Forbes Media's websites will now be majority owned by a Chinese company

breitbart

By Warner Todd Huston 

Back in 2007 Forbes magazine purchased 51 percent of the then-wildly growing website RealClearPolitics.com. Now, in 2014, a Chinese company has purchased a majority position in Forbes itself.

A highly visited site, RealClearPolitics.com was created in Chicago in the year 2000 by John McIntyre and Tom Bevan and grew at an amazing rate, becoming one of the most trafficked political sites on the web. By 2007 Forbes Media took notice and purchased a 51 percent share in the site.

Upon the purchase, Forbes Media decided to let McIntyre and Bevan continue to run the site as they had always done before.

For the last year or so, Forbes itself has been up for sale, and after eight months on the block, this sale was anything but a sure bet as one company after another bowed out of the running. At last the media company found an investor in China.

This week Forbes Media confirmed that it has sold a controlling interest in the company to Hong Kong-based Integrated Asset Management, founded by Tak Cheung Yam. The price tag reportedly tops $300 million.

The Forbes family will hold a minority stake in the 97-year-old company that bears their name.

"This is a major milestone for the company and our family, and we're pleased to partner with a forward-looking investor group to further drive the evolution and growth of this exceptional company," current company chief Steve Forbes told the media Friday.

As of now, Steve Forbes, the company's chairman and editor, and chief executive Steve Perlis will remain with the company.

In a statement, new majority owner Mr. Yam said, "Given the tremendous growth of digital in the past decade, Forbes Media's future plans include additional Internet and social media expansion projects."

With over 27.7 million unique visitors, Forbes Media's websites will now be majority owned by the Chinese company.

However, Steve Forbes went to pains to insist that the magazine and the company's various websites will retain editorial control here in America.

"To mess with that would undermine the investment," he said.

Signs that this was a last-ditch effort to save the company were everywhere. The Forbes family has undergone a long campaign of selling off assets in hopes of keeping the nearly 100-year-old company afloat. The family sold out many of its real estate holdings, closed its longtime Greenwich Village headquarters, and even sold off its impressive collection of Fabergé eggs.

Perlis, though, assured employees that there would be no layoffs.

"This is an investment move," the chief executive said. "The reason it took as long as it did to do the deal was that we were looking for a particular kind of buyer who would understand the tradition of the Forbes brand and an investor [who] would back the family’s and current management’s plan to grow the company."

Cuba: Fortuna de Fidel Castro supera la de algunas realezas

El Observador

By Laguna Larga 

El presidente cubano, Fidel Castro, es el séptimo mandatario más adinerado del mundo, según lo reporta el más reciente ‘ranking’ realizado por la revista Forbes, que busca destacar a los 10 gobernantes más ricos del planeta. Con una fortuna evaluada en U$ 900 millones, éste se ubica por encima las Reinas, Isabel de Inglaterra y Beatriz de Holanda.

Sin embargo, no supera a la riqueza del Rey de Arabia Saudita, Abdullah Bin Abdelaziz, quien se ubica en el primer lugar de la tabla con U$ 21 mil millones, seguido por el Sultán de Brunei, Hassanal Bolkiah, con U$ 20 mil millones;  la del Presidente de Emiratos Árabes Unidos, Jalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan con U$ 19 mil millones; el Emir de Dubai, Mohamad bin Rachid con U$ 14 mil millones, la del Príncipe de Liechtenstein,  Hans-Adam, con U$ 4 mil millones, ni la del  Príncipe de Mónaco, Alberto II con mil millones de dólares.

A pesar de eso, lo asombroso del estudio es que Castro reune más dinero que el Presidente africano de Guinea Ecuatorial, Teodoro Obiang, quien alcanza los U$ 600 millones; la Reina Isabel II de Inglaterra, con U$ 500 millones y finalmente la Reina Beatriz de Holanda, con U$ 270 millones.

¿Cómo se explica la riqueza de Castro?

