World important news by Vannessa

* Shares decline 1.8 pct in after-hours tradingOct 18 (Reuters) - CSX Corp reported a higher quarterly profit in line with forecasts, and said volume was driven up by metals for auto- and energy sector products as well as forest products.The company’s shares, which rose nearly 5 percent on Tuesday, declined 1.8 percent after the results.Total coal shipments were flat from the same quarter last year. While utility coal fell on flat electrical generation in the eastern United States, lower natural gas prices and coal stockpiles were slightly above target levels, and demand for coal for export increased, CSX said.Intermodal volume was flat in the quarter, after rising 15 percent in the same quarter last year, as weakness in the international market offset domestic shipment growth.Intermodal refers to the shipment of goods in containers that can be moved from one form of transport to another, such as from train to truck or train to ship.Domestic shipments rose as higher fuel prices drew traffic to the rails from the highways, the company said. Intermodal “international volume declined due to difficult comparisons from an early peak shipping season in 2010, versus a later, more moderate peak shipping season this year.”CSX said higher fuel surcharges bolstered revenue and offset higher costs in the quarter.”Even as the economy moderated, CSX delivered strong financial results while investing in additional resources to strengthen customer service,” Chief Executive Officer Michael J. Ward said in a statement.CSX shares, which closed 4.7 percent higher at $21.34 on the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday, declined 1.8 percent to $20.95 in after-hours trading.The shares at the close were about 1 percent higher so far this year, outperforming the 8 percent drop in the Dow Jones Transportation average.The second-largest publicly held U.S. railroad operator on Tuesday reported third-quarter net profit of $464 million, or 43 cents per share, up from $414 million, or 36 cents per share, a year ago.Revenue rose 11 percent to $2.96 billion, in line with estimates.Analysts on average expected CSX to report profit of 43 cents on revenue of $2.95 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.The Jacksonville, Florida-based CSX, which operates a 21,000-mile network across 23 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, is the first of the major publicly held railroad operators to report quarterly results.The company will hold a conference call on Wednesday before the stock market opens.

Following is immediate reaction from investors and analysts.APPLEHENDI SUSANTO, ANALYST, GABELLI & CO”The biggest spotlight is the growth in Asia Pacific and Japan, which grew impressively considering Japan is still recovering from the earthquake.”“Another major spotlight is the shipment of Mac computers, which was significantly above my estimate. Despite the strength of iPad, Apple is not seeing a slowdown in Mac computer sales.”“The light shipment of iPhone is understandable considering many consumers were waiting for the iPhone 4S. The decline in iPod sales is also understandable. The iPad is still going strong and is still above my estimates. If you look at the outlook, it is very bullish and above my consensus. Apple is known to lowball its guidance and that may no longer be the norm here.”“What many have not realized is that Apple will start seeling an unlocked version of the 4S in November and that can address the prepaid market, customers outside the official carriers and further penetration in international market. It was announced when iPhone 4S sales began and there could be upside.”MICHAEL WALKER, PORTFOLIO MANAGER, WP STEWART”There’s no question this was a transition quarter ahead of the 4S (the latest iPhone). But the iPad number was a little interesting because there wasn’t a transition there.”“I wouldn’t be surprised to see people buying shares because of the holiday season. With the early pace of iPhone 4S sales, my guess is that disappointment is relatively short-lived.”“I’m not going to call Q3 a throwaway quarter for iPhones but it was definitely transition. The Mac sales were strong.”SHAW WU, ANALYST, STERNE AGEE”The numbers are actually quite good. The reason why the stock is off I think some of the analysts got carried away. We have seen this before. A couple of quarters ago analysts got carried away on the iPad side. They forgot there is a product transition.”“What is interesting is the guidance is less conservative than usual for their next quarter. It’s a timing issue where it looks like the business that people thought would be in the September quarter is occurring in the December quarter. One of the things obviously is the iPhone 4S just started shipping a few days ago.”COLIN GILLIS, ANALYST, BGC PARTNERS”Expectations for this company were red-hot, that is why we downgraded it. Fifty-six brokers out there and everyone is saying ‘buy’.”“The reality is their business is not an annuity. They have to sell their quarter’s worth of revenue every 90 days. They had a big upgrade cycle with the iPhone, the numbers came in weak. They need to set records every time they report to keep the momentum.”STEPHEN MASSOCCA, FUND MANAGER, WEDBUSH MORGAN”Apple has done something very unusual. They missed estimates and they are guiding above estimates for the next quarter. This is not what they typically do. They usually exceed estimates and give out easy guidance. We will have to wait and see more on this but the Nasdaq is likely to be impacted by this tomorrow.”INTELPATRICK WANG, ANALYST, EVERCORE PARTNERS”A couple of things they said that were fairly constructive: they delivered a pretty clean beat and raise. They really told us that things weren’t as bad as were feared in the third quarter. Fourth quarter guidance is well above consensus estimates, but below seasonality, which makes sense.”