On Friday, Ford Motor Co reported a lower-than-expected fourth-quarter profit because of higher commodity costs and losses in its automotive operations in Europe and Asia.

The No. 2 U.S. automaker’s operating profit, excluding one-time items, fell to $1.1 billion, or 20 cents per share, from nearly $1.3 billion, or 30 cents per share, a year earlier. According to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S, analysts, on average, expected an adjusted profit of 25 cents per share.

The company reported a net income of $13.6 billion, or $3.40 per share, buoyed by a one-time tax-related gain of $12.4 billion.

Tags: commodity costs, Ford Motor, Thomson Reuters

On Monday, Brent crude rose towards $111 on worries over supply disruptions after Iran warned Gulf Arab neighbors of consequences if they raised output of oil for replacing Iranian barrels facing international sanctions.

Brent crude gained 29 cents to $110.73 a barrel by 0529 GMT.

“The United States is trying to persuade buyers to stop importing oil from Iran, while each country is studying its options, its situation,” said Ken Hasegawa, a derivatives manager with brokerage Newedge in Tokyo. “This situation will continue with high tension.”

Reuters market analyst Wang Tao said a bearish target at $108.91 per barrel has been lowered to $108.75 for Brent, while U.S. oil is expected to clear a support at $97.52 per barrel.

Tags: Brent crude, derivatives manager, international sanctions

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Tags: data protection, data recovery, data recovery services, data recovery solutions, Data Retrieval, database data recovery, RAID 5 data recovery, RAID system, server data recovery

Apple Inc has been sued by a group of Chinese authors for 11.9 million Yuan ($1.9 million) in compensation for allegedly providing copyright-infringing books for download through its online store, according to Chinese financial magazine Caixin.

The group behind the lawsuit has been lobbying for months to get Apple remove copyright-infringing books from its App Store.

Under the mantle of the China Written Works Copyright Society (CWWCS), the group of nine authors sued Apple in Beijing’s No. 2 Intermediate People’s Court for copyright infringement of 37 works, Caixin reported. An Apple spokeswoman was not immediately available for comment and calls to the Beijing No. 2 Intermediate People’s Court were not answered.

Tags: App Store, Apple Inc, copyright infringement, online store

A Chinese economist said on Monday that economy of the country would not crash but a shrinking trade surplus will likely keep its currency, the yuan, from appreciating over the next year or two.

It would be hard to argue that the yuan was undervalued when the trade surplus was only 2 percent of China’s GDP, Huang Yiping, economics professor at the China Center for Economic Research at Peking University, told a conference in New York.

“In the long run I think the currency should still appreciate but the potential currency appreciation might be more limited in the short term,” Huang said. “Be careful what you look for from China. I suspect the currency will be going down for a little while.” “Rebalancing is happening in China,” Huang said, citing a slowdown in housing and a dearth of solid investment opportunities in the Chinese stock market. “You don’t really want to keep your money in China.”

Tags: currency appreciation, investment opportunities, trade surplus

The new chief executive of Teva Pharmaceutical Industries is set to shift focus of the company to branded drugs from generics as he imports a successful strategy of making mid-sized deals from Bristol-Myers Squibb.

Jeremy Levin will take the reins at Teva in May in the wake of surprising resignation of Shlomo Yanai after five years at the helm.

“I have a deep philosophy in that medicines are medicines. It does not matter whether they are branded or generic,” Levin said. “The key question is can you make the affordable and can you provide them to patients.”

On Tuesday, Teva’s Nasdaq shares were up 6.5 percent at $42.97.

Tags: Nasdaq shares, Teva Pharmaceutical

Easing immediate fears of a credit crunch, banks gobbled up nearly 490 billion euros in three-year cut-price loans from the European Central Bank recently. However, it is still not clear how much will flow to needy euro zone economies.

Hopes of crisis relief before the year-end had been pinned on a massive uptake of the ECB’s ultra-long and ultra-cheap loans after a string of failed attempts by euro zone leaders to thwart market attacks on the bloc’s weaker members.

The funding should bolster finances of banks and ease the threat of a credit crunch and may tempt them to buy Italian and Spanish bonds, thereby easing the sovereign debt crisis of the currency area.

Tags: cheap loans, credit crunch, debt crisis, euro zone, European Central Bank