Swiss net international investment position nears 2007 high

Tax privileges

Foreign companies moving head offices to Switzerland inflate figures

The Lake Geneva region is drawing a growing number of foreign companies for their head offices

Switzerland, which has one of the world’s highest net international investment positions (IIP) in relation to GDP, saw this climb back nearly to 2007 levels in 2009. Its net position rose by CHF95 billion to CHF764b in 2009. Foreign assets climbed by CHF95b to CHF 3,177b. Assets “were still considerably below the level of 2007″, says the Swiss National Bank (SNB).

The figures were released Tuesday morning 14 December by the SNB.

Net IIP is the difference between a country’s external financial assets and liabilities. IIP equals domestically owned foreign assets and foreign owned domestic assets.

“In relation to GDP, the 2009 net investment position increased from 123 percent to 143 percent year-on- year—a very high figure by international standards. At the end of 2007, this key figure was 149 percent,” the SNB notes in its press release. Hong Kong traditionally has a very high figure, above 300 percent, while the United States, for example, was -24 percent, Ireland -58 percent and Greece -75 percent in 2008.

Foreign companies account for nearly half of direct investment

Foreign assets include direct investment, portfolio investment and reserve assets. Direct investment alone rose by CHF85b, with foreign companies moving to Switzerland, included for the first time in these figures, accounting for nearly half that amount, CHF38b. Direct investment rose for two reasons, says the SNB: Swiss companies invested in subsidiaries abroad and foreign companies moved their headquarters to Switzerland.

The growing number of foreign companies moving to Switzerland, many of them from the UK, has drawn fire from British media, most notably with the planned move of Cadbury’s, for tax reasons, in 2011.

The number of employees of Swiss subsidiaries abroad fell by 28,000 in 2009, for a total of 2.63 million, the first such decline since 2003.

The SNB notes that

“by comparison with other countries, Switzerland has relatively high levels of direct investment abroad. This is evident from the ratio of Swiss direct investment abroad to nominal gross domestic product (GDP), which amounted to 164 percent at the end of 2009. In the Netherlands this ratio amounted to 107 percent, while in Ireland it was 85 percent. As recently as 1990, Switzerland had a ratio of 28 prcent and lagged behind both the Netherlands (36 percent) and Ireland (31 percent) (source: Unctad, World Investment Report 2010).”

Income from direct investment abroad rose to CHF53b, up sharply from the 2008 figure of CHF8b, thanks in large part to the banking industry’s recovery.

Derivatives out of favour, high Swiss share prices find investors

Swiss shares held by investors abroad jumped by CHF82b to CHF555b as a result of higher share prices. By contrast, foreign investors scaled back their holdings of Swiss debt securities, notes the SNB. Derivatives and structured products lost favour, and their fall nearly offset the rise in foreign assets.

Swissinfo video on foreign companies moving to Switzerland for tax purposes

Nissan, Yahoo, Chiquita – many multinational companies are moving their European headquarters to Switzerland. Here they pay much lower corporate taxes than in other countries. The international holdings have privileges that not even Swiss firms enjoy. (SF Eco - swissinfo.ch)

Google offers new tools to grow businesses globally

New tools to grow your business globally - Google Blog

Srinidhi Viswanatha from Global Advertisers team has posted a really interesting blog that has attracted my whole attention because it offers you to better understand Merton's Matthew effect, a particular explanation of the law of success!

Imagine you're a men's tailor in Bangkok, and you sell custom suits to travelers passing through Thailand. You start a website to sell your suits online and begin to notice that the majority of your website traffic comes from overseas. How do you respond to this international demand?

Businesses of all sizes face a number of obstacles when they want to expand internationally. First, they must identify the right market to sell their products or services, such as custom men's suits. Then they have to create versions of their website and ad campaigns in the language of the market they want to reach. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, they need to reach new customers who may be interested in their products and services.


