The Coast Guard will hold a public meeting May 6, 2009 in the Washington, DC area to receive comments on its March 2009 advanced notice of proposed rulemaking on Transportation Worker Identification Credential (TWIC1) reader requirements.
Unnamed Japanese and Korean CE are participants in China’s DiiVA Consortium and will be identified this quarter, Consumer Electronics Daily was told. That’s also when preliminary specs for the Digital Interactive Interface for Video and Audio are expected to be disclosed; they originally were scheduled for publication in March (CED March 25 p5). “Unfortunately, due to confidentiality agreements, we cannot disclose the specifics,” said Steve Yum, spokesman for DiiVA and senior director of product planning at consortium co-founder Synerchip. “We will be in position to announce these things during the first half of this year,” Yum said, in reply to our query. DiiVA was entirely developed by nine Chinese companies. It’s a high-speed, hard-wired conduit for uncompressed video and audio with a bi-directional data channel, the consortium said. It has a maximum bandwidth of 13.5 Gbps. Uncompressed signals can be sent through the network from any DiiVA-enabled source to any DiiVA-enabled TV display, using “commodity cable such as CAT6A,” the consortium said. The 2.25 Gbps bi-directional data channel is capable of sending multiple protocols like HD video and audio, USB, Ethernet, commands “and content protection” simultaneously, the consortium said. It didn’t define what kind of copy-protection was supported -- such as industry-standards HDCP and DTCP -- and Yum didn’t provide a hard answer. “We recognize that content protection and broad-based industry support are very important to get this technology adopted, and we are working to make sure those issues are resolved when this technology will go to market,” he told us. Hollywood studios aren’t likely to approve any home-networking system that lacks controls to prevent premium content from escaping the home environment and becoming distributed on the Internet or elsewhere without authorization.
H.H. Gregg got a lift from Circuit City’s demise, the 110-store regional chain said Tuesday, upgrading its earnings estimate for its fiscal year that ended March 31. “The closure of a major competitor led to a pick-up in traffic and strong buying opportunities,” President Dennis May said. It now expects to report earnings per share of $1.08 to $1.11 for the year, up from its previous estimate of 85 cents to 95 cents and better than the EPS of $1.07 it posted for fiscal 2008, it said. It also expects to report fiscal 2009 sales of about $1.4 billion. For Q4, it expects to report sales of about $365 million, a 13 percent increase from Q4 2008. Q4 comparable store sales fell 6.5 percent from a year ago, but that was better than the 7 to 11 percent decline it had predicted. It expects Q4 EPS to come in at 39 cents to 42 cents, up from 32 cents in Q4 2008. The Q4 results “were driven by better than expected performance in sales, gross margin and expense leverage,” said May. The retailer’s “cost savings, inventory management and working capital initiatives drove higher operating efficiencies throughout the quarter” as well, he said. But he said “the overall environment remains challenging,” and it will “face our most difficult same store sales comparison of the year during the first half” of fiscal 2010, which he said “will be impacted by a larger seasonal concentration of appliances in our sales mix, a shift in timing of the Easter holiday, and the lapping of the 2008 stimulus checks.” The updated forecast was based on unaudited preliminary results and the retailer doesn’t plan to report final fiscal 2009 and Q4 results until June, it said.
The International Trade Administration has made a preliminary affirmative countervailing duty determination that countervailable subsidies are being provided to producers and exporters of commodity matchbooks from India.
The International Trade Administration is revoking the antidumping duty order, effective April 1, 2009, on gray portland cement and clinker from Mexico (cement order) pursuant to the final results of its changed circumstances review, and is terminating the five-year sunset review.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection has issued a notice announcing that the calendar year 2009 in-quota ("low duty") tariff rate quota quantity for tuna and skipjack (tuna), in airtight containers, not in oil, weighing with their contents not over 7 kilograms each, that is not the product of any U.S. insular possession, as described in HTS 1604.14.22 (6% duty) has been set at 18,457,467 kg.
Standard & Poor’s assigned a preliminary BB unsecured debt rating to Frontier Communications’ shelf registration. It assigned a BB issue rating and a 3 recovery rating to the company’s proposed $300 senior unsecured notes due 2014.
The International Trade Administration frequently issues notices on antidumping and countervailing duty orders, investigations, etc. which Broker Power considers to be "minor" in importance as they concern actions that occur after an order is issued, neither announce nor cause any changes to an order's duty rates, scope, affected firms, or effective period, etc.
The International Trade Administration has issued its final results of the antidumping duty administrative review of granular polytetrafluoroethylene resin from Italy for the period of August 1, 2006 through July 31, 2007.
The World Trade Organization frequently posts communications to WTO members on issues that involve the U.S. The following are short summaries of such issues for March 16-31, 2009: