Planet Business

Compiled by LAURA SLATTERY

Image of the week: Shanghai Snap

“SO WHAT attracted you to the billionaire Mark Zuckerberg” would be an entirely unfair thing to ask Priscilla Chan, girlfriend of Facebook chief executive Zuckerberg, given they met at college.

On the basis that he created a social media site that perpetuates the horror that is “tagging” and appears not to understand why someone might not want to be friends with all of humanity, Zuckerberg presumably doesn’t mind a Reuters stringer taking the odd snap of him and his girlfriend on a trip to Shanghai. Nobody has any idea who those randomers are with their back to the camera, though presumably Facebook’s recognition technology would try and identify them as some of the couple’s friends anyway.

The lexicon

THE REAL “Pastygate” PR backfire for the Conservatives was not the closing of a VAT anomaly to put VAT on hot pasties.

The bigger fail was the ridicule generated by David Cameron’s assertion that there was nothing he loved more than a takeaway-filled pastry: “I’m a pasty eater myself,” he declared, a day after Labour MP John Mann accused George Osborne of “let them eat cold pasty” elitism. Describing in suspicious detail how the last pasty he had was from the West Cornwall Pasty Company at Leeds station, Cameron’s attempt to get down with the common people was undone when it emerged that the company’s outlet shut down in 2007. Anecdote cringe.

Getting to know...Jane McEvoy

SIR ALAN Sugar’ s Apprentice juggernaut is back for an eighth series and, among the highlights of the first episode, was the moment when candidate Jane McEvoy expressed the desire for a team colleague to “cop herself on”. Ah – definitely Irish then.

From Kilkenny, McEvoy (28) came across as competent and forthright in week one. Week two was somewhat less successful, but McEvoy survived the boardroom bloodbath.

Armed with a degree in economics, she went into business with her husband Gary in 2009 and their company McEvoy Family Foods now makes soups and salads for retailers including SuperValu and Centra. But do they need added Sugar?

In numbers: A turnaround for Nokia?

126 million

number of customers of China Telecom, China’s third largest carrier, which will start selling Nokia Lumia smartphones that run on its network from next month.

17

percentage of the Finnish handset maker’s revenues that came from China in 2011. That is now set to grow thanks to its arrangement with China Telecom.

3.5

percentage rise in Nokia’s share price on Wednesday, after analysts at Swedbank upgraded the stock from “neutral” to “buy”, saying it would ship “decent” volumes this year.