Each week, Report on Business editors choose five stories that shouldn't be missed. Here are the 'must reads' for the week of Feb. 22, 2010.
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It is a lustrous new city boasting row upon row of apartment units, fresh roads, highways, office towers, and a magnificent city hall. Ordos, located in China's coal- and mineral-rich province of Inner Mongolia, was built in only five years and largely with government money. Such infrastructure projects have made China the envy of the world, allowing the country to enjoy GDP growth of 8.7 per cent last year, a sharp contrast to much of the West, which struggled to emerge from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Yet while Ordos is large enough for more than one million residents, large parts of it sit empty, serving as a testament to the risks facing China's economy.
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Is any lunch companion worth $1.7-million (U.S.)? For Courtney Wolfe, chief executive officer of one of Canada's hottest hedge fund management firms, the answer is yes. Warren Buffett, the famous value investor, delivered full value at a three-hour charity lunch with Ms. Wolfe Monday in New York on Monday. "He did not disappoint," said Ms. Wolfe of Toronto-based Salida Capital Corp. just after leaving a table that saw three Salida executives and six clients and friends of the firm enjoy the long-planned meal. Mr. Buffett "was full of energy and insights that we all could take away and apply to our own lives. It was money well spent," she said.
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Seventy-five kilometres southwest of Quebec City, in the farm country that lines the St. Lawrence River, natural gas is surging from the ground. In a province so distant from the petroleum industry that it does not yet have its own system for distributing oil and gas leases, the sight of a producing natural gas well is as unusual as it is important. Thousands of kilometres from the traditional heart of Canada's energy industry, this well could represent a significant redrawing of Canada's energy map.
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A virus that devastated the Chilean salmon industry is driving up global prices, bringing an unintended boon to British Columbia's embattled farmed-salmon business. Salmon spot prices have nearly doubled in the past year, following a sharp drop in global supply because of the outbreak of infectious salmon anemia in Chile, the world's second-biggest source. But the benefits for British Columbia, the fourth-largest producer globally, will go only so far because of a recent moratorium on the expansion of fish farms in the province. That could mean even higher salmon prices in the months ahead, as global salmon supply is expected to fall this year for the first time in almost a decade.
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Tom Stephens still remembers the day, a few weeks after signing on to the top job at Canada's most-embattled company, when he came upon a protester in downtown Vancouver. It was 1996, and Mr. Stephens had been named chief executive officer of MacMillan Bloedel Ltd., whose clear-cutting of old-growth forests had stirred global anger and provoked the single-largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history at Clayoquot Sound. So it was no surprise that Mr. Stephens spotted a protester in Vancouver with a sign pillorying MacMillan Bloedel. The surprising part was what Mr. Stephens - and the forestry industry as a whole - did. Rather than continuing to fight the protesters, they decided to engage with them, setting in motion a transformation of forest practices that not only assuaged opponents, but also led to more profits. The forestry leaders couldn't have known it at the time, but those actions created a model for how to do battle in the green trenches that may prove crucial to a different industry in a similar situation. The leaders of Canada's oil sands, faced with global scorn and protests that have interrupted their operations, are turning to the country's foresters - as well as its miners, who had similar experiences - for guidance on how to respond.