BUSINESS in BRIEF
Foreigners bought $7.2B in June securities
OTTAWA -- Statistics Canada
says non-residents bought $7.2 billion in Canadian securities in June,
while Canadians sold $9.5 billion in foreign stocks, bonds and short-term
paper.
The foreign purchases, which
were mostly bonds, finished a record second quarter investment of $27.6
billion.
The agency says Canadians
sold off securities in the face of a troubled U.S. credit market and lacklustre
global equity markets.
In June, Canadians sold
$2.9 billion worth of foreign bonds, $475 million in short-term paper and
$6.2 billion in stocks, continuing a sell-off that began more than six
months ago.
Canadian economy loses 55,200 jobs in July
OTTAWA -- Canada's economy
lost 55,200 jobs in July compared to the previous month with many people
leaving the work force -- the worst single-month drop since the recession
of the early 1990s.
Statistics Canada also reported
on August 8 a dip in the national unemployment rate to 6.1 percent from
6.2 percent in June. That's because many people -- especially younger part-time
workers -- left the workforce.
Most of the job losses,
which totalled 48,000 in July, came from part-time positions in the manufacturing,
business building, and support and educational services sectors.
Employment across the country
grew by 1.3 percent over the past year, but the pace of growth has slowed
sharply in recent months. Job gains have averaged only 10,000 a month so
far in 2008, compared with an average monthly gain of 30,000 in 2007.
Nortel Q2 net loss US$113M as revenue rises
TORONTO -- Nortel Networks
Corp has reported a second-quarter net loss of US$113 million in a "challenging
business environment," compared with a year-ago loss of $37 million.
The Toronto-headquartered
telecommunications equipment maker, reporting in U.S. dollars, said August
1 its revenue was up two percent from a year earlier at $2.62 billion.
The latest quarter included
$67 million in restructuring charges and $21 million in mark-to-market
losses on interest rate swaps, partly offset by a foreign-exchange gain
of $34 million.
Orders in the quarter totalled
$2.15 billion, down from $2.68 billion a year ago, "primarily impacted
by lower CDMA orders in North America and lower orders from the LG-Nortel
joint venture," the company stated.
BCE earnings slide ahead of buyout
TORONTO -- BCE Inc saw a
steep slide in second-quarter profit ahead of the company's pending $35-billion
buyout.
Toronto-based BCE, Canada's
largest telecommunications company, earned $361 million, or 45 cents a
share, in the quarter, compared with $667 million, or 83 cents a share,
from the year-earlier period.
The company said its earnings
per share in the second quarter of 2007 included a gain from Bell Aliant's
sale of Aliant Directory Services and a favourable tax settlement totalled
36 cents a share.
A net addition of 111,000
postpaid wireless subscribers helped drive up total revenue 1.7 percent
to $3.7 billion. It was the biggest quarterly gain in BCE's wireless business
in over two years.
BCE has been undergoing
a deep restructuring ahead of the company being taken private by a consortium
of new owners led by the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan.
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Housing starts slow sharply
TORONTO -- Housing starts
slowed much more sharply than expected in July, as the fevered pace of
condo and other multiple-unit dwelling construction in Ontario cooled,
at least briefly, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp said August 11.
Starts came in at a seasonally
adjusted annual rate of 186,500 units, down from a revised 215,900 units
in June, and were substantially below an average forecast by economists
of 210,000 for July.
This is just the fourth
time since January 2003 that this rate has come in at below 200,000 units,
the most recent occasion being in December of last year, CMHC statistics
show.
The housing agency released
its data as figures from Statistics Canada showed that new-housing prices
increased at their slowest pace in more than six years in June 3.5
perent year over year, compared with 4.1 percent in May. This continued
a slowdown that started in September, 2006, and Statscan attributed the
latest leg to a softening market in Western Canada.