Starting today, businesses can access a number of new resources from Google to help them overcome these obstacles and start growing internationally. We're launching a new website, calledGoogle Ads for Global Advertisers, which will serve as a central hub for Google's tools and tips for businesses looking to expand to foreign markets. This website pulls together resources for businesses to find the right market for their products and services, translate their websites and ad text, find new customers with relevant online ads, and understand options for international payment, shipping and customer service.


We're also introducing Global Market Finder, a new free tool to help businesses identify markets with high demand for their products or services. The Global Market Finder automatically translates your keyword—for example, [business suit]—into 56 languages and then uses Google search trends data to see where in the world people search for your product or service. It helps businesses evaluate new markets by showing the volume of local searches, estimated price for keywords and competition for each keyword in each market. With this tool, businesses can answer questions like "how competitive is this market?", "how does demand in one country compare to demand elsewhere in the world?" and "how much would it cost to start advertising in this new market?" You can read more about these new tools on the Inside AdWords blog.


Google has already helped hundreds of thousands of businesses reach customers in foreign markets. From a mosaic company in Lebanon to a bespoke shoe retailer in Sydney, a tech support company in India and a bed and breakfast in Poland, tools like AdWords have helped businesses reach new customers and drive traffic to their websites. We think our new website and tools will encourage even more businesses to expand internationally, whether you're a small business testing a single market for the first time or a mid-size company advertising your products to an entire region.

After all, there are more than 1.9 billion consumers online. Wouldn't you like to add some of them as customers?

For all micro-bloggers who are using twitter, Sponsored Tweets and MyLikes are great ad tools as well, I recommend to all of you!

Mark Zuckerberg to Donate Most of His Wealth to Charity

Mark Zuckerberg to Donate Most of His Wealth to Charity - Wall Street Journal

At only 26 years of age, Mark Zuckerberg is one of the world’s youngest billionaires, but he’s not keeping it all for himself. By signing onto Bill Gates and Warren Buffet’s initiative called the “Giving Pledge,” Mark agreed to give most of his wealth to charity.

This is not Zuckerberg’s first foray into philanthropy; he had donated an undisclosed amount to the open social network project Diaspora as well as $100 million to Newark Public Schools. He spoke about the Newark donation on Oprah, explaining his dedication to help fix the public school system.

The Giving Pledge, however, is a completely different ball game. Along with 57 other multi-millionaire and billionaire families and individuals, including Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Carl Icahn, by signing the pledge Mark Zuckerberg promised to give more than half of his wealth to charity, either during his lifetime or after his death.

“People wait until late in their career to give back. But why wait when there is so much to be done? With a generation of younger folks who have thrived on the success of their companies, there is a big opportunity for many of us to give back earlier in our lifetime and see the impact of our philanthropic efforts,” said Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a statement.

According to Forbes’ estimate, Mark Zuckerberg is worth $6.9 billion, which puts him on the 35th position on the list of wealthy Americans. Although many consider him to be the world’s youngest billionaire, he recently lost that title to Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, who’s only 8 days younger than him and whose worth is currently estimated at $1.4 billion.

Wikileaks sites pop up over Europe

Wikileaks sites pop up over Europe - ZDNet

Wikileaks emerged on a Swiss internet domain as well as on domains in Germany, Finland, and the Netherlands, sidestepping a move that had in effect taken the controversial site off the internet.

The group, under heavy criticism in some quarters for publishing US diplomats' classified cables, has been working hard to keep operating amid distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks over the internet and Amazon's decision to stop hosting Wikileaks' website.

Meanwhile, Swedish authorities said they had re-submitted an international arrest warrant asking UK police to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange following sex crime allegations, according to the BBC. Assange, who is staying in a hidden location in England, has denied the allegations. The original arrest warrant issued last month was rejected on legal grounds.

A new problem with the Wikileaks site arose when EveryDNS.net stopped providing Wikileaks with Domain Name System (DNS) services. The DNS translates the web addresses that people type into the numeric Internet Protocol addresses that actually get the job done delivering data from one computer to another. When EveryDNS.net stopped the service, typing "Wikileaks.org" into a browser led nowhere.

In a statement on its website, EveryDNS.net said it terminated WikiLeaks' service to protect others using the service while Wikileaks was under the DDoS attack.

