading Business 10/17/11- There's No Camera, but Plenty of Rubies (Nokia’s Bright Spot: Luxury Handset Maker Vertu)

" For his 27th birthday, Mohammed Al-Haj, a marketing executive in Abu Dhabi, hinted to his girlfriend that he wanted a new cell phone. He wasn’t after the latest Apple (APPL) or Android (GOOG) device. He wanted a Nokia. Or rather, he wanted a Vertu, from the Finnish company’s luxury division. “It’s an accessory, part of my outfit,” Al-Haj says of his Vertu, with its keypad bordered by pavé-set diamonds. “People look at it all the time and say, ‘Wow, that’s a nice phone.’ It feels good.” "

Reading business 10/10/11-For Chinese students, smoking isn't all bad!

The government provides tobacco. The schools are sponsored by local units of China’s state-owned cigarette monopoly, China National Tobacco. The schools slogan are 'Genius comes from hard work—tobacco helps you become talented.' This is related to what we have been talking about in class. This is an example of public limited company. Governments are supposed to provide survives that benefit people. China has more than 320 million smokers, a third of the world’s total, and 53 percent of men there smoke. About 1 million Chinese die from tobacco-related illnesses every year. The tobacco industry grew at an average annual rate of 19 percent from 2006 to 2010, according to State Tobacco. In the year of 2010 earnings of China's state tobacco monopoly went up 17%.