LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – The 362 doping tests run for the July 2011 swimming World Cup in Shanghai have all come back negative, FINA (world swimming federation) announced 22 August from its head office in Lausanne. The tests included 311 urine samples and 51 blood tests.
Atlas detector, Cern
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The elusive Higgs-Boson particle is proving to be ghost-like, says Cern, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva. Results from Cern’s Atlas and CMS projects were presented at the biannual Lepton-Photon conference in Mumbai, India 22 August.
Results of these collaborative projects using the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) “show that the elusive Higgs particle, if it exists, is running out of places to hide. Proving or disproving the existence the Higgs-Boson, which was postulated in the 1960s as part of a mechanism that would confer mass on fundamental particles, is among the main goals of the LHC scientific programme,” the group says in a press release.
BERN, SWITZERLAND – PostFinance, the financial arm of Swiss Post, continues to pull in new customers as the country’s two large banks cope with the fallout from legal problems with the US and a strong franc that is hurting their revenues. PostFinance Wednesday 27 July announced that it acquired 43,000 new customers in the first half of 2011 and 103,000 new accounts, bringing the totals to 2.7m customers and 4.2m accounts.
Customer assets totalled CHF90 billion.
Profits rose nearly 20 percent to CHF327 million and the company created 130 fulltime jobs, with plans to add another 50 before the year ends.
The positive performance contrasts sharply with gloomy news from the country’s two big banks. UBS Tuesday 26 July announced a 49 percent drop in revenues due in large part to falling income from investment banking’s weak performance with stocks bonds, commodities and currencies. The bank plans to cut costs, which will mean job losses, by up to CHF2b in the next two to three years.
Credit Suisse announced 15 July it is being investigated by the US Justice Department, which has indicted eight former employees for helping wealthy Americans hide money in Switzerland. The bank announces its first half 2011 results tomorrow, 28 July.
London, England (GenevaLunch) - There is enormous pressure on British university places for autumn 2010, with an estimated shortfall of 170,000 places.
The results will add to pressures on students from the international schools in Switzerland, who generally take the International Baccalaureate rather the A levels, as fewer places will be available for those who just missed their targets in the IB exams.
The proportion of candidates getting an A* in A levels is approximately the same as those receiving a maximum “7″ in an IB exam.
The long-awaited UK 2010 Advanced Level university entrance exams results were released Thursday 19 August and show yet another improvement in grades, for the 28th consecutive year.
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch.com) – Swiss is flying high again, with CHF61 million in profits for the first six months of 2010, after a dismal start to the year thanks to the Icelandic volcano that forced planes to stay on the ground. Profits were down compared to the first six months of 2009 (CHF65m), but the company’s total income, CHF2.25 billion, was up 6 percent compared to a year earlier.
The outlook for 2010 remains bright, according to Swiss chief exective CEO Harry Hohmeister. “The developments of the past few months enable us to look ahead with greater confidence than we could have mustered just a few months ago. Business has picked up, and the trend is particularly encouraging on our intercontinental routes. We’ll be investing well over half a billion francs in renewing our fleet and further developing our product this year, and will also be recruiting 500 new staff.”
Hohmeister credited Switzerland’s economic recovery, stronger than its neighbours’ in Europe, with contributing to the good results. The company noted, however, that Swiss “is suffering the effects of both a weakened euro and (above all) a substantial increase in fuel costs.”
Zurich Aiport, winter 2010
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch.com) – Autopsy results published by canton Zurich Monday morning 28 June show that a 29-year-old Nigerian who died at Zurich Airport 17 March was suffering from an undiagnosed heart ailment, and his death was due to a heart attack. He died shortly before he was to board a plane to be returned forcibly to Nigeria. The medical examiner’s report indicates that the hunger strike he held in the days leading up to the flight aggravated the heart condition, which is virtually impossible to detect when a person is alive.
Forced repatriation flights were cancelled while an investigation into his death took place, but they were gradually resumed starting in May and the first such flight to Africa will take place in July, the Migration Office has told ATS news service.