Anyone with Wikileaks's numeric internet address can get to the site without using the DNS, and Wikileaks offered instructions in a tweet: "WIKILEAKS: Free speech has a number: http://88.80.13.160".

Later, it re-emerged with a more human-friendly internet address, also broadcast over Twitter: "Wikileaks moves to Switzerland http://wikileaks.ch/" although that site remained inaccessible to some people who tried to view it, and EveryDNS.net said on its site that it had also cancelled Domain Name System services for the page.

The Swiss and German Pirate Party chapters purchased a host of alternative addresses for Wikileaks after Swiss services were terminated.

The Pirate Party of Germany said it purchased alternative service space to "ensure that press freedom in the form of Wikileaks maintained".

Wikileaks is available at http://wikileaks.piratenpartei.de and the Swiss Pirate Party has listed a further 21 additional alternative websites.

"About two hours after the deactivation of wikileaks.ch by EveryDNS.net we acquired a heap of redundant DNS servers … access should be possible from most places again," the party said in a statement.

Wikileaks announced on its Twitter page that the cables were accessible at http://wikileaks.de, which is a German internet domain, wikileaks.fi in Finland and wikileaks.nl in The Netherlands.

You might be interested in:

• Wikileaks site down ... but not out
• Members' members and the Wikileaks dump
• Amazon cloud sends Wikileaks packing

Several groups not affiliated with Wikileaks also created mirrors of the site on their servers, which means copies of the site would remain up even if Wikileaks loses its domain name and hosting service. The hacker group 2600 created a mirror site at "http://wikileaks.2600.com/" and another one is here. The 2600 Twitter account explained: "#wikileaks website stolen by authorities. we will point wikileaks.2600.com to backups and mirrors in solidarity for as long as necessary."

Meanwhile a group of Dutch journalists launched CableSearch.org, a searchable index of all the cables that have been published.

After getting dumped by Amazon, Wikileaks took issue with the company's explanation that it terminated Wikileaks' service for violating Amazon's terms of service. Amazon said of its decision: "It's clear that Wikileaks doesn't own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content. Further, it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that Wikileaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren't putting innocent people in jeopardy."

Wikileaks doesn't buy it. "Amazon's press release does not accord with the facts on public record. It is one thing to be cowardly. Another to lie about it," Wikileaks tweeted.

Since Amazon dropped Wikileaks, a French company, OVH, has picked up some of the slack, much to the dismay of a French official, according to Reuters. The French Industry Minister wants to ban OVH from hosting the site, but OVH is seeking a court opinion arguing that it is legally a provider of technical services and not a host.

Wikileaks returns to web on Swiss domain

Wikileaks returns to web on Swiss domain - ZDNet UK

Wikileaks re-emerged on Friday on a Swiss internet domain, sidestepping a move that had in effect taken the whistleblowing site off the internet.

On Friday, the Wikileaks group said in a post on Twitter: "Wikileaks moves to Switzerland http://wikileaks.ch/".

The group, which has come under criticism for publishing US diplomats' classified cables, has been working hard to keep operating amid distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks over the internet and Amazon's decision to stop hosting Wikileaks's website.

A new problem arose early on Friday, when EveryDNS.net stopped providing Wikileaks with DNS services. The DNS translates the web addresses that people type, such as 'ZDNet.co.uk', into the numeric Internet Protocol addresses that underpin the delivery of data from one computer to another. Now that EveryDNS.net has stopped the service, typing 'wikileaks.org' into a browser results in a blank page.

WikiLeaks' tweet about losing its Internet address service yesterday

(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

WikiLeaks re-emerged today on a Swiss Internet domain, sidestepping a move that had in effect taken the controversial site off the Internet.

The group, under heavy criticism in some quarters for publishing U.S. diplomats' classified cables, has been working hard to keep operating amid distributed-denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks over the Internet andAmazon's decision to stop hosting WikiLeaks' Web site.

