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SEOUL Oct 09 (AFP): Domestic woes are mounting for Samsung, South Korea's biggest and most profitable business group, recognised as a major global player and market leader in memory chips.
Last month, while Japanese rival Sony was announcing restructuring plans including 10,000 job cuts, Samsung Electronics paraded a 33- billion-dollar expansion plan creating 14,000 new jobs.
The company that emerged from the 1997 Asian financial crisis stronger than ever, toppling the Hyundai group as South Korea's top corporate performer, should have been basking in glory and applause.
Instead, the announcement only succeeded in temporarily deflecting public attention away from a tangle of troubles that have been brewing around the company for months.
A major difficulty for the corporate giant that accounted for nearly 20 per cent of all South Korean exports last year has been its battle against a government-backed drive to limit the power of top conglomerates.
South Korea maintains strict regulations to curb the growth of the conglomerates which control nearly 40 per cent of the economy and whose reckless expansion was blamed for triggering the 1997 crisis here.
But Samsung has led a corporate revolt. Backed by other conglomerates, it complains those regulations make local firms more vulnerable to hostile takeover bids by foreign investors.
Foreign investors hold a stake average of 46.8 per cent in South Korea's top 10 conglomerates, while the foreign stake in Samsung stands at 54 per cent of its total market capitalization.
Critics dismissed Samsung's argument as unwarranted and suggested the group could fend off any hostile takeover bids by enhancing transparency.
Russian space agency says contact with European satellite lost after launch
MOSCOW (Xinhua): The Russian Federal Space Agency said Saturday it had lost contact with a European satellite two hours after it was launched on a Russian rocket.
Contact with the CryoSat satellite was lost two hours after it blasted off from the Plesetsk space center, it said.
A command of the Russian Space Forces said the satellite and the rocket had fallen into the sea near the Arctic, the Itar-Tass news agency reported.
Schroeder, Merkel to hold showdown talks on German leadership
BERLIN (AP): Three weeks after parliamentary elections, opposition conservatives led by Angela Merkel and Chancellor Gerhard's Schroeder's Social Democrats are moving toward the formation of a so-called "grand coalition" of the country's main parties of the right and left.
But the parties remain at loggerheads over whether Schroeder should extend his seven years at the head of the government, or whether Merkel should become Germany's first female chancellor.
Merkel's Christian Democratic Union and Stoiber's Christian Social Union have 226 seats in the 614-seat lower house of parliament, four seats ahead of the Social Democrats. A coalition needs 308 seats for a majority.
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