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US online holiday shopping rocketing

US shoppers spent a record 733 million dollars on the so-called “Cyber Monday” following the Thanksgiving holiday, industry tracker comScore said Tuesday.

More than 10.7 billion dollars has been spent online since November 1, according to comScore’s “holiday season e-commerce” report.

An unprecedented 733 million dollars worth of those purchases were made on “Cyber Monday,” the nickname given to the Monday following the Thanksgiving due to its typically feverish degree of Internet shopping.

“While that makes it the heaviest online shopping day on record, we expect that a number of individual shopping days during the coming weeks will surpass the Cyber Monday total, with some days potentially surpassing 800 million dollars,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni.

Shoppers spent 21 per cent more online this Cyber Monday, November 26, than they did last year, comScore reported.

“Cyber Monday is an important day during the online holiday shopping season, representing the first significant spike in online holiday spending activity,” Fulgoni said.

The number of online buyers on Cyber Monday rose 38 per cent from the same day in 2006, while the average amount spent per person dropped 12 percent, comScore reported.

The lower average spending might be due to deep discounts being offered by sellers along with “new Cyber Monday buyers” tending to spend less than seasoned Internet shoppers, Fulgoni said.

Six per cent of US Internet users made online purchases Monday, with 60 per cent of the activity coming from work computers, according to comScore.

Overall visits to retail websites surged on Monday as people used the Internet to browse as well as shop, according to comScore.

Traffic at websites run by retailers Wal-Mart, Dell, Best Buy, Circuit City, and Overstock.com jumped by more than 100 percent on Cyber Monday.

The MSN Shopping website operated by Microsoft saw a 261 percent increase in visits while Yahoo! Shopping had 85 percent more visits than usual.

The heavy online shopping overloaded a Yahoo! Merchant Solutions used by thousands of small businesses to process Internet purchases, giving some aspiring buyers error messages instead of completed transaction notices.

Service outages due to “heavy holiday traffic” lasted several hours, according to Yahoo.

Online retail spending was strong on both Thanksgiving Day and on Black Friday according to comScore.

The day after Thanksgiving is referred to as Black Friday because it is counted on to produce profitable sales registered in black ink on retailers’ financial ledgers.

It also traditionally marks the start of a holiday retail season considered crucial for US economic momentum.

Surveys show this shopping season is off to a robust start as consumers shrug off worries about high fuel prices and weak housing.

The research firm ShopperTrak RCT said US retail sales on Black Friday, November 23, jumped 8.3 per cent to a preliminary total of 10.3 billion dollars.

The firm said consumer spending, which accounts for about two-thirds of US economic activity, has been resilient despite near-record fuel costs and housing and credit woes.

AFP

Big gains seen from US-Japan free trade pact

A free trade pact between the United States and Japan would generate hundreds of billions of dollars in economic gains for both countries, according to a study released on Tuesday.

The report came as the assistant US trade representative for Japan and Korea said Washington and Tokyo had begun exchanging information on details of a possible agreement.

However the official, Wendy Cutler, said the time was not yet right to begin formal talks.

In a speech at a Washington think tank, Cutler said a proposal to negotiate a regional free trade agreement with Japan, China, Russia and other members of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation group known as APEC deserved “serious thought” following last year’s US deal with South Korea.

An agreement that phased out tariffs and other trade barriers between the world’s two largest national economies would generate about $130 billion in economic gains for Japan and about $150 billion for the United States, according to Scott Bradford, a visiting scholar at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Those estimates assume 10 per cent of service sectors such as finance and banking, distribution, insurance, construction, health care, telecommunications and delivery would be opened to more bilateral trade, Bradford said in a study.

An agreement that liberalized 30 per cent of services would generate about $350 billion in gains for each country equal to 7 per cent of gross domestic product for Japan and 2.6 percent for the United States, Bradford said.

The United States and Japan have began examining each other’s trade deals to help lay the groundwork for possible negotiations, Cutler said at the Peterson Institute, although such talks were still premature at this point.

“The stakes would be very high meaning if and when we were to embark on this path, we would need to be highly confident we would be successful,” she said.

Japan would have to make major agricultural policy reforms and remove many of its regulatory barriers, Cutler said.

Bradford noted American automakers are likely to complain loudly about any agreement that eliminates remaining US tariffs on Japanese automobile imports.

A proliferation of free trade arrangements in Asia excluding the United States has heightened US interest in negotiating an free trade agreement with other APEC members, Cutler said.

Prospects for an agreement with Japan or the more ambitious wider regional deal would be enormously set back if Congress rejects the South Korea agreement, Cutler said, but she was confident Congress would approve it next year.

Samsung sees PC chip recovery, strong phone sales

South Korea’s Samsung Electronics said the oversupply of memory chips used in personal computers was expected to ease in 2008, especially in the second half, and set ambitious targets for its mobile phone business.

Although the market for dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips was still tough, rising demand for NAND-type flash chips used in portable gadgets, such as Apple Inc’s iPod, means manufacturers will switch more production from DRAM to NAND, easing DRAM supply, said Chu Woo-sik, executive vice president in charge of investor relations.

“The market is very difficult for DRAM,” he said at a technology forum organised by Samsung.

But the world’s biggest maker of memory chips reckons the DRAM market will recover next year, probably at the beginning of the second half, he said. Chu also said the company was not intending to flood the market.

In October Samsung posted a flat third-quarter net profit as sluggish computer memory chip prices offset strong flat screens, and had warned that the whole memory sector could see losses in this quarter. Reuters

Vietnam highway builder raises $25 mln in dong bonds

State-owned Vietnam Expressway Corporation raised 400 billion dong ($25 million) from its maiden bond this month, the issue’s adviser Habubank Securities said on Wednesday.

The 15-year dong bonds carry an annual coupon of 9 percent, Habubank Securities’s Deputy Director Nguyen Lam Dung told Reuters.

Dung said the bonds were part of the 8.6 trillion dong ($530 million) worth of dong bonds the company planned to raise in the next three years to finance the north-south highway upgrades.

The bonds are the first corporate debt whose repayment is guaranteed by the government’s Ministry of Finance, Habubank Securities Co has said.

The rest of the planned issue will be completed by 2009, Dung added.

The proceeds will fund the first phase of construction of a 56-km (35-mile) section of road linking four northern provinces.

Reuters