A new problem arose at 7 p.m. PT Thursday, when EveryDNS.net stopped providing WikiLeaks with Domain Name System (DNS) services. The DNS translates the Web addresses that people type, such as CNET.com, into the numeric Internet Protocol addresses that actually get the job done delivering data from one computer to another. When EveryDNS.net stopped the service, typing "WikiLeaks.org" into a browser led nowhere.

In a statement on its Web site, EveryDNS.net said it terminated WikiLeaks' service to protect others using the service while WikiLeaks was under the DDOS attack.

The services were terminated for violation of the provision which states that "Member shall not interfere with another Member's use and enjoyment of the Service or another entity's use and enjoyment of similar services." The interference at issues arises from the fact that wikileaks.org has become the target of multiple distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks. These attacks have, and future attacks would, threaten the stability of the EveryDNS.net infrastructure, which enables access to almost 500,000 other websites.

Thus, last night, at approximately 10PM EST, December 1, 2010 a 24 hour termination notification email was sent to the email address associated with the wikileaks.org account. In addition to this email, notices were sent to Wikileaks via Twitter and the chat function available through the wikileaks.org website. Any downtime of the wikileaks.org website has resulted from its failure to use another hosted DNS service provider.

As it did when tweeting about the Amazon termination, WikiLeaks mentioned the EveryDNS.net's United States connection.

"WikiLeaks,org domain killed by US everydns.net after claimed mass attacks," WikiLeaks said in its tweet.

Anyone with WikiLeaks's numeric Internet address can get to the site without using DNS, and WikiLeaks offered instructions in a follow-up tweet today: "WIKILEAKS: Free speech has a number: http://88.80.13.160"

And later, it re-emerged with a more human-friendly Internet address, also broadcast over Twitter: "WikiLeaks moves to Switzerland http://wikileaks.ch/"

WikiLeaks also took issue with Amazon's explanation that it terminated WikiLeaks' service for violating Amazon's terms of service. "It's clear that WikiLeaks doesn't own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content. Further, it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren't putting innocent people in jeopardy," Amazon said of its decision.

WikiLeaks doesn't buy it. "Amazon's press release does not accord with the facts on public record. It is one thing to be cowardly. Another to lie about it," WikiLeaks tweeted.

The DNS, centrally administered by a non-profit group called ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is a critical service when it comes to publishing and finding information on the Internet. Rerouting addresses through the DNS is how the U.S. government seized 82 domains associated with copyright infringement.

One response to this situation involves a new effort to create a decentralized DNS, also using peer-to-peer technology. Peter Sunde--one founder of a site called The Pirate Bay that indexes content shared with the peer-to-peer BitTorrent technology--is involved in the project, called P2P-DNS.

"Alternative DNS system based on P2P," Sunde said about the effort in a tweet, though he later took pains to say he was only interested, not the person behind the effort. He added that the "core of the DNS problem is not ICANN. It's that governments and companies can control ICANN (i.e. it's centralised)."

Twitter’s Best Business Model Yet

Twitter’s Best Business Model Yet - The Next Web

We’ve been waiting a long time for Twitter to reveal their game plan, the real way that they were going to monetise the huge community that they have on the site. Sponsored tweets might have been it, but they have just trumped themselves and revealed their ultimate business model : their data. In a huge move, Twitter announced earlier this month that their data was now available to ‘buy’ through a partnership with Gnip, which provides real time social media data for organisations. At least, organisations that can afford it. So just what deal have Twitter struck with Gnip and what other data trends can we see, that could change the web as we know it?

Purchase Twitter data at a price

The product offered through Gnip allows organisations to purchase up to 50% of tweets over a year. But it’s going to cost you $360,000 per year. With prices starting at $60,000 over a year to access 5% of tweets. This opens up Twitter’s data somewhat, as up until now it was only available to large organisations that had struck individual deals, such as Yahoo and Microsoft. In theory it is now available to anyone (though Twitter will be reserving 100% access for themselves) , provided you can afford the hefty price tag. This is a pretty huge deal both for Twitter and Gnip and it shows that Twitter’s biggest trump card was the thing we were waiting for it to monetise all along – the huge amount of tweets that they have access to. Although we’re seeing them experiment with ads, this is a much more direct route to monetisation, that allows them to strike big, one-off deals with the simple model developed by Gnip.

