Japan has been notable for its avant-gardism, its leadership, and its competitiveness in the area of green technology and clean energy, considerably in terms of its investment in research and development for Smart and Renewable Energy efficiency technologies. In addition, Japan also tends to be the world’s second-largest investor in renewable energy, reaching a threshold of 23 GW of installed renewable energy sources (including 9 GW of hydro power and 5.6 GW of solar power).
World Smart Energy Week 2017, is organized by Reed Exhibitions Japan bringing 1,570 exhibitors including 9 renewable energy shows- FC EXPO 2017 -13th Hydrogen & Fuel Cell Expo, PV EXPO 2017-10th Int’l Photovoltaic Power Generation Expo, PV SYSTEM EXPO- 8th Int’l Photovoltaic Power Generation Expo, BATTERY JAPAN- 8th Int’l Rechargeable Battery Expo, 7th INT’L SMART GRID EXPO, WIND EXPO 2017-5th Int’l Wind Energy Expo & Conference, 3rd ENERGY MARKET LIBERALISATION EXPO, 2nd INT'L BIOMASS EXPO and 1st THERMAL POWER EXPO-1st Next-generation Thermal Power Generation Expo.
70,000 professionals from the sector are expected to visit, with simultaneous BtoB conferences and seminars are being held on major themes comprising expert panelists. World Smart Energy Week 2017 is welcoming internationally renowned green energy specialists, and influential figures from the business milieu to engage with the business opportunities.
There are plenty of business opportunities to be seized for Non-Japanese companies in Japan under the clean and green energy sector Banner. All professionals and companies having products in the following domains are welcome participate and visit the expo. to Electricity, energy efficiency; Natural gas,Petroleum, Petrochemicals, Solar energy (cells, modules, panels)
Wind energy, Biomass, Hydrogen, Nanotechnologies, Processing technology/products
Storage technology/products, Analytical technology/products, Hydrogen and fuel cell technology
Photovoltaic system integration/installation technology, Technology relating to smart grid systems
Eco-construction products,Insulation, refrigeration, climate control, heating systems, Automation systems, Cogeneration systems and all Products and services consisting of energy efficiency.
Japan is a country with high purchasing power, and exploring avenues to partner with Global companies on many dimensions. As such, quality and relevance are equally important along with pricing factors, which, for example, allows Global companies to explore business and trading options with Japanese counterpart companies.
World Smart Energy Week 2017, is held during March 1st to 3rd 2017 at Tokyo Big sight; invites Global green technology sector companies to exhibit and showcase the technologies/products there, and as well invites professionals operating in the sector and seeking to learn more about the most recent advances.
The first freight train has set off from China to the UK on the reintroduced historic Silk Road trade route.
The train, carrying household items, garments, textiles, bags and suitcases, will take around 18 days to travel more than 12,000km.
The train, which left on New Year’s Day from Yiwu in eastern Zhejiang province, will pass through Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, Poland, Germany, Belgium and France before arriving in London.
According to the China Railway Corporation (CRC), London will be the 15th European city to receive freight train services from China.
The CRC said the service would “improve China-Britain trade ties, strengthen connectivity with western Europe, while better serving China’s Belt and Road initiative, an infrastructure and trade network connecting Asia with Europe and Africa along ancient trade routes”, China’s state-owned news agency Xinhua reported.
Under China’s officially named One Belt, One Road initiative, billions of dollars will be ploughed into infrastructure along historic trade routes in a bid to shift the world’s centre of economic gravity.
China is the EU’s second biggest trading partner after the US and in 2015 the EU imported goods worth €350.5bn from China, up 4.4% on 2014.
| From Supply Management | January 3, 2017 |
∩ Company car tax perk to return: expert
∩ Bill English leaves on Monday for nearly nine days in Brussels, London and Berlin.
∩ Japan World Smart Energy Week 2017
∩ Freight train running from China to UK is a first
∩ Bellamy's organic infant formula derails in China
∩ Amazon files patent for flying warehouse
∩ Belgian deputy PM to discuss free-trade deal with EU and NZ
∩ Fonterra milk price rises in NZ shops as world dairy prices take a hit
∩ While you were sleeping: Stocks, greenback climb
Emirates, which offers five double-decker A380 services a day out of New Zealand, is welcoming in the new year with special fares to a selection of points around its global network, including Australia, the UK, Europe and Africa.
The Hello 2017 Economy and Business Class fares are also on offer to destinations in Asia and the Middle East, as well as India and the Americas via Dubai
The five daily New Zealand flights – a non-stop service to Dubai from Auckland and three others via Australia, plus a Christchurch service via Sydney – offer the chance to travel all the way by A380 from New Zealand to 17 destinations in Europe among other cities.