Para los creadores del ‘ranking’, la fortuna de Fidel Castro ha crecido enormemente en los últimos años, dado que en 2003  tan sólo se le calculaba una riqueza de U$ 110 millones. Dos años después, llegó a tener U$ 550 millones (una suma cinco veces superior).

Según Forbes, desde el año pasado, el patrimonio del presidente cubano casi se duplicó hasta llegar a los 900 millones de dólares. “Suponemos que él tiene el control económico sobre una red de compañías estatales que incluye el Palacio de Convenciones,  Cimex, tiendas al por menor y Medicuba, que vende vacunas y otros productos farmacéuticos producidos en Cuba”; pues según expertos, esta sería la única forma en la que el mandatario reuna dicha cifra.

La inclusión del nombre de Castro en la lista del año pasado tuvo una dura respuesta por parte del Gobierno cubano, al afirmar que tomaría acciones legales contra lo que consideraba una “infamia”.

The World’s Most Powerful People 2013 - Forbes

• Reuters/REUTERS - Russia's President Vladimir Putin attends the Leaders Retreat during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit in Nusa Dua on the Indonesian resort island of Bali, October 7, 2013. …more 

Who’s more powerful: the omnipotent head of a corroding but still feisty superpower or the handcuffed head of the most dominant country in the world? This year, our votes for the World’s Most Powerful People — an annual look at the heads of state, financiers, philanthropists and entrepreneurs who truly rule the world — went with the former.

President Vladimir Putin has solidified his control over Russia (“dictator” is no longer an outlandish word to ponder) while U.S. President Barack Obama’s lame duck period has seemingly set in earlier than usual for a two-term president — latest example: the government shutdown mess. Anyone watching this year’s chess match over Syria has a clear idea of the shifting individual power dynamic.

[More from Forbes: The Youngest Power People]

The Most Powerul People in the World list represents the collective wisdom of top FORBES editors, who consider hundreds of nominees before ranking the planet’s top 72 power-brokers – one for every 100 million people on Earth — based on their scope of influence and their financial resources relative to their peers.

Keep reading on Forbes >>

Havana, Cuba and the Dead Hand of the Municipal Planner - Forbes

Forbes

Eric Goldman

As I walked deeper into Havana’s Vedado district, well off the tourist track, I could feel my anxiety rising.  It was the same angst prompted by the human curation of every detail at Disneyland, where nothing feels natural or organic.  I encountered a government-run sandwich shop at a corner, followed by a government-run pizzeria at the next corner, then a crumbling concrete bus stop with vague 1960s styling at the next corner; followed by a sandwich shop, then a pizzeria, then a concrete bus stop, repeating with little variation for block after block.  It was like I was walking through a 3D model of the template a government municipal planner conceived decades ago.

We sometimes refer to the “dead hand of the architect,” the concept that the architect’s choices—often driven by social conventions prevailing at the time of construction—constrain future building occupants decades later.  For example, office buildings from the 1930s or earlier rarely provided many womens’ restrooms because there weren’t many women in the workforce; as it turns out, a architectural constraint as workplace demographics changed.  The dead hand of the architect reflects the fact that capital investments are costly, and those costs are amortized over the project’s useful life.  It can be too expensive to fix architectural design choices through renovation, so the assumptions and social norms animating the architect’s design persist until the building is replaced.

The dead hand of the architect rules over Cuba; or more precisely, it’s the dead hand of municipal planners.  Decades ago, someone decided upon the designs of concrete bus stop and the location of government-run restaurants, and those choices live on today–even as social conventions have evolved around it.  In a sense, the fixed infrastructure and cultural evolution work against each other; society is changing but the infrastructure isn’t, and something has to give.

 

Eventually governments must renovate and replace the infrastructure they provide.  However, the Cuba government lacks the money to do so.  Financially strapped by the other services it provides to its citizens, the Cuban government won’t replace or redesign its infrastructure until it becomes absolutely necessary (and maybe not even then).  You often hear Cuba described as a “time capsule.” In part that means the infrastructure is frozen because the government can’t afford replacing it to reflect modern cultural norms.

