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A broader look at today’s business TfridayNovember 18,2015 2014Vol. Vol.1010No. No.200 40 Monday, April 27,
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SM, Ayala near common-hub deal
JAPAN’S VIEW OF WWII HISTORY RANKLES VETERANS Perspective
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BusinessMirror
Japan’s views of WWII history rankles some US veterans B M P | The Associated Press
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ASHINGTON—Lester Tenney endured three hellish years as a Japanese prisoner during World War II, but with the passing of decades and repeated visits, he’s made peace with his former enemy. Yet as Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe prepares to address Congress next week, in the 70th anniversary of the war’s end, something rankles the US military veteran about Japan’s attitude toward its past.
LESTER TENNEY poses next to a memorabilia display in his home in Carlsbad, California. Besides a variety of war medals and letters, there is the cover of his book, My Hitch In Hell, which documented the years he was held in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. AP/LENNY IGNELZI
Phoenix, Arizona, said he has forgiven the people of Japan, but not the government. He doesn’t dwell on the past but said, “The truth needs to be told...it needs to be told as it happened.”
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THIS photo provided by Judy Gilbert shows Darrell Stark. Stark, 93, was a new recruit with the 31st Infantry Regiment, US Army, when he was captured and eventually shipped to Yokkaichi, the city in Japan where he was forced to shovel coal at a copper mill. JUDY GILBERT VIA AP
“They don’t want the young people to know what really happened,” complains Tenney, now 94. The Associated Press spoke to three US war veterans about their surrender in the Philippines in 1942 and their exploitation as slave laborers in Japan. It’s an episode of history most notorious for the Bataan Death March, when tens of thousands of Filipino and American prisoners of war were forced 65 miles on foot to prison camps. Thousands are believed to have perished. The AP also asked the veterans for opinions about Japan today. The US-allied nation issued a formal apology to American POWs in 2009 and again in 2010, and has paid for some veterans to travel to Japan, leaving them with a more positive view of the Japanese people. All three veterans, however, remain adamant that their wartime experiences, and those of the POWs who didn’t make it, should not be forgotten.
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ENNEY, with the 192nd Tank Battalion, US Army, said he was made to march for eight days after his capture. “You had to stand on your own two feet and you had to keep moving. If you fell down, you died. If you had to go to the bathroom, you
died. If you had a malaria attack, you died. The Japanese would just kill you, period. You had to stay on your feet.... If you looked at a Japanese soldier in the wrong way, he would beat the hell out of you.” After a 28-day journey by ship to Japan, Tenney worked at a coal mine near the town of Omuta run by the Mitsui Mining Co., shoveling coal 12 hours a day for three years. He said British, Australian and Indonesian prisoners also worked there and they had no protective gear, and they’d self-inflict injuries to get days off. His weight dropped from 189 pounds to 97 pounds. He said Mitsui has never responded to his letters calling for an apology. (Mitsui & Co., which was disbanded after the war and then reestablished as a major industrial group, denies having any legal or historical responsibility for Mitsui Mining Co.’s treatment of forced laborers before or during the war. It says therefore it cannot comment on complaints or requests for apologies.) “If Mr. Abe comes here I would like him to say, ‘I bring with me an apology from the industrial giants that enslaved American POWs.’ He could say that very easily.... I’m afraid that when Mr. Abe leaves here, all of it’s going to be forgot-
RETIRED Chief Master Sgt. Harold Bergbower, 94, who was in the US Army Air Corps and then the Air Force, pauses in front of his military medals earned, but talks about spending almost four years in various Japanese prisoner of war camps and that he still has nightmares about his treatment almost 70 years after World War II. AP/ROSS D. FRANKLIN
ten. They’re going to forget about apologies to the POWs, they’re going to forget they did anything wrong. It’s going to like whitewashing the whole thing.” “You can’t have a high-ranking country today if you’re not willing to face your past. They have to admit their failures. If they admit their failures, then by golly they deserve to have the best.” After the war, Tenney became a professor of economics at Arizona State University and today lives in Carlsbad, California. He has returned to Japan five times and was instrumental in starting Japanese government-supported “friendship” visits by POWs. “The Japanese people were wonderful. They were very kind, they were very hospitable, no question about it. They treated us beautifully.... And there’s no reason why
they shouldn’t. We didn’t do anything wrong [in the war].”