Background, GenevaLunch and feature on debate over Migration Office policy
Swisscom sold 79,000 of the Apple iPhone 3GS model between its 19 June launch and the end of September 2009, according to industry media reports
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Swisscom, Switzerland’s dominant telecommunications company, posted revenues of CHF8.92 billion Wednesday 11 November, a figure 1.8 percent below that for the same period a year earlier. Net income rose, however, by 16.6 percent to CHF1.31b, “on a par with the previous year”, says the company. The results were published just days after the company was fined CHF219 million, accused by Switzerland’s competition watchdog of earlier (2007) having a broadband pricing policy that hampered competition. The company, which once had a monopoly of the Swiss industry, has denied the charges. In today’s press release on the company’s results for the first nine months of the year it says that the weak Swiss market was responsible for the lower revenues.
Links to other sites: Swisscom, Trading Markets
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Edipresse, whose Swiss operations are scheduled to be sold to Tamedia in Zurich in 2010 if the deal is approved by the federal government, has posted a loss of CHF8.9 million for the first half of 2009, citing the continuing overall weak economy and lower advertising revenue. The company notes that the fall in turnover, CHF36 million, was not as great in percentage terms as the decline in profits, showing the positive impact of cost-cutting measures. The figures are in any event difficult to compare to previous financial results because the company has adopted new accounting methods as part of the spinoff, and the Swiss business is now handled separately as “discontinued business.”
The Swiss arm of Edipresse had January-June 2009 revenues of CHF173.6 million, down CHF 38m (-18%) compared to the same period in 2008, “mainly due to the fall in advertising receipts.” The profit on these operations nevertheless remained positive, before depreciation, at CHF22.5 million, a fall of CHF-13.7m.
Photo ©2009 PHOTOPRESS/Gaetan Bally)
Update 15 August 08:10 Bienne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Swatch group, the world’s largest maker of watches, posted profits of CHF301 million for the first half of 2009, 28 percent down compared to the same period last year, which was a record year. By late Friday 14 August when the market closed in Zurich the company’s shares had risen 13 percent, the most in 10 months according to Bloomberg, which says the company led a surge in luxury goods share prices.
The watchmaker’s results confirm that the Swiss watch industry is suffering the effects of the global downturn, but the company says it sees signs of recovery and that sales in the second half of the year are expected to beat last year’s sales for the same period.
(correction: price of gold) Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The Swiss National Bank has posted a positive half-year result of CHF5 billion before provisions, compared to a loss of CHF3.4b a year earlier. The SNB ended 2008 with a loss of CHF4.3b. The central bank’s legal obligations require it to set aside provisions that allow it to maintain currency reserves at a level necessary for monetary policy. For the first six months, CHF701.8 million will be allocated to provisions. The stabilization fund set up to bail out bank UBS had no impact on the results, the SNB points out.
Rupert Murdoch, head of News Corp, one of the UK’s main media businesses, says that with advertising revenues nosediving the company will begin to charge readers for online news and other services starting in the summer of 2010. The news was woven into the Times’s own story on the company’s financial results: News Corp posted a £2 billion loss for the year ended 30 June, in part the result of the recession but with writedowns for acquisitions that included Dow Jones (which owns the Wall Street Journal) and Fox Interactive Media. The Guardian and the Financial Times made the web-news-for-fee the headline. A flurry of comments in the Guardian disputed Murdoch’s comment, picked up by the Guardian, that “quality news” costs money and readers must pay for it. BBC
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – UBS is reporting in a webcast 6 May that its loss for the first quarter of 2009 is CHF2 billion.
Net outflows of new money for its Global Asset Management business have slowed, the bank reports, to CHF7.7 billion.
The loss is attributed mainly to risk business that the bank has left or is in the process of leaving. UBS live webcast, 09:00
Related, Le Temps (Fre)
Romanel-sur-Morges, Switzerland (TSR, Fre) – Computer peripherals manufacturer Logitech, long proud of double-digit quarterly increases in profits, posted one of its worst results in years Thursday 23 April, showing a fourth quarter fiscal year 2009 loss of $35 million. A year earlier the company’s net income was $60.3. The company’s fiscal year ends 31 March. Poor sales, down 32 percent for the year, were blamed.
Dupont, the third largest chemical company in the US, announced 21 April that net income fell 59 percent, from April 2008, to $489 million. The company will cut 2,500 jobs worldwide as part of belt-tightening measures. Sales plummeted as client industries, notably the automotive industry, weakened, but the company says Q2 sales should be stronger, as client stocks run down. Profits remained in line with analysts expectations in the first quarter. Dupont lowered profit forecasts for 2009 to $1.70-2.10 a share, from an earlier projected $2.00-2.50. Bloomberg
