. May 23, 2008 SouthAmerica: I guess some people will be surprised about what I have to say about Petróleo Brasileiro SA on my next article that is almost ready for publishing. In the meantimeâ¦. ***** âNew Find Fuels Speculation Brazil Will Be a Power in Oilâ By JOHN LYONS and DAVID LUHNOW May 23, 2008; Page B1 The Wall Street Journal A flurry of activity by emerging oil giant Petróleo Brasileiro SA is heating up speculation that Brazil may have enough deep-water oil to propel it into the big leagues of global oil exporters and ease pressure on soaring oil prices. Petrobras, as the state-controlled company is known, announced its latest discovery late Wednesday, saying it struck oil some 155 miles off the coast of São Paulo state. The new field is close to the company's massive Tupi field, which was discovered two years ago and remains the world's largest find since 2000 and the biggest in the Western Hemisphere since 1976. Petrobras wouldn't say how much oil the new field might hold. The find is the latest in a string of successful oil strikes by the company, raising hopes that Brazil will be the next big thing in global oil. With oil prices setting new highs, big discoveries in Brazil would boost the energy industry's optimism that it could deliver enough oil to keep pace with fast-growing demand. In trading Thursday on the New York Mercantile Exchange, oil price fell $2.36, or 1.8%, to $130.81 a barrel, partly on the prospect of more supply flowing from Brazil. Major finds in Brazil would be especially welcomed in the U.S., providing a new source of oil from its own hemisphere. The focus of attention is the Santos Basin, a collection of potential oil fields buried under miles of ocean water, earth and a stubborn layer of salt. Exploratory drilling in different fields has produced very similar oil, fueling a tantalizing new theory: that the basin could be one contiguous megadeposit of crude. Despite the excitement, there is good reason for skepticism, observers say. Exploring and extracting oil from ultradeep waters is an expensive and risky proposition. The salt that sits atop the potential fields adds technical challenges because it shifts and is prone to sudden pressure changes. And despite the advances in geological imaging technology, it is impossible to know the quantity and quality of oil hidden in a deposit until it starts flowing -- a process that takes years. "This is still at a very early stage," said Peter Jackson, senior director of exploration and development at Cambridge Energy Research Associates, an industry consulting firm. "In a play that size and scale, they've still got a lot of appraisal and homework to do to establish the likely holdings, and then they've got a lot of work to do to deliver it." Some investors aren't waiting to place bets. The publicly traded slice of Petrobras has risen so much this year that the company's market value has surpassed that of household names like General Electric Co. and Microsoft Corp. Actions by Petrobras and the Brazilian government have fueled investors' enthusiasm. Brazil called off planned auctions of drilling concessions at Santos Basin blocks after the Tupi find was confirmed late last year. Some observers read that as a sign that the Brazilians believe the basin is swelling with oil, and want better terms on any new auctions. Meantime, Petrobras is ramping up its deep-water drilling capacity at a furious pace. This week, the company, which has already leased about 80% of the world fleet of vessels capable of drilling in deep water, announced plans to lease 40 more drilling vessels and semi-submersible oil platforms starting in 2017. Petrobras also has announced that it will hire 14,000 more workers and set up a new management division for drilling through salt. Adding to the excitement was an apparent slip of the tongue last month by Brazil's oil-industry regulator, Haroldo Lima. Mr. Lima said the Santos Basin could contain about 33 billion barrels of oil, which would make it the world's biggest find in decades. Mr. Lima later retracted the statement, saying he was referring to published speculation by oil analysts in a trade journal. Even with the oil that has already been found, Brazil, which was a net oil importer until recent years, seems almost certain to join Venezuela and Mexico in the ranks of top Latin American oil producers. For a country starting to shed its past as a volatile developing nation, such a bonanza could be a mixed blessing. Oil money will fill government coffers, but it could also tempt Brazil to follow the profligate habits of other major oil exporters. Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121150123181115931.html?mod=googlenews_wsj .
. May 23, 2008 SouthAmerica: I canât find a website that I saw that had pictures of the dam system that they are going to build on the Madeira River. That website gave all kinds of interesting information about this particular project, and the damage that it will cause to the environment of that entire area. Here is another website with some info about that project. Hydroelectric dams on the madeira river File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as HTMLThe Madeira River, the second largest river in the Amazon, is considered a jewel of ... The Madeira River is the major affluent of the Amazon River,with a ...www.foei.org/en/get-involved/take-action/RIO_MADEIRA.pdf .