“They are giving us a realistic look at the fourth quarter and it seems like they are guiding conservatively, between 2 and 3 percent growth. Growth is historically up about 8 percent.”“Bottom line they delivered a beat and raise. They also authorized another $10 billion in stock buyback. This is in conjunction with the 4 percent dividend yield. Intel has one of the strongest balance sheets in technology and you’ve got investors happy.”BETSY VAN HEES, ANALYST, WEDBUSH SECURITIES”We were looking for a beat, but it was above our expectations, and guidance clearly outpaced what we and the Street were looking for. Intel’s definitely benefiting from the ramp of new products.”“We remain cautious. While it’s exceptional what Intel has been able to put up, we’ve seen 17 semiconductor companies negatively pre-announce. While Intel’s results are fantastic, when you’ve got 17 other companies that have already struggled it’s hard to be constructive, given the uncertain macro.”KEVIN CASSIDY, ANALYST, STIFEL NICOLAUS”It’s just like what the company has been saying, double digit PC unit growth.”“We have all these datacenters out there being built, the companies aren’t buying traditional servers from Dell or HP, but they are buying the chips and making their own servers.”“Intel is showing record sales. Their outlook is better than consensus, in this market that is very good.”“The gross margin estimate was better than what we were expecting.”YAHOOBEN SCHACHTER, MACQUARIE RESEARCH”It looks OK, nothing spectacular but nothing disastrous, and nothing disastrous is good news for these guys.”“They’re keeping their heads down, and just trying to execute. As long as these guys didn’t have completely terrible guidance, and they didn’t, they should be OK.”COLIN GILLIS, ANALYST, BGC PARTNERS”The earnings beat is nice, but this is a revenue story, and revenue was still declining.”“What I really want to see is that they can stop the declining revenue. If we got a little revenue beat, that would be really nice. You can always squeeze more out of earnings.HERMAN LEUNG, ANALYST, SUSQUEHANNA FINANCIAL GROUP”The display stuff was a little bit weaker than expected, but search was a little bit better. Overall it was a cost savings story. Costs at the bottom line were a little better.”“The guidance was a little worse on the top and bottom line. That’s largely expected given the abrupt firing of (former CEO) Carol Bartz.”“What’s going to predicate the stock movement going forward is going to be the commentary on the call, whether it’s under strategic review or Yahoo Japan. About 90 percent of the focus for investors on the call will be that kind of thing.”

Police repeatedly fired teargas and water cannons in attempts to disperse them but the clashes with hard-core demonstrators continued hours after tens of thousands of people in Rome joined a global “day of rage” against bankers and politicians.Discontent is running high in Italy over high unemployment, political paralysis and 60 billion euros ($83 billion) of austerity measures that have raised taxes and the cost of health care.The violence at times resembled urban guerrilla warfare as protesters hurled rocks, bottles and fireworks at police, who responded by repeatedly charging the demonstrators.At least two demonstrators were injured and one was reported to be in critical condition. At least 30 policemen were injured.At one point demonstrators surrounded a police van, pelted it with rock and bottles, and set it on fire. The two occupants managed to escape, television footage showed.Rome mayor Gianni Alemanno ordered all public museums in the capital closed for security reasons as the violent demonstrators continued to run amok hours after the protest began.The demonstration began peacefully but suddenly turned violent when hundreds of hooded radicals known as “black blocs,” who had infiltrated the group, set cars and garbage bins on fire.They then went on a rampage on several streets around the Colosseum, trashing windows of stores and banks.One building, believed to be an annex of the Defense Ministry, caught fire after the flames spread from a car.The protesters had earlier forced their way into the annex and trashed the offices.The protest was one of many staged around the world on Saturday to show solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States, venting anger over years of economic and financial crisis since a global credit boom went bust in 2007.Italy’s fractious coalition government has been forced to push through austerity measures to try to stop the economy — the euro zone’s third largest and one of its heaviest debtors — from being sucked into the bloc’s debt crisis.Hours after the demonstration began police were still firing teargas canisters and training water canon on violent demonstrators in Piazza San Giovanni, the terminus of the demonstration, where a final rally was due to be held.Masked demonstrators attacked police vans with rocks, bottles and clubs in the San Giovanni area, which was full of tear gas.Some of the peaceful demonstrators tried to take refuge on the steps of St. John’s Basilica, one of the largest churches in Rome and Pope Benedict’s basilica in his capacity as bishop of Rome.The streets of central Rome were littered with rocks, bottles and garbage bins that had been overturned in the protest and fire brigades drove around the city trying to put out the fires.Peaceful demonstrators also clashed with the militants and turned some of them over to police.Politicians across the political spectrum condemned the violence.”Unacceptable violence and devastation is happening right now on the streets of Rome,” said Pierluigi Bersani, head of the Democratic Party, the largest in the opposition.”Those who are carrying out what is nothing less than urban guerrilla warfare are hurting the cause of people around the world who are trying to freely express their discontent with the world economic situation,” he said.Alemanno, noting that the demonstrators had called themselves “the indignant ones,” said: “Those who are really indignant are the citizens of Rome.”

