LAURA SLATTERYperuses the week in business
THE NUMBERS
5.3 million
Number of passengers who braved the yellowed insides of a Ryanair fuselage to get from A to B in April, up 12 per cent on the same month last year thanks to a late Easter and a gaggle of passengers downgrading from more comfortable airlines.
203,000
Number of people who have decided to brave the sleek insides of a Tata Nano to get from A to B, according to the number of orders placed for the world's cheapest car with Tata, India's largest vehicle manufacturer, last month.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
"We chose a strategy to lift the fog of uncertainty over bank balance sheets and to help ensure that the major banks, individually and collectively, had the capital to continue lending."
US treasury secretary Timothy Geithner defends the banking stress tests, which have effectively ranked the US banks in order of how deep they are in the mire. But with the fog of uncertainty keeping those green shoots of recovery well hidden, how many businesses and families are going to want their capital anyway?
GOOD WEEK Ben Southall
The 34-year-old charity fundraiser beat 34,000 rival candidates to get the "best job in the world" in a massively successful marketing campaign by Tourism Queensland. The Englishman will be paid A$150,000 (€85,000) to live on Hamilton Island, a tropical island on Australia's Great Barrier Reef, for six months, where his job will be nothing more strenuous than writing a "wish you were here"-style blog. Southall will live rent-free in a three-bedroom house - here's betting a few long-lost school friends are already fixing their sights on those guest rooms.
'Boston Globe'
The 137-year-old newspaper was saved at the 11th hour after its owner, the New York TimesCompany (NYTC), struck a deal with its largest union that will see the paper cut costs of $20 million (€15 million). The Massachusetts political elite, ie former presidential candidate John Kerry and senator Edward Kennedy, had called for a stay of execution after the NYTC threatened to close the lossmaking Globe. Its closure would have been the latest in a series of Stateside newspaper failures.
BAD WEEK
BMW
In contrast to the demand-besieged fortunes of the experimental Tata and the happy coupling of Fiat and Chrysler, the premium market-chasing BMW is honking the horn for this week's most unreliable car-maker, posting a quarterly loss of $202 million (€151 million). This is not all that much compared to the scale of business at the German company, which made sales of €1.5 billion in the first quarter (down 13 per cent) and is now pinning its hopes on a new limousine model and a convertible Mini.
Disney
Dark economic times are supposed to send people hurtling to the glibbest, cheeriest and most technicolour celluloid offerings but, if so, the Walt Disney Company has yet to capitalise on any escapist tendencies, reporting a 26 per cent drop in earnings and citing disappointing box office returns from such fare as canine superhero animation flick Bolt (below) , dognapping adventure Beverly Hills Chihuahua and ode to plastic fashion Confessions of a Shopaholic.
