GE Capital Buys Singapore SDL

GE Capital Buys Singapore SDL

SINGAPORE: GE Capital, a financial services arm of General
Electric Co. (GE), has acquired automobile finance company SDL
Leasing Singapore Pte. Ltd. from UBS Capital Asia Pacific, UBS
Capital Asia Pacific said in a statement Friday.

UBS Capital Asia Pacific is a private equity unit of UBS AG.

Both UBS Capital Asia Pacific and GE Capital said they won't
disclose the transaction price.

Founded in 1983, SDL Leasing has assets of more than S$400
million (US$1=S$1.7851) and a major share of the used auto
finance market and a smaller vendor leasing business specializing
in office equipment, UBS Capital Asia Pacific said.

With the acquisition, GE Capital will use SDL Leasing as a
platform for growth in Singapore, the statement said.

GE Capital has assets totaling more than US$425 billion and
operates in 47 countries.--Dow Jones

Opel sees 400-500 mln euros loss

FRANKFURT: German car maker Opel, a unit of General Motors, is
expecting to post an operating loss of 400-500 million euros
(US$372-465 million) this year, the Financial Times Deutschland
reported on Friday, quoting management comments to the
supervisory board.

Until now, Opel had said it was hoping to substantially narrow
its losses after booking a loss of 674 million euros in 2001.

And a restructuring program had been implemented to bring the
car maker back to profit by 2003.

"The market is not really helping us, with sales developing
worse than expected," the newspaper quoted an unidentified source
as saying, who attended the meeting of the management and
supervisory boards earlier this week.

Opel's sales fell by 24 percent in the first three months of
this year.--AFP

Puma ups 2002 sales, earnings forecasts

FRANKFURT: Puma, the German maker of sportswear and equipment,
is expecting sales to rise by more than 40 percent this year and
earnings to rise even faster, chairman Jochen Zeitz said in a
newspaper interview published Friday.

Previously, the group had been forecasting sales growth of 30
percent and a similar rise in earnings both before and after tax.

But Zeitz told the Friday edition of the daily Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung that Puma was now forecasting an increase of
more than 40 percent in sales "and we believe we'll be able to
lift earnings by a further one percentage point on top of that,"
he said, without specifying whether he was referring to pre-tax
or net profit.

Looking further ahead, Zeitz predicted that group sales would
surpass the one-billion-euro (US$930 million) mark in 2003.
--AFP
BP cuts 800 contracting jobs

LONDON: Energy group BP PLC said Friday it planned to shed 800
jobs among its contractors as part of a restructuring of its
North Sea operations.

The decision reduces the head count of contract employees for
the oil giant from 3,300 to 2,500.

The job losses will be spread among staff at the company's
headquarters in Aberdeen, Scotland, other locations around
Britain and offshore oil fields.

In March, BP announced a major restructuring and cost cutting
program designed to secure the long-term future of the oil
giant's North Sea operations, including 500 job losses among its
internal staff.

A spokesman for the company, speaking on condition of
anonymity, said some of the 800 contractors will be redeployed by
the contract companies.

BP last month blamed lower prices for oil and natural gas, and
pinched profit margins on refined products, for a 57 percent drop
in first-quarter earnings not including exceptional, one-off
gains or losses.

The company earned US$1.58 billion in profits before taxes and
exceptional items for the three months ending March 31, compared
to $3.71 billion for the same period last year.

The group's quarterly operating profit fell by 55 percent to $
2.78 billion from $6.20 billion.--AP

Commerzbank says cost-cutting savings will fall short

FRANKFURT: Commerzbank, the fourth-biggest bank in Germany,
said on Friday that its much-trumpeted cost-cutting program would
not save so much as had been expected, given the difficult market
conditions at present.

The original aim of the bank's ambitious CB21 program,
unveiled this time last year, had been to boost pre-tax profit by
some 1.6 billion euros (US$1.5 billion) by 2003.

But Commerzbank chairman Klaus-Peter Mueller told shareholders
at the group's annual meeting here on Friday that cost-cutting
would now only likely contribute around 640 million euros to pre-
tax earnings by then.

"In view of the drastic deterioration in general market
conditions, we expect CB21 to generate only about 40 percent of
the total profit contribution we had originally been aiming for,"
Mueller said.

"But we're still hoping to close some of that gap with
additional appropriate measures," he added.--AFP