Saunders, a CEO of a year and a half, is also focusing on at least two other targets: growth in emerging markets and boosting the company’s pharmaceutical business.”The hidden gem of our business is our pharmaceutical business … We’re very interested in adding more products,” he told Reuters on Thursday.Previously traded on the New York Stock Exchange, the Rochester, New York-based company was acquired for $4.5 billion by private equity firm Warburg Pincus in late 2007 after falling out of Wall Street’s favor because of product recalls, big charges and restatements of earnings.Saunders said the business has regained stable footing, growing across all divisions — contact lenses and lens care products, eye medicines and ophthalmic surgical devices and instruments — and all regions.”We clearly have an aspiration to come back to the public market over the next couple of years,” Saunders said, adding that no timetable has been set because of jittery markets.Saunders, who has beyond-perfect vision of 20/10, is a former consumer healthcare chief at Schering-Plough Corp who took the helm at B&L in March 2010 as the company headed into its 158th business year.At the time, he largely dodged the IPO question and told Reuters he planned to build B&L’s three main businesses through “tuck-in” acquisitions and overseas expansion.”We need to put more into our system and we’re very active on the trail of looking for opportunities to in-license, partner, acquire and grow our business,” he said on Thursday.”We evaluate virtually every opportunity out there.”Since Saunders became CEO, B&L has acquired rights and licenses to several medicines, such as anti-viral gel Zirgan and anti-inflammatory drug Yellox. It has also partnered with Germany’s Technolas Perfect Vision GmbH to sell a laser that combines capacity to perform cataract and refractive eye surgeries.Earlier this week, the company launched a new contact lens for people with astigmatism.Next year, B&L plans to release a new lens material with “unique properties not seen on the market today,” Saunders said. The eye-care company also continues research and work on an experimental anti-inflammation drug Mapracorat.In an effort to streamline the business, Saunders said over the past year and a half he took out several hundred managers to slim down in favor of more front-line jobs, whether focused on sales, science or manufacturing.”We are doing quite a bit of hiring in markets like China, India, Brazil, Russia, Eastern Europe,” he said, adding that the company tends to hire several hundred people a year, either to fill opening positions or create new jobs.”We have a much freer hiring in the developing growth markets and we’re a little bit more cautious in the developed world,” Saunders said.The company’s biggest competitors are Johnson & Johnson (JNJ.N) , Novartis AG’s (NOVN.VX) eye-care group Alcon, and Abbott Laboratories’s (ABT.N) through its acquisition of Advanced Medical Optics.”We have highly respected competitor companies, but I think our strength is our dedication, our sole focus on eye health,” Saunders said. “We wake up and go to sleep thinking about one therapeutic area.”