Time has largely stood still in Cuba since the 1960s, but change is in the air.  When Cuba no longer has a Castro in power, the US government surely will further loosen restrictions on American tourism to Cuba.  (Already, due to recent liberalizations of the rules, almost every tourist I saw in Cuba was American).  More American tourists will mean more American dollars, higher expectations for service levels, and (presumably) infrastructure upgrades to more modern specifications.  If you wanted to see and experience a “socialist” Cuba, your window of opportunity is closing rapidly.  Go now, before the inevitable Cancun-ification of Cuba.

[Note: this is the first of a three-part series on the Cuban economy from my visit to Cuba in March 2013.]

Forbes' billionaires list gets bigger, and richer too

nbcnews

Forbes

With an estimated $73 billion fortune, Carlos Slim Helu tops Forbes' list of the world's richest billionaires for the fourth year in a row.

This year Forbes has uncovered a record 1,426 billionaires. That is 200 more than we found in 2012, another record breaking year. It’s also nearly 10 times as many as Forbes pinned down in 1987, the year we began tracking fortunes around the world.

The group is worth $5.4 trillion, an astounding 17 percent jump from a year ago. The average net worth of a Forbes billionaire is $3.8 billion, $100 million more than a year ago. More than two-thirds of the world’s richest added to their fortunes. Only 259 from last year’s list are poorer than a year ago. Sixty dropped out of the ranks, including Zynga’s Mark Pincus and former Chesapeake Energy CEO Aubrey McClendon. Another eight passed away.

Mexico’s Carlos Slim is the richest person in the world for the fourth year in a row, followed by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. At number three for the first time is Spaniard Amancio Ortega, founder of fast fashion phenom Zara. He is worth $57 billion, up $19.5 billion, making him the year’s biggest gainer. Legendary investor Warren Buffett slips to number 4, the first time since 2000 that he hasn’t been among the top 3. L’Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt moves back into the top 10 for the first time since 1999 and reclaims the title of world’s richest woman.

Among the notable newcomers were founders of some of the world’s hottest brands – such as Dolce & Gabbana, Tory Burch and Chobani yogurt, as well as the first ever billionaires from Angola, Guernsey, Nepal, Swaziland and Vietnam.

No. 1: Carlos Slim Helu & familyNet Worth: $73 billion
Source: telecom
Citizenship: Mexico

• World's richest man for the fourth year in a row.
• Net worth up $4 billion versus 2012 but still $1 billion shy of his all-time record; boost came from surging stock prices at his financial arm, Grupo Financiero Inbursa, and at his Grupo Carso industrial and retail giant.
• Pan-Latin American mobile telecom outfit America Movil remains his most valuable holding at $36.3 billion; the company spread its wings to Europe in the past year, buying pieces of Dutch telecom company KPN and Telekom Austria
• Bought a majority of struggling Spanish soccer team Real Oviedo.
• Latin America’s most generous person, his foundation pledged to translate into Spanish 1,000 videos from the Khan Academy education nonprofit website. Slim also hosted Bill Gates in late February; the two men announced they are funding research to improve farmers' yields and reduce hunger.

No. 2: Bill GatesNet worth: $67 billion
Source: Microsoft
Citizenship: U.S.A

• World's biggest philanthropist has given away $28 billion, the vast majority of it to his foundation, which is working to eradicate such diseases as polio and malaria.
• Net worth is up by $6 billion vs. March 2012 due to gains in his investment portfolio. Holdings include tech hygiene firm Ecolab and Mexican Coke bottler FEMSA, both up more than 20% in the past year.
• Microsoft stock --he owns about 5% of the company -- accounts for just 18% of his net worth.
• In February the first 12 non-Americans joined Bill Gates’ and Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge, in which the ultra-wealthy pledge to give away at least half their net worth to charity. New pledgers include Richard Branson of the U.K. and India’s Azim Premji.
• Gates recently said the only thing left on his bucket list was, "Don't die."