. June 6, 2008 SouthAmerica: I enjoyed reading Paul Krugmansâ column today since he mentioned a number of things very familiar to me. He even mentioned a joke about my country â Brazil. But I donât mind his joke since I have a good sense of humor. The only thing is that very soon that joke it will not apply to Brazil anymore if we continue in the path of economic development of the last few years. Basically for all practical purposes the future has arrived for Brazil. I always enjoy when a guru such as Esther Dyson is interviewed on The Charlie Rose Show â she is a very smart and an outstanding woman. When my book editor told me that my book it was going to be available also in ebook format I was excited and thought that more people would buy the book in that format since it was easy to download the book compared to buying it from Barnes & Noble, Borders or Amazon.com. But it turned out that I never sold a single copy of the book in ebook format, I guess most people still prefer to get the hard or soft cover version of the book. ****** âBits, Bands and Booksâ By PAUL KRUGMAN Published: June 6, 2008 The New York Times Do you remember what it was like back in the old days when we had a New Economy? In the 1990s, jobs were abundant, oil was cheap and information technology was about to change everything. Then the technology bubble popped. Many highly touted New Economy companies, it turned out, were better at promoting their images than at making money â although some of them did pioneer new forms of accounting fraud. After that came the oil shock and the food shock, grim reminders that weâre still living in a material world. So much, then, for the digital revolution? Not so fast. The predictions of â90s technology gurus are coming true more slowly than enthusiasts expected â but the future they envisioned is still on the march. In 1994, one of those gurus, Esther Dyson, made a striking prediction: that the ease with which digital content can be copied and disseminated would eventually force businesses to sell the results of creative activity cheaply, or even give it away. Whatever the product â software, books, music, movies â the cost of creation would have to be recouped indirectly: businesses would have to âdistribute intellectual property free in order to sell services and relationships.â For example, she described how some software companies gave their product away but earned fees for installation and servicing. But her most compelling illustration of how you can make money by giving stuff away was that of the Grateful Dead, who encouraged people to tape live performances because âenough of the people who copy and listen to Grateful Dead tapes end up paying for hats, T-shirts and performance tickets. In the new era, the ancillary market is the market.â Indeed, it turns out that the Dead were business pioneers. Rolling Stone recently published an article titled âRockâs New Economy: Making Money When CDs Donât Sell.â Downloads are steadily undermining record sales â but todayâs rock bands, the magazine reports, are finding other sources of income. Even if record sales are modest, bands can convert airplay and YouTube views into financial success indirectly, making money through âpublishing, touring, merchandising and licensing.â What other creative activities will become mainly ways to promote side businesses? How about writing books? According to a report in The Times, the buzz at this yearâs BookExpo America was all about electronic books. Now, e-books have been the coming, but somehow not yet arrived, thing for a very long time. (Thereâs an old Brazilian joke: âBrazil is the country of the future â and always will be.â E-books have been like that.) But we may finally have reached the point at which e-books are about to become a widely used alternative to paper and ink. Thatâs certainly my impression after a couple of monthsâ experience with the device feeding the buzz, the Amazon Kindle. Basically, the Kindleâs lightness and reflective display mean that it offers a reading experience almost comparable to that of reading a traditional book. This leaves the user free to appreciate the convenience factor: the Kindle can store the text of many books, and when you order a new book, itâs literally in your hands within a couple of minutes. Itâs a good enough package that my guess is that digital readers will soon become common, perhaps even the usual way we read books. How will this affect the publishing business? Right now, publishers make as much from a Kindle download as they do from the sale of a physical book. But the experience of the music industry suggests that this wonât last: once digital downloads of books become standard, it will be hard for publishers to keep charging traditional prices. Indeed, if e-books become the norm, the publishing industry as we know it may wither away. Books may end up serving mainly as promotional material for authorsâ other activities, such as live readings with paid admission. Well, if it was good enough for Charles Dickens, I guess itâs good enough for me. Now, the strategy of giving intellectual property away so that people will buy your paraphernalia wonât work equally well for everything. To take the obvious, painful example: news organizations, very much including this one, have spent years trying to turn large online readership into an adequately paying proposition, with limited success. But theyâll have to find a way. Bit by bit, everything that can be digitized will be digitized, making intellectual property ever easier to copy and ever harder to sell for more than a nominal price. And weâll have to find business and economic models that take this reality into account. It wonât all happen immediately. But in the long run, we are all the Grateful Dead. Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/06/o..._r=1&scp=2&sq=Paul+Krugman&st=nyt&oref=slogin .