Bergbower spent two years in brutal labor, scooping ore into open furnaces at a steel mill in the city of Toyama. He was very bitter about his experience as a POW, and for more than 50 years he never talked about it, even to his wife and family. “When I got back to the States after the war, I was told to go home and forget about it and that’s exactly what I did. I didn’t talk to anybody.” His view of Japan changed when he went on a friendship visit in 2011 and returned to the factory where he’d been enslaved. Staff there apologized “from the heart” for what the POWs had been through. “I came away with a much different impression of Japan. We couldn’t have been treated any better.” Bergbower, who lives near
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AROLD BERGBOWER, 94, was a private with the 28th Bomb Squadron, US Air Force, when he was captured on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao and sent eventually to Davao penal colony. “We could not have been treated any worse in prison camp,” he said. “It was inhuman.” Intensely sick during the voyage, he can’t recall the journey to Japan, in the broiling, closed holds of “hell ships” that carried POWs and Asian laborers. They were starved of food, deprived of water. Only decades after did he learn that the first ship he was on was hit in a US bombing attack and forced to dock for repairs. Thousands died on such voyages.
ARRELL STARK, 93, was a new recruit of the 31st Infantry Regiment, US Army, when he was captured and eventually shipped to Yokkaichi, the city in Japan where he was forced to shovel coal at a copper mill. Five years after the war, Stark received a letter from a Japanese man who showed him kindness and gave him food at the mill. Stark always regretted that he never replied. Stark suffered post-traumatic stress disorder, but he recovered and enjoyed a long career as a corrections officer in Connecticut. He went to Japan on a friendship visit last October, and the current deputy director of the mill clasped his hand and apologized. Stark has also exchanged letters with the son of the man, now deceased, who’d showed him kindness 70 years ago. “I found the people [in Japan] to be very friendly, the country very clean and the people that I talked to were very nice. It is amazing what the two countries have done together to accomplish what we have over all these years. It’s also amazing that with all this we have accomplished, they are not completely coming out with the truth.” “It really upsets me there are certain individuals who have completely ignored history and rewritten it to make it look like Japan was attacked, and that there was no Bataan Death March and no cruelty at all on their part. That’s not all the people. But there are some. “I think when [Abe] comes, and if he really wants to do something great for his nation and maybe for the world, he should make an apology and be grateful, in a way of appreciation, for things the two countries have done together. That would just about wind it up right there, because we need to be allies.” “Another reason I would love to see Japan and the United States and all countries get along with each other is that if we ever have a total conflict, the whole world is going to be destroyed. No question about it.”
PERSPECTIVE
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When You h have ave to Coa CoaC Ch C h Remotel RemotelY Y By Mark Mortensen
t its core, coaching is a simple idea: Help your direct reports improve both what they do and who they are. But it’s not a simple process. Good coaches create a safe space to have an open discussion, ask the right questions (and genuinely listen to the answers) and constructively challenge the employee. This is hard enough to do when you’re sitting face to face. What happens when some of your direct reports are hundreds or even thousands of miles away? It’s challenging, largely because you don’t have a shared context with them. On any given day in the office, employees pick up countless pieces of information about their colleagues. Such information becomes part of a mental database we use to interpret situations, decode interactions and understand motivations. This database is critically important in coaching. When you coach, you’re helping people understand the consequences of their actions and recognize any disconnect between what they wanted to accomplish and what actually happened. That is harder to do from a distance. Also, not sharing context reduces trust— a cornerstone of effective coaching. The people you’re coaching need to trust you enough to share their successes and failures, expose their vulnerabilities and ask for help. Even with only intermittent visits or phone calls or video conferences, a manager still can coach:
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Get the problem out in the open. Have an honest discussion about the challenges of establishing and
By Tami Erwin
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maintaining an effective coaching relationship at a distance. Thus you build rapport and trust by creating the shared experience of working together to overcome the distance factor. Formalize the inFormal. Plan ahead and set a fixed schedule for how often you will interact. Research shows that a predictable rhythm is a key driver of trust at a distance. Spend part of your time together establishing a shared context with the people you’re coaching. Ask not only what they do in the office but also where they choose to spend the rest of their time. Thus you gain a deeper perspective on their personal and professional life.
Mark Mortensen is an associate professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD.