From today until January 23 the Hello 2017 fares will include Economy Class return to Australia from $439, Asia $899, Indian sub-continent $1,299, Europe $1,499, United Kingdom and Africa $1,599, the Americas $1,799 and the Middle East $1,899.
Special Business Class fares are also available.
The fares are inclusive of all taxes and are valid for select travel dates. They are subject to availability on specific flights and various conditions apply.
“Emirates likes to welcome in each new year with a special treat for travellers and this year’s offering is no exception,” said Emirates’ New Zealand regional manager, Chris Lethbridge. “In all, we have special fares to more than 80 destinations, including the most popular places on our network.”
In total, Emirates offers connections at its Dubai hub to 38 places in Europe, 22 in Africa and 17 in the Middle East.
Passengers travelling on the three-class, 491-seat A380 aircraft will enjoy spacious cabins and experience a peaceful journey in the world’s quietest long-range jet. They can use the onboard Wi-Fi; indulge in food prepared by international chefs, and be entertained by Emirates’ award-winning ice system which offers over 2,500 channels of inflight entertainment across all cabins.
Emirates has redefined the core experience of premium travel. First Class and Business Class passengers will have access to the A380’s onboard Lounge, with space to mingle whilst enjoying canapés and the beverages prepared by the onboard bartender. First Class passengers can enjoy the aircraft’s First Class Private Suites and experience the aircraft’s signature onboard Shower Spa.
Emirates is the largest operator of the Airbus A380 with 89 in its fleet, and has carried over 65 million passengers on its flagship aircraft since 2008
Bookings can be made through www.emirates.com/nz or phone 0508 364 728.
Le Parisien Determined to Identify What Voters Believe in place of what elites believe they believe.
Paris’ leading daily newspaper, the tabloid Le Parisien-Aujourd’hui en France has outlawed from its pages all poll-based predictions on the pending presidential election.
The centrist popular daily blames unquestioning reliance on polls, known in France as “soundings” to have led to the embarrassing set of circumstances in which Alain Juppe was unanimously predicted to become the successful candidate of the right-of-centre Republican Party.
In the event, and as MSC Newswire’s European correspondent had predicted, (see our story below) the successful candidate was Francois Fillon who now becomes the favourite to win the pending presidential (i.e. general) election.
In the same forecast, MSC Newswire had also predicted that current president Francois Hollande would not be the Socialist Party candidate in the election. In the event, and several days after our prediction, Mr Hollande stood down.
Meanwhile, according to Le Parisien, the elimination of polls, soundings, and other tendentious content will be replaced by plain and simple reporting.
The objective being to report what people are in fact thinking in place of the former practice of reporting on what a narrow elite believe, or want to believe, everyday people are thinking.
According to our European correspondent, Alain Juppe’s “Happy Identity” slogan was only finding approval among the media.
Similarly Mr Juppe’s involvement with a funds scandal, which had caused him to live in Canada, was taken seriously by voters, if not the media.
Also, the idea of a Clintonesque co-presidency (see front page), while attractive to the media, nonetheless dismayed the public at large, as it did voters in the United States presidential election.
| From the MSCNewswire reporters' desk | Thursday January 5 2017 |
Our foreign correspondent forecast the Trump victory, and now previews the fall of France’s Francois Hollande ....
| Napier, MSCNewsWire, Nov 24, 2016 | - The predicted fall of France’s president Francois Hollande in next year’s election will bring to a close the initial era of political correctness. He is scheduled to become the third big-economy leader victim within less than a year of the accelerating electoral power of the non-political class.
Mr Hollande is known as the King of Consensus. His determination prior to any decision to canvass every opinion and nuance in his own Socialist Party and also in the string of other French leftward parties conveyed an impression of dithering in the face of islamic insurgency.
Instead of being seen to be heading a tough reaction Mr Hollande’s nature lead him to be more at home leading candle lit marches, vigils and uttering trite panaceas in the face of the emergency. It was left to his prime minister Manuel Valls to express the public mood about the threat throughout France of rampant religious extremism.
Worse still, Mr Hollande was viewed as being over-preoccupied by the star studded Paris climate conference with its breathtaking ritual insights into the blindingly obvious instead of with the much more visible and immediate terrorist threat
The most visible manifestation of Mr Hollande’s pending loss of the presidency is the number of his own hand-picked cabinet members who are deserting the sinking ship. The “frondeurs” as the rebels are known are setting themselves up, they are still in their 30s and 40s, for the 2022 election.
