News - Carrefour CEO sees Brazil sales surging-report

SAO PAULO, Feb 22 (Reuters) - Carrefour (CARR.PA), the world’s No. 2 retailer, expects sales in Brazil to surge in the next five years because of expansion in Latin America’s largest economy and buoyant consumer demand, newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo said on Monday.

Brazil should account for 20 percent of Carrefour’s global sales in five years, up from 10 percent, Chief Executive Lars Olofsson told Estado in an interview. Though the retailer will focus on short-term sales growth in France, Italy, Spain and Belgium, the biggest opportunities in the medium and long term are in Brazil and China, Olofsson added.

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Article - Spot Luck: Great wildlife encounters in Brazil

From the Amazon jungle to the wetlands of the Pantanal, Brazil is home to an astonishing diversity of plant and animal life

It’s a nose. A very long nose. It swings back and forth in our direction, combing the breeze for our scent like some animated Hoover nozzle. Finding nothing amiss, the owner continues her meandering path towards us. What now?

The long grass parts as her outlandish form emerges into full view. Fifteen metres, 10 metres, eight metres. Surely she has seen us. But the wind is in our favour and those stuck-on currants of eyes are fooling nobody. Now we can see her pickaxe front claws and metre-long witch’s broom of a tail. And, best of all, her passenger: a mini-me clinging gamely to mum’s back like some myopic clanger.

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News - Buy Brazil’s Real Versus Australian Dollar, Morgan Stanley Says

Feb. 17 (Bloomberg) — Investors should buy the real against the Australian dollar, citing the 5 percent decline in the Brazilian currency this year against the Aussie as “too sharp, too fast,” Morgan Stanley said.

“We see value in the Brazilian real at current levels,” Vitali Meschoulam, a New York-based emerging-market strategist, wrote in a research note to clients today. “The Brazilian real’s sell-off was perhaps too sharp, too fast, and is potentially out of line with the large inflows expected for the next several years that will be necessary to finance infrastructure developments.”

Investors should buy the real versus the Australian dollar through 12-month non-deliverable forwards, according to the note.

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Brazil Demand Pushes Job Creation to January Record

Feb. 18 (Bloomberg) — Brazil created a record number of jobs for the month of January, prompting traders to increase bets policy makers may start raising the benchmark interest rate as early as next month to keep inflation in check.

Latin America’s biggest economy created 181,419 jobs last month, led by manufacturers, compared with a loss of 101,748 jobs a year earlier, the Labor Ministry said in a report today in Rio de Janeiro.

Yields on interest rate future contracts maturing May 2010 through July 2011 rose after the report was released. The contract due January 2011, the most traded on Sao Paulo’s BM&F exchange, rose 1 basis point, or 0.01 percentage point, to 10.25 percent at 12:57 p.m. New York time.

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Article - Brazil girds for massive offshore oil extraction

State-run Petrobras is poised to become a major global player

Everything about the shipyard here is colossal — the 4,000-man workforce, the billions sunk into it in capital costs, the half-finished 10-story-high production platforms.

But then, so is the challenge facing Brazil’s state-controlled energy company, Petrobras: developing a group of newly discovered deep-sea oil fields that energy analysts say will catapult this country into the ranks of the world’s petro-powers. The oil pools are 200 miles out in the Atlantic and more than four miles down, under freezing seas, rock and a heavy cap of salt.

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