. June 6, 2008 SouthAmerica: A friend of mine asked me the other day some questions about the subject of higher education in Brazil. We talked about how Brazilians donât need to go to other countries to get a good higher education since Brazil has very good schools. Here is an example of what I am talking about. The enclosed article published by The Financial Times last month mentioned one of these high quality schools - Fundação Dom Cabral. ****** âBrazilian school that is a mine of knowledgeâ By Jonathan Wheatley Published: May 12, 2008 The Financial Times (UK) There is an air of wilderness tamed about the campus of the Fundação Dom Cabral, high in the hilly uplands of Minas Gerais state, Brazil. Its post-modern buildings sit at the edge of a man-made lake, in a valley flooded to drive a hydro-electric generating station built by a nearby gold miner. The surrounding hills are almost solid iron ore - one open-cast mine can be seen, and its explosions heard, across the valley - keeping vegetation scrubby (Minas Gerais means, approximately, "mines of all kinds"). The Fundação Dom Cabral was created in 1976, when it was spun off from the PontifÃcia Universidade Católica of Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, the state capital about half an hour down the road. But its unusual business model and subsequent growth date from the 1990s, when, says Dalton Penedo Sardenberg, head of business partnerships, Brazilian entrepreneurs were facing "the common enemy of market liberalisation". Brazilian businesses had been cosseted throughout the country's "economic miracle", the rapid post-war industrialisation that delivered what today would be called Chinese rates of growth in the 1960s and 1970s. But, from the early 1990s, trade barriers were torn down, forcing many companies to make radical changes in order to survive. That was when a group of business leaders got together with the FDC to create a forum for discussion that quickly developed into the CTE, or Centre for Business Technology - the first of the FDC's trademark business partnerships. The chief executives and senior directors of about 25 big companies meet in summits to discuss the challenges facing them. "The big emphasis has always been on generating knowledge that could be applied to those companies and to the market as a whole," says Mr Sardenberg. The CTE still operates, but the challenges facing companies have changed and a new version is in preparation for launch this year. However, the idea of partnership and applied knowledge remains fundamental to everything the FDC does - whether it be "off-the-shelf" open courses or tailor-made courses for individual companies. The FDC does not offer ordinary post-graduate MBA courses. It does have post-graduate specialisation and Executive MBA programmes, but its speciality is tailor-made, highlyfocused courses often involving immersion at the FDC or at a site in another Brazilian city for middle- to top-level management. Courses are sold to companies, not to individuals, and aim to deliver results in the form of programmes to address their targets or concerns. One programme that typifies this approach is known as PAEX, or Partners for Excellence. Middle- to senior-level management of medium-sized, non-competing companies take part in tailor-made courses designed to address shared management challenges. Courses typically total 400 hours spread over a year, and include a period in which the FDC's teachers visit participating companies to help implement the solutions developed over the year. This appears to take the FDC into the realm of consultancy rather than teaching. But Mozart Pereira dos Santos, one of the FDC's directors, is quick to point out the difference: "We aim to provide permanent development for company executives, rather than deliver the kind of specific solutions that consultants offer." The FDC will sell your company a single, tailor-made lecture, if you want. More commonly it will sell short, customised courses. Some 22,472 executives were trained during 2007. Of 47,821 teaching hours, about half (23,300 hours) were given in customised courses. Partnerships - the CTE, PAEX and PDA, a programme for shareholder development aimed at family-owned companies - took up 9,076 hours. Post-graduate specialisation and Executive MBA courses, in areas such as logistics, finances and marketing, took up a bit more than a quarter (13,228), and other open courses, 2,217. The FDC is quickly building a reputation internationally and has alliances with Insead of France, the Kellogg School of Management of the US and the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia, Canada. It regularly attracts high-profile visiting professors and speakers - Hank Paulson, the US Treasury secretary was one speaker last year. The school recently embarked on a development strategy based on three priorities. First is internationalisation. "Companies are increasingly international and if we don't become a global supplier we will end up being left behind," says Elson Valim Ferreira, director. The FDC has many multinational clients in Brazil and is pitching courses in other countries. The second priority is generation of knowledge. The FCC already has a huge database of case studies. Now it is building a "centre for the development of management knowledge" - one of five new buildings currently planned on the campus, in addition to a new office just opened in São Paulo. Third, is development of the FDC's own organisation to meet new global challenges: a stronger focus on hiring from overseas, especially from developed countries and from Brazil's developing market peers in Russia, India and China. Source: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/170b809c-1fbd-11dd-9216-000077b07658.html .