There is though in the anticipated disappearance of Mr Hollande a signal point of difference with those other landmark scupperings of the political classes, Brexit and Trump. The difference is that this time everyone is expecting it.
The winner of the French Republican Party primaries is now looked to as the winner of the presidency. This is looking, in fact, increasingly like former premier Francois Fillon.Mr Hollande’s political career has been an inch-by-inch bureaucratic progression characterised by a reverse Clinton-effect process.
His life-mate Segolene Royale (pictured above with Hollande) with whom he has four children was the glamorous one. Her attempt to crack the French version of the glass ceiling was more spectacular than anything attempted by Hillary.
In the event she lost to Sarkozy.
It was now that that the blander Francois entered the lists and in doing so streamlined his approach by parting from Segolene. The go-it-alone Francois now beat the unpopular Nicolas Sarkozy and the ElyseesPalace was his and his Socialist Party’s.
Four and a half years later he looks like a president who knows he can’t win. He is unlikely to hand over to the rather more decisive figure of his prime minister Manuel Valls.
No major economy leader, not even President Obama, personifies so closely as does Francois Hollande the twin pillars of diversity and multiculturalism which in France’s case are supercharged by the Revolutionary code of the Rights of Man.
Few doubt his sincerity of purpose. It is just that as with the other casualties of this new wave politics, the Clintons, he found himself reading from an out-of-date script.
Cinch is the brainchild of Jake Jackson, an avid camper and entrepreneur from Lancaster in the United Kingdomwho set out on the mission to find the perfect tent for festival-going.
His search was thwarted when he was unable to find one which did everything he wanted it to. Jake’s vision was ambitious, yet simple: a tent should make camping fun, easy and cheap – not suck away your time, money and sanity.
He wanted power. He wanted to access his tent from both the back and the front. He didn’t want to trip over guide ropes or tent pegs. And he wanted to be able to stand up!
So in true entrepreneurial fashion, when he couldn’t buy what he wanted, he set out to make his own. And Cinch was born.
“The concept behind Cinch came from me not being able to find what I wanted on the market,” said founder Jake Jackson, “I loved the idea of a pop up for the festivals I was attending but there was nothing out there that suited my needs fully so I went about designing my own.”
Setting off on a one-man-mission, his first step was to design his perfect tent and get some samples made, which any designer will tell you, is a challenge in itself.
“I sourced different factories and got some samples made up,” he added, “I then got a small test order which went well and made constant changes over the space of a year or two to get the tent to more of an advanced concept.
“We field tested them, listened to customers and changed them accordingly. The most difficult thing was finance to get the project off the ground. It is not really a business that you can start off with too small and scale up steadily, you have to start the business on a much larger scale for it to work.
“I tried for a good couple of years to find funding for the project but due to the economic climate there was no money available for new businesses and ideas. This is when we decided to crowd fund to get the project off the ground and it went amazingly well.”
With his designs ready, Jake took to crowdfunding platform Kickstarter in a bid to fund the project and was overwhelmed by the response. The campaign raised £30,000 in just 14 minutes and became one of the fastest raises ever to appear on the website. Jake decided to extend the campaign and went on to raise a total of £366,905 from 1,341 private investors.
“I’ve had a great experience with crowdfunding,” he said, “but not all of my experiences have been great, I’ve learned a lot along the way. I wasted a lot of time and money making the wrong decisions but always learning from them.
“It’s certainly not easy and you can’t just expect something from nothing with crowdfunding, you have to put the work in, no matter how good you think your product is. Our approach to crowdfunding was to get the product out there before the campaign and gather momentum, this is the hardest thing to do.”
Cinch is now on target to launch its first range of solar powered pop-up tents early next year and Jake has ambitious plans for the future.
He added: “The reception so far has been unbelievable, our customers are so enthusiastic and I really do think it’s got people camping that maybe would have not bothered previously which is fantastic.
“The plans are now to continue to develop the tents and the expand the range. It would be great to develop Cinch into a world wide lifestyle brand that is recognised for the coolest innovative products.”
| A Cinch press release | December 20, 2016 |
Palace of the Alhambra, Spain
By: Charles Nathaniel Worsley (1862-1923)
From the collection of Sir Heaton Rhodes
Oil on canvas - 118cm x 162cm
Valued $12,000 - $18,000
Offers invited over $9,000
Contact: Henry Newrick – (+64 ) 27 471 2242
Mount Egmont with Lake
By: John Philemon Backhouse (1845-1908)
Oil on Sea Shell - 13cm x 14cm
Valued $2,000-$3,000
Offers invited over $1,500
Contact: Henry Newrick – (+64 ) 27 471 2242