Business-to-business salespeople can survive if they reimagine their roles
c u stomers. We knew that these tools wouldn’t work if they didn’t fit our customer service team’s needs. So we recruited more than 90 callcenter supervisors and customer representatives to help our tech team shape Mobile Coach and Rep Guidance. In the past, when we’ve implemented new technologies, we’ve had to focus our efforts on communicating their value to team members. Inviting feedback is good, but having the end-users actually help build a tool takes engagement to another level. Now our reps contribute to improving these tools all the time. And they’re learning how to identify customer signals faster and more accurately. During a pilot phase of Mobile Coach, we saw a 10-percent in crease in close rate and in firstcall resolutions. Coaching sessions have nearly tripled from 1.5 con versations per rep per month to four. When we surveyed 2,700 call center employees, 88 percent felt the technology was headed in the right direc tion. Using the technology to generate insights and enabling our frontline people to act on them makes the difference. And that isn’t possible without frontline feedback.
By James A. Narus
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EATH of a B2B Salesman,” a new report from forrester Research, lends urgency to the need for companies to incorporate digital media into their sales models. By a factor of 3 to 1,
forrester predicts that “1 million US B2B salespeople will lose their jobs to self-service e-commerce by 2020.? But B2B salespeople aren’t destined to become dinosaurs. Their role just needs to adjust to the new reality: Redesign your sales funnel.
digital marketing tools and specify where the field salesperson should be involved, if at all. Previously, salespeople focused on finding sales leads and converting them into prospects. Today, they may have to redirect their efforts to closing hot prospects, providing follow-up
Reimagine, retrain and redeploy your sales force.As forrester points out, ordering can be more efficiently conducted via digital devices; thus, salespeople no longer need to perform this task. Instead, today’s field salesperson should be an educator, negotiator, consultant, service pro-
MONDAY MORNING
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Sports
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BusinessMirror
| Monday, april 27, 2015 mirror_sports@yahoo.com.ph sports@businessmirror.com.ph Editor: Jun Lomibao
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HE mad rush to acquire tickets to watch Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao fight on May 2 is creating a frenzied marketplace. At StubHub, a secondary ticket seller, a seat on the MGM Grand floor was listed at $128,706 on Friday morning and the cheapest upperdeck seat was priced at $5,826. Part of the craze is being fueled by the maddening delay in making tickets available. Pacquiao representatives said that Mayweather’s manager, Al Haymon, attempted to alter an agreement in the original fight contract that would have shorted Pacquiao and promoter Top Rank Inc.’s agreed-upon ticket allocation by 2,000 tickets. Settling the disagreement took until Wednesday, and MGM put 500 tickets on sale to the public on Thursday. The arena’s capacity is around 16,800. When tickets finally went on sale and someone congratulated Top Rank Chairman Bob Arum, he said, “Why congratulations? It’s a...disgrace.” The remaining tickets were divided, with MGM getting 40 percent and Mayweather Promotions and Top Rank splitting the remainder evenly. The face-value prices ranged from $1,500 in the upper deck to $10,000 on the floor. The long-anticipated showdown between the unbeaten Mayweather and the record eight-division champion Pacquiao is also expected to shatter pay-per-view records. Cameron Papp, a spokesman for StubHub, said he believes most of the 245 ticket listings his company currently has for the bout were “put there by the MGM or the fighters.” Other secondary ticket agents have reported record-high prices for a single ticket. At StubHub, Papp said one seat has sold for $15,000, short of the company’s record $30,000 price for the National Collegiate Athletic Association men’s basketball championship game earlier this month. That price, however, was for a suite that included 20 seats and food and drink. “There’s no question the prices are reflecting the low inventory and high demand,” Papp said. “It’s interesting and unique to have tickets for such a major event go on sale just nine days before.” Papp said in tracking sales for Mayweather’s record pay-per-view fight in 2013 against Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, StubHub found most buyers came from California, Texas and New York. “I’ve seen where some canceled their hotels and flights because of the delay, so we may see more buyers from Nevada on this one,” Papp said. “It’s a tough ask to get all this done nine days before the event. “But the people buying these tickets are obviously well off— actors, high-end business people. They’re going quick.” StubHub has taken extensive security precautions, requiring sellers to leave their tickets after having them screened at StubHub ticket centers. Buyers must come to StubHub’s Las Vegas center to pick up their tickets. Lance Pugmire/
‘WHO DO YOU LIKE?’ THE Manny Pacquiao-Floyd Mayweather has fight fans buzzing. AP
It’s understood the world over that the choice is between undefeated welterweight and pound-for-pound champion Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Philippines congressman and national hero Manny Pacquiao. It doesn’t matter that the fight should have been made five years earlier when both were in their prime because it’s on now Saturday night at the MGM Grand, and that’s all that matters.
Los Angeles Times
By Greg Logan
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Newsday
OR the next six days, the question that will be repeated again and again is: “Who do you like?” It’s understood the world over that the choice is between undefeated welterweight and pound-for-pound champion Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Philippines congressman and national hero Manny Pacquiao. It doesn’t matter that the fight should have been made five years earlier when both were in their prime because it’s on now Saturday night at the MGM Grand, and that’s all that matters. Even as many boxing luminaries convened in New York for last night’s heavyweight title fight between champion Wladimir Klitschko and challenger Bryant Jennings at Madison Square Garden, the buzz was building for Mayweather-Pacquiao. In fact, all-time great light heavyweight champion Bernard Hopkins, who just signed as a boxing commentator for ESPN, was literally buzzing during the week when he described the difficulty Mayweather will encounter with Pacquiao’s southpaw style. Like most of the cognoscenti, Hopkins is picking Mayweather based on his 47-0 record (26 KOs) and his defensive style and technical brilliance. But Hopkins cautioned that Mayweather won’t be able to counterpunch Pacquiao (57-5-2, 38 KOs) the way he dissects most foes. Comparing Pacquiao’s frenetic style to the tepid opposition Mayweather often has faced, Hopkins said, “Were they on him like a bunch of wild bees after you disturbed the bee nest, and the next thing you know, you’re swatting them
COMFORTABLE AND FAMILIAR N EW YORK—The champ returned to the Garden, and it sounded and felt like Kiev. Ukraine’s Wladimir Klitschko easily outpointed a game-but-outclassed Bryant Jennings in the champion’s first fight in the United States in seven years, defending his heavyweight titles with a unanimous decision on Saturday night. Klitschko’s last US fight was right here on February 23, 2008, when he easily won over Sultan Ibragimov. This was his fourth Garden bout, and it seemed both comfortable and familiar. “It is great to come back to Madison Square Garden, to be home here and fight here,” Klitschko said. “I look forward to coming back to fighting here, a great crowd and a great atmosphere.” Although not at his dominant best, Klitschko was in control from the outset in his 18th straight successful defense. His jab and straight right hands
win solution for SM and Ayala on the common-station disagreement. Still, it appears that the fate of the multibillion-peso common station is still hanging, based on Abaya’s statements pertaining to the actual plan of the government in pursuing this venture. The transport chief admitted that he is unaware if SM Prime Holdings C A
TREMORS HAMPER NEPAL SEARCH FOR SURVIVORS
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Find a soundinG board. If possible, seek out someone in your reports’ location who can serve as a sounding board—someone you trust to help you assess whether your recommendations make sense locally. Distance takes away much of the information we need to understand our distant reports. Putting in place a few simple structures and processes can help bring you closer.
‘WHO DO YOU LIKE?’ Delay, scarcity fuel ticket prices
HE compromise agreement for the construction of a common hub—or two—for the three overhead-railway systems in Metro Manila is nearing fruition, Transportation Secretary Joseph Emilio A. Abaya said over the weekend.