No. 3: Amancio OrtegaNet worth: $57 billion
Source: Zara
Citizenship: Spain

• Year’s biggest gainer: fortune up $19.5 billion
• Moves to number 3, up from number 5 richest last year. Now ahead of Warren Buffett.
• Driving the jump is a more than 50% rise in value of Inditex shares; Ortega, who stepped down as the firm’s chairman in 2011, still owns nearly 60% of the shares.
• He also has real estate portfolio, estimated to be worth more than $4 billion, that includes iconic Torre Picasso, a 43-story skyscraper in Madrid (Google is a tenant), plus properties in Madrid, London, Chicago, San Francisco and New York.

No. 4: Warren BuffettNet worth: $53.5 billion
Source: Berkshire Hathaway
Citzenship: U.S.A.

• Year’s second biggest gainer added $9.5 billion to his fortune as Berkshire Hathaway shares rose 26% year over year
• First time he’s not among top three richest since 2000.
• Investors applaud his dealmaking savvy, and this year was no exception as he made a couple of notable moves: in February, announced a deal with Brazilian billionaire Jorge Paulo Lemann's 3G Capital to snap up iconic ketchup producer H.J. Heinz Co. for $23.2 billion; bought Oriental Trading in November 2012.
• World’s second most generous person, he gave $1.5 billion to the Gates Foundation in July 2012, bringing his lifetime giving to nearly $17.3 billion. On his birthday in August 2012 Buffett pledged $3 billion of stock to his children's foundations.

No. 5: Larry EllisonNet worth: $43 billion
Source: Oracle
Citizenship: U.S.A.

• Software mogul is $7 billion richer than a year ago, thanks to more than 20% jump in the value of Oracle stock.
• In June he bought 98% of Hawaiian island of Lanai from billionaire David Murdock for a reported $500 million.
• Just recently bought Island Air, a Hawaiian airline. Purchase price was not disclosed.
• Continues to buy property in Malibu.
• Gearing up for the America’s Cup yacht races in San Francisco later in 2013.
• Supports the Ellison Medical Foundation, which does research on aging and age-related diseases. Gave $45 million worth of Oracle shares to the foundation in April 2012.

No. 6: Charles Koch/ No. 6: David Koch (tie)Net worth: $34 billion
Source: diversified
Citizenship: U.S.A.

• World’s richest siblings added $9 billion apiece to their fortunes over the past year.
• They own a combined 84% of Koch Industries, country’s second largest private company with $115 billion in estimated sales, up 15% in the past year
• Also got boost from improving operations at Georgia Pacific, maker of Angel Soft and Quilted Northern toilet paper, Brawny paper towels, and Dixie cups. Sold more than $1 billion worth of toilet paper in 2011.
• David, who runs the chemical technology side of Koch Industries, is the richest New Yorker.
• Things didn’t go so well on the political front as brothers failed in their quest to unseat Barack Obama from the White House ("Bitterly disappointing," he told Forbes in an interview after the election).

No. 8: Li Ka-shingNet worth: $31 billion
Source: diversified
Citizenship: Hong Kong

• Once again Asia’s richest person and the only one from the region among the world’s top 20 richest.
• His fortune jumped $5.5 billion to $31 billion, as shares of his biggest holdings, Cheung Kong, Hutchison Whampoa and Husky Energy, all rose more than 10%. He also received 2012 dividends of $860 million.
• Li's businesses employ 260,000 ­people around the world in 52 countries.
• Li-controlled companies bought British gas supplier Wales & West Utilities for $1 billion in October; his third utilities acquisition in the U.K. in 24 months. He now supplies gas to a quarter of all Brits.
• Investor in such tech outfits as Facebook, spotify, and social TV platform Stevie.

