Business News
Friday’s business pages were dominated by news of the Czech energy giant
CEZ. The partly state-owned energy company has just bought a 7% share in
the Hungarian gas and oil giant MOL. It’s thought that CEZ paid in the
region of 28 billion CZK (1.4 billion USD) for its stake in the Hungarian
company. The firms plan to embark upon a joint project to build gas-based
power plants in Hungary and Slovakia. On the same day, CEZ raised its
profit estimate by 1.2 billion crowns to 42.6 billion CZK (21 billion USD).
The profit boost means larger dividends for shareholders, and nearly 15
billion CZK for the state, which plans to invest the money into highway
construction.
Czech Airlines has agreed to sell its catering business to Alpha Overseas
Holdings, a unit of Italy’s Autogrill, it was announced on Thursday. The
cost of the deal has not been revealed. Czech Airlines has been selling
non-core assets as part of a restructuring which it has undertaken to
recover from losses generated over the past years. The deal is still to be
approved by a general meeting, which will be held next month.
Meanwhile, Czech car maker Skoda Auto won the country’s Exporter of the
Year award this week, based upon the volume of its exports over the 1993
– 2006 period. Last year, the firm exported goods worth 164.2 billion CZK
(8.2 billion USD) – that’s nearly 8% of the Czech Republic’s total
exports in 2006. The firm’s sales in Western Europe grew by 5.4% to 120.4
billion crowns, and shot up in Eastern Europe by 46% to total 19.9 billion
CZK. Second behind Skoda at the Exporter of the Year awards was Siemens
Group Ceska Republika.
The world’s largest coffee-shop chain Starbucks is set to open its first
branch in the Czech Republic in early 2008, Friday’s Mlada Fronta Dnes
reported. The first Starbucks in the country will be located in Prague’s
Palladium shopping-centre, the paper reports. It had long been speculated
that the city’s Arkada shopping-mall would house Starbuck’s first
outlet in the Czech Republic, but a branch of the chain is only expected to
open there in autumn of next year. Two other Prague malls have also voiced
an interest in housing a Starbucks in the near future. The firm is planning
to launch operations in the Czech Republic and Poland early next year.
Onto beverages of another kind now - Czech beer output is expected to
cross the 20 million hectolitre mark for the first time this year. On
Friday, the chairman of the Czech Beer and Malt Association, Jan Vesely,
made the prediction, but added that the growth in production would not be
as big as in previous years, due to a slowdown in exports. According to Mr
Vesely’s statistics, Czech breweries will export some 3.6 million
hectolitres of beer this year, which is about 100,000 hectolitres more than
last year. Last year’s growth, however, was about four times higher than
this. Mr Vesely attributed the slowdown to the strengthening of the crown.