. June 6, 2008 SouthAmerica: Today The Financial Times published a good article about Globo Television Network. I know a little about Globo TV since I worked for that Network for a few years and I met Roberto Marinho a number of times when he used to come to visit the New York office of Globo TV. I wrote an article about Globo when Roberto Marinho died in 2003. August 2003 â âRoberto Marinho â The Most Powerful Man in Brazilâ By: Ricardo C. Amaral http://www.brazzillog.com/2003/html/articles/aug03/p123aug03.htm ******* âBrazil's winning game-planâ By Jonathan Wheatley Published: June 6 2008 The Financial Times (UK) As they say in football-mad Brazil, you don't make changes to a winning team. Rede Globo, Brazil's largest and the world's fourth largest television network, has taken the injunction to heart: for 30 years, its weekday evening line-up has hardly changed. Television executives the world over scramble to change schedules to suit fickle tastes. Globo sticks to its game-plan. From 6pm to 10pm, Monday to Friday, viewers get the following: a soap opera; local news; a soap opera; national news; another soap opera. Thereafter they get football on at least one evening a week and a Hollywood film on another. A mix of sitcoms and popular-interest current affairs fills up the rest. Weekends and daytime weekdays are dominated by another staple: auditorium shows, in which household-name presenters serve up celebrity interviews, live acts, competitions and real-life dramas. This, says Octávio Florisbal, Globo's director-general, is one secret of the network's success: a rigid, "horizontal" schedule - unlike the varied, "vertical" schedules common in the US and Europe - that is best suited to capturing viewers and making them loyal. Another secret is the fact that Globo produces almost all its own programming, using writers, actors, journalists and technicians who are all tied to the network and create programmes in an instantly recognisable house style. And what a style it is. Globo's space-age logo, which goes "bling, bling", says it all. Its soap operas, or novelas , feature recognisably Brazilian types from around the country (a heavy bias towards the Rio de Janeiro- São Paulo axis notwithstanding) in recognisably Brazilian settings behaving in recognisably Brazilian ways. They deal with issues of daily concern to viewers, such as crime, under-age sex and drug-taking - except that this is not quite Brazil, because everybody and everything is just a bit, often a lot, better-looking and less alarming than in real life. The poor, especially, do rather better in Globo's world than they do in the real one: they are better fed and clothed, get on better with their middle-class employers and live in favelas - Brazil's ubiquitous urban shanty-towns - that leave the real thing literally in the dust. "The Brazilian people face enough difficulties in their everyday lives," Florisbal says. "They don't want to see more suffering. That's not what they want from Globo's novelas ." But if Globo is not changing, its viewers are. The economy has been picking up and earnings have been rising for some time. In the past two years alone, 20m people have entered the middle-income bracket, which now comprises 46 per cent of Brazil's almost 190m people. That means more people should have more time and money to do other things than sit loyally through Globo's horizontal schedule. Bars, restaurants and cinemas are obvious threats, although middle income Brazilians are not rich enough yet for these to make too much of an impact. The internet and pay-TV have caused concern, although their effect is marginal; pay-TV is present in just 6 or 7 per cent of Brazil's 50m households. Competition for people's leisure time, it seems, does not come primarily from these sources - the bugbears of American and European schedulers. What rising incomes have produced is fierce competition for television audiences and the advertising they attract. Figures on audience and advertising share are hard to come by. Ibope, a market research company, supplies them to broadcasters, who only release what they please. Daniel Castro, a television columnist at Folha de S. Paulo, says Globo's share of television advertising is holding steady at about 70 per cent. But this share has come under threat. Globo says its average audience from 7am to midnight has fallenbut it does not reveal its prime-time evening audience, which Castro says has declined over the past three years. Who is eating into Globo's share? Not, apparently, its traditional rival channels, SBT and Bandeirantes, but a relative newcomer, Rede Record, with a new winning formula that has been in place since 2004. And that formula is: copy Globo. Alexandre Raposo, Record's head of television, says that after a lot of research it came up with a new horizontal schedule consisting of novelas , news, football and auditorium shows. Its weekday prime-time schedule differs from Globo's only in the order of the novelas and news programmes. The result is unsurprising yet still striking: Record's novelas look just the same as Globo's, down to the actors, the sets and even the opening credits and graphics. "Of course, this is our strategy," Raposo