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employees Will use t they helped build tools O build new technologies that your frontline employees will use and trust—tools that will improve the customer experience—you need to ask for employee feedback at every stage. At Verizon we recently developed two new technologies for our call centers. The first, Mobile Coach, is an app that compiles service representative performance metrics in real time so call center supervisors can engage with their teams more quickly. In the past, supervisors would often spend much of the workday at their desk computers listening to recorded calls to assess their reps’ customer interactions—hours, if not days, after the calls. The tablet-based Mobile Coach enables supervisors to freely move about their team all day, accessing all their management tools via the screen in their hands. They can see how their team members are performing while simultaneously coaching them. The second technology is Rep Guidance, a desktop solution that helps improve conversations with customers. By identifying who’s on the other end of the line or computer screen, Rep Guidance helps our team members
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“It seems that we are nearing the signing stage on that second common station,” he said, pertaining to the proposal of building another station near SM North Edsa, a property owned by shopping-mall magnate Henry Sy Sr., to end the conflict with Ayala Corp. The Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTC) has taken the initiative to find a win-
WHEN YOU HAVE TO COACH REMOTELY A
P. | | 7 DAYS A WEEK
ABAYA SAYS COMPROMISE AGREEMENT BEING BROKERED BY DOTC FOR LRT-MRT ALIGNMENT NEARING SIGNING STAGE
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kept Jennings from getting inside, and the unbeaten American had little chance of winning from distance. The overwhelmingly pro-Klitschko crowd of 17,056 roared loudly with every thundering punch by the champ. They chanted Ukrainian slogans when he entered the arena and when the decision was announced: 116-111 on two cards, 118-109 on another. The AP had it 118-109. Yet, with Jennings still standing in the middle rounds and beginning to land some punches, the Americans in the crowd began shouting “U-S-A! U-S-A!” But the Philadelphian never really had a chance and was outpunched 545-376, with 144 landing for Klitschko, 110 for the challenger. “Jennings would have beaten a lot of heavyweights in the division,” Klitschko said. “He’s a tough competitor.” Klitschko is 64-3 and has held a heavyweight belt
and they’re biting on your head? This is how Pacquiao fights. Pacquiao is not one punch, then delay, then a punch. “Mayweather is great, but as all counterpunchers will tell you, if [you’re facing] a rapid-throwing fighter, you don’t have pockets to throw that counter in because punches are coming more than one at a time. They’re not accustomed to trying to counter a person who is throwing five, six, seven, eight, nine. If you read what Freddie Roach said, they want to swarm him like bees.” Pacquiao’s trainer, Freddie Roach, naturally has been vocal about predicting victory, but even he says Pacquiao must fight a perfect fight. Fellow trainer Abel Sanchez, who handles middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin, among others, doesn’t believe Pacquiao can sustain his punching pace against Mayweather. “I see Floyd winning,” Sanchez said. “I think the first three or four rounds may be difficult. Floyd has to adjust to Manny’s speed, but Manny is a pattern fighter. The reason for that is because of the work in the gym with Freddie. Everything is a pattern. I think Floyd is smart enough to eventually figure that out. “I’m not going to say he’s going to knock Manny out, but I think he will handle him like he did Canelo Alvarez.... Manny makes a lot of mistakes. Manny likes to jump in, and once a fighter does that to Floyd, it’s an easy fight for him.” Tom Loeffler, who is Golovkin’s
for nearly a decade. Jennings is 19-1. Klitschko has won 21 straight bouts, and tied Joe Louis with 27 total heavyweight championship fights. He is 25-2 in those, while Louis was 26-1. The low point for the 39-year-old Klitschko came in the 10th round, when he was penalized a point for holding. Jennings complained before the fight about that tactic, and referee Mike Griffin paid attention. “Every time I started working, he held me,” Jennings said. “When he was holding I was hitting him to the body. I must have hit him with about 100 body shots, not that much to the head, though. “I felt the margin should have been much closer.” It wasn’t in large part because Klitschko started well, keeping Jennings so off-balance that the challenger often lost any technique and threw some wild prayers. None of those came close to being answered.
promoter, disagrees with Sanchez about the potential for a Pacquiao upset. He noted Marcos Maidana succeeded in landing enough punches last May to lose a majority decision that earned him a September rematch he lost unanimously. “Pacquiao is a pressure fighter,”Loeffler said. “He throws a lot of hard punches. A lot of people discount Manny’s chances, but I think he actually has a good chance. Maidana was able to hit Floyd. If Manny hits him with those same punches, he might hurt him.” While most study styles to determine a winner, promoter Gary Shaw, who handled Jennings on Saturday night at the Garden, suggested the outcome might depend on whether Pacquiao can revive the knockout punch that has deserted him in his last nine fights since he stopped Miguel Cotto in November 2009. “It depends on which Pacquiao comes into the ring,” Shaw said. “If it’s the real religious Pacquiao that comes in and doesn’t have the killer instinct he had years ago, I don’t think he has a chance. If he takes Mayweather into a street fight.....“ Shaw recalled how Evander Holyfield told him before fighting Mike Tyson that he planned to bully the bully, counter one punch with two back. But saying that and doing that against Mayweather
Klitschko won all but the ninth and 10th rounds on judge Max DeLuca’s card—and the 10th was when he had the point deducted. Robin Taylor gave Jennings the third, sixth and seventh. Steve Weisfeld saw the third, sixth and ninth in Jennings’s favor. The champion’s main weapons were his jab and straight right. Indeed, he landed more than 80 jabs and rocked Jennings with a terrific right-left combination in the fourth. Undeterred, Jennings defiantly shouted at Klitschko in the fifth, as if challenging Klitschko to hit harder and more often. AP
is two different things. Klitschko won a gold medal in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, where Mayweather suffered his last loss in the semifinals to Bulgarian Serafim Todorov by a controversial 10-9 decision that left him with a bronze medal. “You have to give credit to him to be undefeated since 1996 in the Olympics,” Klitschko said. “Maybe his fights are not as impressive as Pacquiao’s, but they’re effective. From a boxing standpoint, he has the physical advantage and slight technical advantage as well.” Greenlawn’s Chris Algieri, who was knocked down six times while losing a unanimous decision to Pacquiao last November, came away impressed. “He was not reckless,” Algieri said. “He was very smart in his attack. What I realize is that his style is so much his own and so rehearsed and so experienced. There’s no change. He is Manny Pacquiao.” That might be what makes Saturday’s fight so intriguing. No matter who they are picking, most in boxing at least agree no one has a better chance of becoming the first to beat Mayweather than Pacquiao does.
