The purchase of the airports and other assets from the Spanish firm Abertis will cost a total of 284 million euros. The move, which does still require the approval of minority shareholders and US regulators, will see ADC & HAS Airports Worldwide add to its portfolio, which includes interests in airports in Costa Rica and Ecuador.

The plans involve various tax breaks, including a proposal to cut the tax on some of the income generated from producing shale gas from 62 percent to 30 percent. The government claims that this would make the UK the most generous regime for shale gas in the world.

Alibaba’s announcement that it has experienced a 71 percent jump in quarterly sales to $1.4 billion has resulted in shares in its owner Yahoo rising more than ten percent on Wall Street. The figures eclipse those of Yahoo’s overall performance, which included a 13 percent fall in advertising revenue for the same period.

It was in 1929 that O. T. H. Beier, a young pioneer living in Germany, made a life-changing decision, going against the wishes of his family by leaving his home and travelling to Durban to establish himself as a wool merchant. Little could Beier and his family have realised that with this decision he would be sowing the seeds for what would become a business legacy that continues in 2013.

When a successful formula is discovered in the business world, it’s copied and becomes part of standard operating procedure throughout entire industries.

The newest SOP trend among leading businesses? – Focusing on employee and family well-being, says Gary Kunath, who was honored nationally as Businessman of the Year and recognized with a dinner hosted by the President of the United States.

With the internet age in full swing and very much a part of everyday life in the Western world and developed nations, it is in the fast-developing nations across the world that the expansion of the digital sector is most prevalent today. One such country that is currently experiencing a rapid expansion in internet usage is Thailand, where access to the technology has become an increasing necessity, not only in business, but also in personal life.

At the moment, though Devex has opened a few offices in other countries where clients have adopted its systems, it is firmly a Brazilian company, with 85 percent of its $35 million annual revenue generated domestically. However there is no better seed-bed for new technology than Brazil, and forward thinking global mining groups are now taking notice of Brazil not just as a country with huge resources to extract but as a developer of smart ways of doing that.

Packaging specialist Coresa was established in Chile in 1966. “We started making flexible containers from polypropylene in the 1980s and also some fabrics for specific applications,” says managing director Jose Ignacio Arrate, “so we’ve been making these products now for thirty years, and the company has been in existence for nearly fifty years altogether.”

BHP said that production had jumped by nine percent to 187 million tonnes for the year to 30 June, news that analysts have reacted to by claiming it meant that the commodity giants were betting on continued strong demand from China, despite the country's economy seeing a slowdown in growth.