No. 9: Liliane Bettencourt
Net worth: $30 billion
Source: L’Oreal
Citizenship: France

• Heiress to L’Oreal cosmetics fortune jumps to 9th richest in 2013 from 15th richest last year, thanks to a more than 30% rise in the price of L’Oreal stock. Her net worth is $6 billion higher than a year ago.
• Now the world’s richest woman. She last cracked the top 10 in 1999.
• Her father founded L’Oreal. Bettencourt and her family own more than 30% of the company.
• Bettencourt’s assets were placed under the guardianship of her daughter in 2011 after a three-year legal battle. Bettencourt, widowed and age 90, suffers from dementia. Her grandson, Jean-Victor Meyers, took her spot on the L’Oreal board in February 2012.

No. 10: Bernard Arnault
Net worth: $29 billion
Source: LVMH
Citizenship: France

• Falls from no. 4 in world to no. 10 due to more information about his ownership stake.
• Also a factor: Forbes now values his direct stake in Christian Dior, which in turn has a 41% stake in LVMH and trades at a near 20% discount to the underlying shares; previously we had valued the shares in LVMH.
• LVMH shares rose more than 6%; U.S. sales grew at a faster rate than sales in Asia region in the fourth quarter
• Arnault denied reports that his request for Belgian citizenship last year was related to the country’s tax policies.
• It was announced in October that he will be knighted for his services in the U.K.

More stories from Forbes

• See more of The World's Billionaires
• Billionaire Newcomers
• The World's Youngest Billionaires
• The World's Richest Women
• Billionaire Dropoffs

Forbes: Is Cuba The Next Emerging Market?

forbes

By Alexa van Sickle

On Dec. 11, Cuba authorized the formation of non-agricultural cooperatives. The latest in a series of small liberalizations, this measure could lead to the formation of small and mid-sized businesses in Cuba, and transform sectors of the country’s economy.

Small changes allowing some private enterprise in Cuba are coinciding with the U.S.’s own policy shifts: As a result, the economic embargo, which prevents most business and travel in Cuba for U.S. firms and citizens, is becoming more porous. In 2009 President Obama relaxed travel restrictions and remittances for Cuban-Americans, enabling them to invest in small private businesses. U.S. citizens can now legally travel to Cuba. But is it time to look at Cuba as a viable emerging market?

U.S. public opinion is shifting in favor of normalizing ties, and the American business lobby in particular wants to take advantage of the untapped market, which it believes is worth $1 billion a year.

Agricultural Products

The U.S. is, despite the embargo, the largest exporter of food and agricultural products to Cuba, providing around 30% of Cuba’s food imports. Under the 2000 Trade Sanctions Reform and Export Enhancement Act, hundreds of U.S. businesspeople travel to Cuba every year to sell agricultural goods. The catch is that Cuba must pay cash up front on these transactions.

Regardless, Cuba has bought over $3.5 billion in agricultural products from the United States since trade began in 2001. Modest sales of $138 million that year climbed steadily to a peak of $710 million in 2008, according to statistics from the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council.

U.S. agricultural exports to Cuba have declined in recent years, as Cuba’s economic troubles have caused it to look elsewhere for cheaper and less complex terms — for example from Vietnam and Venezuela. The U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council noted that agricultural exports declined 6% in 2011, following a 31% decline in 2010.

Peter Orsi, reporting for the Associated Press from an agricultural fair in Havana in November 2012, observed that “some purchases of U.S. goods have held steady, like soybean and poultry, [but] others have tanked, including branded processed food and grains.” But he added that U.S. firms at the fair – which included Kellogg’s, Gatorade, Hormel, and Hunt — were optimistic, and “jockeying to be in position” when the embargo is lifted.

Chilly Business Climate

Cuba has potential opportunities for growth in a number of sectors, including tourism, high-value agriculture and even natural resources, but conducting business there is still challenging, noted Richard E. Feinberg in a Brookings Institution report titled ‘The New Cuban Economy: What Role Foreign Investment?”