Monetising the social web

The move by Twitter hints at the future monetisation of the social web. While many are experimenting with new forms of advertising, it seems that ads might not be the answer after all. The huge wealth of data that social networks can access is where the real money is, which will likely leave many privacy advocates less than pleased. Of course the rather uncomfortable problem is that these services will monetise off of someone else’s data. They are providing the platform, but the data that’s created by the users within that is what will become the real currency – and profit – of these sites. From a business point of view it is merely adapting your model to fit social. The revenue through advertising is limited and damaging to the user experience, so social networks have to adapt and explore new models.

We’ve frequently seen how important data is to social media and also how many problems it can cause. Facebook caused a bit of a stir earlier in the year when they allowed users to download their data. They offered users the ability to access all of their own wall posts, status updates, photos, videos which could be downloaded into a zip file. While this was seen by many as a step in the right direction towards data portability, or owning your own data, the security threat was clear. Access someone else’s Facebook page and in the click of a button you could download their entire data. And of course, it still meant that your data was available on Facebook’s servers. They’ve given us access to it, but not the option to delete it or take it out of Facebook’s control. And why would they? There’s big money in data!

Who owns our data?

At the moment, whichever site you choose to give it to. This is causing a lot of problems for many of the industry, particularly Tim Berners Lee. I was luckily enough to see Berners-Lee give a talk earlier this year and he spent a lot of time talking about projects he was working on, towards the creation of open data. In a recent article, he discussed how social networks (particularly Facebook) owning data is fragmenting the web and could eventually destroy it. His argument centered around the fact that social networks are mining and hording data, which results in silos of information, with particular worry that users do not have control over their own data. This is a problem that the majority of users don’t often contemplate. While many are now getting used to controlling their information or privacy settings to avoid risks such as photos being found by your boss, the implication of who owns that data is rarely considered. And this is still relatively new territory. We still don’t know the long-term implications of a company like Facebook owning the amount of data that they do.

It’s a difficult issue. I’m a firm believer in the freedom of information. It’s what made the web so great in the first place. We all have a basic right to information and the web facilitated this like never before. But the responsibility comes from the organisations that will provide that data. As much as I advocate access to information (access to your own data should be a given), I respect and understand that social networks as a business, have a right to revenue. They are businesses, after all. And if data is the thing that they own, then shouldn’t this be part of their revenue model?

There’s no doubt that data is where the money is at. We’re an information economy and companies like Twitter are among the first to really stretch this and explore entirely new business models. Data is being circulated every second of every day online and it’s big business. Facebook realised this when they first started offering targeted advertising based on demographics. While not handing personal data over to advertisers, they opened up their data to be monetised in ways that weren’t possible before. Of course the biggest issue is that it’s one thing for Twitter to own your data, but quite another when it can be purchased by anyone who can sign the cheque.

Tata Nano car sales sink by 85%

Tata Nano car sales sink by 85% - BBC Business

Sales of Tata Motors' Nano, the world's cheapest car, plunged by 85% in November compared with a year earlier, the Indian carmaker has said.

It blamed the slump on the difficulty potential customers had in accessing loans to buy the car.

About 70,000 Nano cars have been sold in India

However, analysts pointed out that a series of fires in the Nano, as well as price rises, had also affected sales.

Tata said its total sales across all models in November were 54,622, a rise of 1% on a year earlier.

The carmaker also said that sales of its Jaguar Land Rover-branded models "continued their upward trend".

Fire hazard

However, the company said it had sold just 509 Nanos during November.

During the month, Tata offered free safety upgrades for the model, which went on sale last year.

Incidents of the Nano catching fire have been reported

his came after owners of the hatchback reported about half a dozen fires since April last year. There were no injuries.

The Nano was introduced to India in April 2009 and there are now about 70,000 of them on the country's roads.

The basic Nano costs about 100,000 rupees ($2,205; £1,414).