Following our highlights of Reuters’ interview with Dale, which was conducted at the BoE on Tuesday, Oct. 10.>Q. Is Britain in the worst economic situation since the Great Depression in the 1930s?A. “I can’t think of any obvious period in history where we’ve seen such an acute and prolonged period of financial turmoil. But I think what’s very different now to the Great Depression is what’s happening in the real economy.”“I think that in part reflects the nature of the policy response now compared to the 1930s.”“However, I do think what’s going on in financial markets is having an impact on our economy. You can see considerable stress within financial markets, we’ve seen large falls in certain risky asset prices, particularly equity prices.”“We’ve seen growing pressures around banks — in particular the health of the European banking system — and that’s affected the ability of our own banking system to fund itself.”Q. Was the decision to launch QE last week a pre-emptive one?A. “I think the policy committee was responding to the deteriorating economic outlook and I think that deterioration largely reflects factors that are happening abroad, which are outside our shores. There are three or four factors going on in the rest of the world, which are all acting together.”First, we’ve seen a slowing in growth and demand. We saw that slowing happening during the summer and thought it was likely to be largely temporary … but that slowing now looks more persistent.”“We’ve seen increased concerns about levels of sovereign debt, particularly obviously in the euro area. That’s then fuelled anxieties within financial markets, particularly with concerns about the European banking system.”And finally, there’s a reduced level of confidence that the authorities in those other countries have the ability to act quickly and decisively.”“(This) is why the economy has slowed … through the third quarter, and I expect it to carry on slowing in the fourth quarter, and it is that we have responded to when we took the policy decision last week.”Q. Did you vote for more QE yourself?A. “My decision and the decisions of all individual members of the Committee won’t be known until the minutes are out next week. I was speaking here as the chief economist of the Bank, explaining the reasons why the Committee made the decision it did.”Q. Is this round of QE likely to be as effective as the first one, pound for pound?A. “It’s hard to know with any precision exactly what impact it had last time and exactly what impact it has this time. I think there are some recent developments, some of the recent developments we’ve seen in our economy do actually add to the impact of QE, and I think I would highlight two.”“First, a key feature of what we’ve seen in recent months is a flight to safety. People have moved away from risky assets into safe assets in the context of the UK, in terms of how we’ve seen falling (government) bond yields.”What QE does is help to work in the opposite direction. It goes along and encourages institutional investors to move out of gilts, as the bank purchases those gilts and drives yields down, and encourages them to move back into riskier assets.”“The second one is the way QE to a very large extent works by going round the banking system, so we go out into the economy and we go to institutional investors, insurance companies and pension funds and … say we’re going to buy 75 billion pounds of gilts off of you and … it’s then up to those institutional investors what they do with that cash.”Q. How will you judge the success of QE?A. “The ultimate judge of the success of QE is whether we hit the inflation target. So in a couple of year’s time, whether we’ve managed to support demand and we’ve hit the inflation target. That’s what we’re doing this for. I will keep on emphasising this.”Q. The August Inflation Report pointed to inflation of just below 2 percent at the two-year horizon. Without QE, would it be significantly lower?A. “We obviously start with inflation at 4.5 percent. I think there’s a very good chance that when the inflation numbers next week are published for September, CPI inflation will be above 5 percent.”“There’s a strong onus on the Committee to explain why loosening monetary policy when inflation is so far above target is the right thing to do. And it’s because … we think a significant part of the reason why inflation is so high at the moment relates to these temporary factors that we’ve discussed many times in the past.”So I’d expect to see a very substantial fall-off in inflation at the beginning of next year as suddenly VAT effects and oil prices start to drop out, and for inflation to continue to decline through that year.”Q. Why did you not wait until their was more clarity about euro zone leaders’ response to the Greek debt crisis before starting QE?A. “The decision we made … was we felt we needed to inject 75 billion pounds into the economy in order to hit the inflation target.”Does that mean it will be the right decision for every single month, whatever happens? No. And we’ve made it very clear in our statement, each and every month we’ll review that policy decision and if we want to increase the scale of asset purchases or reduce the scale of asset purchases, that’s what we’ll do.”The fact just due to the operational logistics that you can only purchase 75 billion over four months doesn’t mean we’re on hold for four months. We’ll review our decision each and every month.”Q. Is there business demand for more credit? Are we in a liquidity trap?A. “I don’t think we’re in a liquidity trap.”“But I think you’re quite right, an important aspect of the impact on demand at the moment is people’s general levels of uncertainty and concerns about the future.”There’s a limit to what we can do on the committee about that, because many of these things are coming from the rest of the world, but I think what we showed is that we were willing to act quickly and decisively in order to support demand in our economy. And hopefully that will help to add to some extent to people’s confidence about the future.”Q. What do you think of George Osborne’s plans related to credit easing?A. “The chancellor’s suggestion that he thinks the Treasury should explore the possibility of improving the flow of credit to the SME sector does seem very welcome. The Treasury are in the lead on this work and I think it is appropriate that they are in the lead. The type of schemes that they can think about have the property of allocating credit to particular sectors of the economy. They also have the property that they take on credit risk.”Q. If confidence doesn’t pick up, is Britain at risk of a Japanese-style ‘lost decade’?A. “Clearly demand growth in this recovery has been less strong than we ideally would have liked. Some of those features can be related back to the financial crisis and the constraints we see on the banking sector. But some of them relate to other factors that are going on in our economy.”A big feature of the weakness of growth this time around isn’t something related to