介绍:
Disney to buy YouTube network Maker Studios for $500 million
The Walt Disney Co has agreed to buy Maker Studios, one of YouTube's largest networks, for 500 million U.S. dollars.
The deal makes Disney a major online video distributor and should help draw more teens into the Disney entertainment empire.
Maker, founded in 2009, is one of the largest video production networks on Google Inc's YouTube.
Its producers target the younger millennial generation, known for its high appetite for online video.
Maker helps produce and distribute videos to more than 380 million subscribers worldwide across more than 55,000 channels.
Its videos now collectively garner some 5.5 billion views every month, according to the source.
The deal is expected to close in Disney's third fiscal quarter.
Callin with Gao Shang
Chinese coal mining firm Yanzhou Coal has abandoned plans to buy Yancoal Australia.
Yanzhou hasn't given any explicit reasons for backing away from the deal, which would have seen Yanzhou take Yancoal private.
The original deal was announced in July.
The deal would have seen Yanzhou buy out the remaining minority investors in Yancoal, then delist from the Australian Stock Exchange.
Yanzhou already holds a 78-percent stake in Yancoal.
Hong Kong-listed Yanzhou, one of China's largest coal mining companies, said at the time of the planned buyout that it could better manage the impact of weak coal prices if it had full control of the Australian unit.
For more on this issue, CRI's Paul James spoke earlier with Gao Shang, Analyst with Guangtong Futures.
That was Gao Shang, Analyst with Guangtong Futures speaking with CRI's Paul James.
Cisco joins cloud computing race with $1 billion plan
Cisco Systems Inc plans to offer cloud computing services, pledging to spend 1 billion U.S dollars over the next two years to enter the market.
The cloud market is currently led by the world's biggest online retailer Amazon.com.
Cisco says it will spend the money to build data centers to help run the new service called Cisco Cloud Services.
Cisco, which mainly deals in networking hardware, wants to take advantage of companies' desire to rent computing services rather than buying and maintaining their own machines.
Enterprise hardware spending is dwindling across the globe.
Companies cope with shrinking budgets, slowing or uncertain economies and a fundamental migration to cloud computing, which reduces demand for equipment by outsourcing data management and computing needs.
Microsoft last year said it was cutting prices for hosting and processing customers' online data in an aggressive challenge to Amazon's lead in the growing business of cloud computing.
Former Madoff associates found guilty of fraud
Five former aides to investment manager Bernard Madoff have been found guilty of helping their former boss conceal his multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme for years.
The five-month trial was one of the longest white-collar criminal trials in Manhattan federal court history, featuring dozens of witnesses and thousands of documents.
It is the first criminal trial stemming from Madoff's fraud.
The five defendants will be sentenced in late July.
There is little dispute that various defendants engaged in activities such as backdating fake trades and creating false documents. The case focused on whether the five knew at the time that they were aiding Madoff's fraud.
The defendants claimed Madoff duped them into becoming unwitting accomplices, using a potent combination of charm and deception.
Madoff, 75, is serving a 150-year-prison sentence after pleading guilty in March 2009 to running the Ponzi scheme, estimated to have cost investors more than 17 billion U.S. dollars.
He was arrested in December 2008.
Candy Crush game maker's IPO to face investor scrutiny
King Digital Entertainment Plc's colorful "Candy Crush Saga" has gone viral on smartphones worldwide.
But the company may struggle to replicate that enthusiasm with its upcoming 7.6 billion U.S. dollar initial public offering.
The flotation this week will be closely watched in the fast-growing 17 billion U.S. dollars mobile gaming industry.
King Digital is keen to emerge from the shadow of Zynga Inc, which has lost half its value since its 2011 IPO valued it at $8.9 billion.
That may be a struggle for London-based King.
While the company has drawn plaudits for catching the mobile gaming wave with the most downloaded free app, and becoming the top revenue producer of 2013 on Apple Inc's app store, it relies on its marquee game for three-quarters of its revenue.
Mexico taken control of Oceanografia
Authorities in Mexico have announced the chief executive of a major Mexican oilfield services company is being held in temporary detention, as investigations are getting underway in a fraud case that forced Citigroup to cut its 2013 profit.
Jesus Murillo Karam, Mexico Attorney General, says Amado Yanez, CEO and majority owner of Oceanografia, has presented himself voluntarily for questioning.
The attorney general has also denied the investigation against Yanez is politically motivated.
"The evidence is derived from documents which point out that on this day credit was requested from an institution with documents that were not legal. This happened in the last quarter of last year and the first month of this year. This implies a deterioration of a company to a bank and I simply repeat what I have said before, there is no political implication, or political order, we are just chasing after a crime."
Citigroup Inc said last month it uncovered at least 400 million U.S. dollars in bogus loans to Oceanografia at its Mexican subsidi