“In principle, Cuba’s foreign investment laws offer favorable conditions and … some JVs [joint ventures] are successfully navigating the Cuban economic system. But the government has been keeping many suitors waiting for the final green light.”

He said foreign investors encounter an “elastic legal framework” and a “chilly business climate,” but explains that there are some benefits in Cuba’s socialist economy for foreign companies: “Once admitted, JVs are often granted monopolies, or dominant market shares, in key market segments … The Cuban state restricts market entry by other foreign competitors or by national enterprises.”

In the growing tourism sector, many European and Canadian companies are going ahead with large hotel and golf developments — despite some high-profile cases in which foreign executives have ended up in jail — because they believe getting in from the ground up will pay off hugely when the country opens up for U.S. tourists.

A Matter of Time?

How likely is it that the embargo will soon be lifted? On the U.S. side, the embargo won’t shift without congressional approval, and there is still significant opposition to engaging with the island. It would take a bigger change within Cuba, which might not happen next week or even next year. But Cuba’s increasing emphasis on foreign investment is an opportunity for sustainable growth and change. There has also been a significant, but less remarked-upon, development: In 2011 it became legal, for the first time in 50 years, for Cubans to buy and sell property. This could very well lead to major societal shifts and, eventually, political ones, which could help thaw U.S.-Cuba relations.

Feinberg concludes that until the embargo is lifted, the U.S. should “build on the recent liberalization regarding remittances and travel to further facilitate assistance to the emerging private sector in Cuba.”

It may be too soon to jump in, but certainly not too soon for American companies to start thinking about the future and investigating opportunities in Cuba. Businesses should monitor U.S.-Cuba relations and the developments for private enterprise in Cuba. The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control publishes alerts when Cuban policy is amended, and the office also recently loosened business travel restrictions.

“Cuba is becoming a more and more important market for U.S. companies … Everybody wants to have some kind of presence,” Hector Rainey, managing director of Atlanta’s Intervision Foods, told Orsi at the Havana agricultural fair. “If something changes all of a sudden, they have an angle here.”

China's economy is a Ponzi scheme

By  Gady Epstein 

China's economy is the envy of the world. As developed nations struggle to eke out a bit of growth and to get unemployment rates out of double digits, Chinese output gallops ahead at an 8% annual rate. This $4.7 trillion economy, it seems, is the world's dynamo and the prototype for the future.

Take a close look, however, and you may come away thinking China resembles nothing so much as Japan shortly before its stock and property markets melted down two decades ago. A speculative frenzy of borrowing and bidding up is at work. If and when prices crash, there will be hell to pay.

Signs of the times: government bureaucracies funding themselves by foisting debt on state-owned business enterprises; local governments raising capital by selling land at sky-high prices to corporations they own; and a People's Bank of China lavishing liquidity on the entire system in a way that makes Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke look downright stingy.
"It's a Ponzi scheme whose head is the central bank, and it can print money," says Victor Shih, a China expert at Northwestern University.

FULL STORY...

A Day In The Life Of Yuri Milner, Web Billionaire

DST Global founder Yuri Milner; photo by Paul Eng

Parmy Olson

You wouldn’t think Yuri Milner was in a hurry. When I first interviewed him in London last January with Forbes’ San Francisco bureau chief Eric Savitz, it was clear that the Internet investor we’ve just ranked a billionaire liked to take his time in conversation. Biting into a crustless tuna sandwich, the former physicist would methodically chew it before answering a question about the way social networks were connecting the world. “When you have a few billion people connected with screens, not voice… screens are important,” he said in a Russian accent tinged with an American lilt. Chew, chew, chew. Zen-like pause. “You can transmit a thousand times more information.”

More Here >>

China y Rusia, la ‘casa’ de los ricos

Moscú es ahora la ciudad que cuenta con el mayor número de multimillonarios, 79, seguida por Nueva York con 58, dijo Forbes en su lista anual de la gente más rica del mundo.

China y Rusia, la 'casa' de los nuevos ricos