IBM cuts hundreds of jobs

IBM Corp. has cut hundreds of jobs across a number of divisions. The cuts Monday represent a sliver of the technology company's nearly 400,000 workers worldwide.

After this, IBM wouldn’t comment. Documents submitted by laid-off workers to the Alliance(at)IBM, a labor union at IBM, indicate that at least 856 jobs were cut. It's not known where the positions were located. IBM, which is based in Armonk, New York, generally doesn't release details of its job cuts.

Monster will buy Yahoo’s HotJob

Recruiting firm Monster will buy Yahoo’s jobsite Hotjob for $225 million in cash. The companies have also entered into a three-year ‘commercial traffic agreement' in which Monster would become provider of career content on Yahoo's home page in the US and Canada.

Monster Worldwide said, "it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire the assets of Yahoo HotJobs, a leading online recruitment website, from Yahoo! for $225 million in cash,"

Yahoo has been cutting cost and closing its underperforming businesses like the GeoCities Web-hosting site. The company also sold its e-mail technology unit Zimbra to VMware for an undisclosed amount.

Toyota are in profit of nets $1.7bn

Toyota said that they are in profit in the final three month of the last year.

Toyota said it expects to sell 150,000 more cars in the fiscal year that ends March 31 than it had initially forecast, thanks to government stimulus programs across the world that have spurred the sales of eco-friendly cars.

It reported a quarterly net profit of 153.2 billion yen ($1.7 billion) and cited stronger sales of the Prius and other ‘‘green’’ models. It reported a 164.7 billion yen loss in the same quarter a year earlier. The results don’t reflect the damage from the massive recalls linked to faulty gas pedals, announced on January 21.

IATA said: Asia now world's biggest air travel market

According to IATA, the Asia-Pacific region has overtaken North America as the world's largest air travel market with 647 million passengers in 2009.

Within Asia, China has eclipsed Japan over the past decade as the region's largest domestic market, with 1,400 aircraft compared with Japan's 540 and 5.7 million weekly seats against 2.6 million in Japan.

Giovanni Bisignani IATA director general told the conference that the Asia-Pacific market will continue to grow rapidly with an estimated 217 million additional air passengers a year in the region by 2013.

He added, "While we see dynamism and diversity within the region, the aspect of Asia-Pacific that excites me most is its potential,"

He said, "More than a quarter of the 2.2 billion people who flew last year, or 647 million people, flew within Asia-Pacific markets. It has eclipsed travel within North America as the traditional leader in traffic numbers."

PwC said: May overtake US by 2020

According to top business consultancy said, China will overtake the US to become the world’s largest economy as early as 2020.

PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC) also said in its report that by 2030 the top 10 world economies could be China, followed by the US, India, Japan, Brazil, Russia, Germany, Mexico, France and Britain.

In 2008, top 10 largest economies countries are US, Japan, China, Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Russia, Spain and Brazil.

John Hawksworth, head of macroeconomics at PwC, said, "These projects suggest that China could be the largest economy in the world as early as 2020 and is likely to be some way ahead of the US by 2030,".

He added, “India could grow even faster than China after 2020, and will also move rapidly up the global GDP rankings" because of its younger and faster growing population as opposed to China,”