WLADIMIR KLITSCHKO easily outpoints a game-but-outclassed Bryant Jennings in the champion’s first fight in the United States in seven years. AP
SPORTS
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FRESH 6.7-magnitude aftershock in Nepal on Sunday hampered efforts to find survivors of a more powerful earthquake the day before that killed more than 1,800 people. The tremors prompted authorities to temporarily halt flights into Kathmandu, the capital, where thousands of people are camping outdoors. The 7.8-magnitude temblor that struck shortly before noon on Saturday triggered avalanches on Mount Everest, killing 18 foreign climbers including a Google Inc. product manager. “Rescue teams are looking for those buried—the priority is look ing for sur v ivors,” Tirtha Raj Wagle, an official at Nepal’s embassy in New Delhi, said on Sunday. The International Mon-
PESO EXCHANGE RATES ■ US 44.2680
etary Fund (IMF), humanitarian groups and governments from China to India to Israel rushed to provide assistance to Nepal, one of Asia’s poorest countries. While the temblor also downed buildings and took lives in neighboring India and China, Nepal suffered most of the damage. The US Geological Survey initially estimated economic losses to Nepal from the quake at 9 percent to 50 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), with a best guess of 35 percent. Tourism is a key economic driver for Nepal, which has a GDP that is smaller than any of the 50 US states. Its 28 million people have the lowest spending power of any Asian country apart from Afghanistan, IMF statistics show. C A
FOREIGN MINISTERS SUMMIT Foreign Secretary Albert F. del Rosario (right) chats with Vietnamese Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh, as they arrive for the 26th Asean Summit Foreign Ministers’ Meeting at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Center in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on Sunday. AP/JOSHUA PAUL
Banks continue to tighten real-estate loan standards B B C
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ANK lending to the real-estate sector grew even more stringent in the first quarter, according to the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP). In a recent report, the central bank said local lenders reported a net tightening of their overall credit standard for commercial real-estate loans in the Januaryto-March period. This was the 11th consecutive quarter that the banks reported a net tightening of standards in real-
estate loans under the diffusion index (DI) approach. This pertains to the statistical method, where the number of banks indicating tighter credit standards was subtracted from the number of banks that indicated otherwise. “The net tightening of overall credit standards for commercial real-estate loans was attributed by respondent-banks to perceived stricter oversight of banks’ realestate exposure, along with banks’ reduced tolerance for risk, among others,” the central bank said.
The BSP previously implemented several measures monitoring the banks’ exposure to the sector, as part of the effort to maintain financial stability and avoid socalled asset bubbles. The BSP earlier expanded the reportage on real-estate exposure. It also conducted a so-called stress test on the various banks to discover which of these lenders would or would not survive under simulated conditions of financial adversity. A maiden report is expected to be released later this year. S “B,” A
■ JAPAN 0.3705 ■ UK 66.6942 ■ HK 5.7124 ■ CHINA 7.1423 ■ SINGAPORE 33.0014 ■ AUSTRALIA 34.4498 ■ EU 47.9600 ■ SAUDI ARABIA 11.8117 Source: BSP (24 April 2015)