Air Paradise to increase flights

SANUR, Bali: Private airline Air Paradise International (API) is planning to increase its flights between Denpasar and a number of Australian cities, API's president has said.

"We serve flights between Denpasar and Perth, Sydney and Melbourne three times a week, and this will be increased to four or five times a week," I Gde Wiranatha said here on Thursday.

API began operating in February with an Airbus 310 and it plans to purchase more aircraft, he said.

The load factor for the Australian route has reached 70 percent, rising to 80 percent to 85 percent during peak seasons, he said.

He said API will also start serving the Denpasar-Seoul route thrice weekly, beginning July 17. -- Antara

Pertamina to hold Iraq project

On Iraq, Indonesia's state-owned oil and gas company, Pertamina, will put on hold its exploration project in the western desert, as "there is no Iraq government and we are not in touch with Iraq," Purnomo said.

Pertamina was among several foreign companies awarded rights before the war to explore the western desert, a largely untapped area that lies on the border with Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

The Asian Wall Street Journal in a report on Thursday quoted Salim Razouki, general director of exploration at the reconstituted Iraqi oil ministry, as saying that talks are continuing with foreign oil companies over exploration contracts in the western desert.

"Indonesia will wait and see" with regards to the commencement of oil exploration in the western desert, Purnomo said. -- Dow Jones

Chinese chainstore heads to Europe

SHANGHAI: China's largest retail chainstore, the Shanghai Lianhua Supermarket, has been approved to set up a subsidiary in Belgium, state press said on Thursday.

"This will make us the first indigenous chain store to explore the European market," president Wang Zongnan was quoted as saying by the Xinhua news agency.

With the subsidiary company as a bridgehead to the European market, the supermarket giant plans to use its domestic procurement network to export Chinese-made products.

It also plans to set up a distribution company specializing in the export and import business to bring back European products meeting the demands of Chinese customers, Wang said.

Wang added that the move would strengthen the company's competitive edge and quicken the development of the domestic chainstore sector.

Shanghai Lianhua Supermarket has 2,000 stores in China which raked in sales of 18.33 billion yuan (US$2.2 billion) in 2002. -- AFP

HSBC to cut 1,400 jobs

LONDON: British banking group HSBC said on Wednesday it plans to cut 1,400 jobs by the end of the year, of which about half will be through layoffs.

Most of the job cuts will be at branches in London, Southampton and Birmingham, a group spokeswoman said.

"This is a painful decision for any business but one we have to make to ensure our future competitiveness," chief executive Bill Dalton said.

Dalton said the job cuts would cost HSBC around 1.5 million pounds (2.2 million euros, US$2.5 million).

Rob O'Neill, national secretary of the banking union UNIFI, said he was concerned about the timeframe for the job cuts and rejected any forced redundancies.

"If the bank stick rigidly to their proposed timescale and cannot reassure those staff remaining about future workloads, this will be seen as no more than a cost-cutting exercise designed to get people off the books before the end of the year in order to increase returns to shareholders," he said. -- AFP

Cisco moves testing lab from Sydney

SINGAPORE: Computer Networking giant Cisco Systems moved its Asia-Pacific testing laboratory to Singapore to be nearer Japan and other major Asian markets, executives said on Wednesday.

The U.S.-based Cisco spent US$40 million to set up the Asia- Pacific Network Solutions Integrated Test Engineering (NSITE) lab.

Ed Carney, vice president of NSITE labs, said at the launch the city-state is "ideally located," for the lab as it is much nearer the company's key customers in Asia.

Asian customers last year accounted for $3.78 billion, or a fifth of Cisco's total revenue.

The Singapore lab is the only one in Asia and joins two in the United States and three in Europe.

The lab aims to address specific client needs which differ from country to country, Carney said. -- DPA