says. "We are using the conditioning that is already present in the viewer. And 80 per cent of our professionals are from Globo." Record has poached so many of Globo's people in the past couple of years that it is a wonder Globo has any left. Yet Record's novelas differ from Globo's. Vidas Opostas (Opposite Lives), which ran for 240 episodes in 2006 and 2007, was a novela set in a favela that actually looked like a favela , complete with drug-dealers and corrupt policemen. It picked up a string of awards and healthy audiences. Record followed that success with Caminhos do Coração (Ways of the Heart), in which middle-class characters leading ordinary lives are beset by mutants shooting death-rays from their eyes, an allegory for the evils - from petty crime to corrupt politicians - that plague Brazilian life. In ultra-realism and the surreal, Record has found ways of adding to Globo's winning formula. Earlier this year, Caminhos did for Record what no Brazilian network has managed before: it notched up a prime-time audience more than half the size of Globo's. Globo is not panicking yet. Its strategy remains the same: no change. "As the market leader, with the audience we have, we can only change very slowly," says Florisbal. Meanwhile, it seems that Globo runs the risk of being eaten by its own clone. Sounds like a novela for Record. Source: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8366b88c-338c-11dd-ba8a-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1 .
Some interesting snippets, Ricardo. Are most of them available on Brazzil.com? I read some more about José Bonifácio, and he did a lot of interesting things after being commissioned to go to Europe to learn mineralogy and about the development there. Not being a good speaker and seemingly a bit arrogant, it's still a shame he died forgotten and poor soon after having been accused of treason. As the emperor's mentor he was the seed for brazilian abolition and democratic change after his studies in Europe. Incidentally, my neighbour's grandfather was at some time a lawyer for the emperor or something. He's moved back to Florianopolis, though - leaving his house for sale but wanting to end his days in his home town. Hehe, with the mayor gone too behind me - I only got one neighbour left in close proximity. I don't think the brazilian educational system is great, although there are of course many smart people here. Too often the example to be followed is one of not following the law to become rich here. The lack in confidence by parents is one of the contributing factors to them undermining the efforts by the educational system. And I'm not talking about the social elite here - but the average brazilian.
. Gringinho: Some interesting snippets, Ricardo. Are most of them available on Brazzil.com? ****** June 6, 2008 SouthAmerica: No. I didnât post them on Brazzil.com. ****** Gringinho: I read some more about José Bonifácio, and he did a lot of interesting things after being commissioned to go to Europe to learn mineralogy and about the development there. ****** SouthAmerica: You reduced Jose Bonifacioâs impact in Brazilian History to 2 sentences giving a summary of his accomplishments and your final conclusion is not correct. I know a lot about Jose Bonifacio de Andrada e Silva because I had to do a lot of research about his life when I wrote a book about Jose Bonifacio and his impact on Brazilian independence. I had to read a ton of material during the process of writing my book since there are over 100 books written in the last 200 years that discuss Jose Bonifacio in one way or another. When I was a kid I used to go with my father or my grandmother to visit her oldest sister and what always called my attention on these visits was that her house looked like a museum honoring Jose Bonifacio. (She was a great-great-granddaughter of Jose Bonifacio de Andrada e Silva - The Patriarch of Independence of Brazil.) I donât know if you know anything about United States history, but to give you a comparison in a nutshell: Jose Bonifacio de Andrada e Silvaâs impact in Brazilian history can be compared with the combined impact that George Washington, Ben Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison had in American history. I am lucky since I have read a lot about Jose Bonifacio, the French Revolution (an important and influential time on Jose Bonifacioâs intellectual life), and also American history. As a result I have a better understanding and appreciation about Jose Bonifacioâs accomplishments in Brazilian history than most people. ****** Gringinho: Not being a good speaker and seemingly a bit arrogant, it's still a shame he died forgotten and poor soon after having been accused of treason. As the emperor's mentor he was the seed for brazilian abolition and democratic change after his studies in Europe. ****** SouthAmerica: Yes he was arrogant and fearless and that combination made him a great commander under the Duke of Wellington when they did beat the French armies on 3 different French invasions of Portugal from 1808 to 1812. And Jose Bonifacio received many honors during that time for his bravery during the battles, and some of the honors even mentioned that it was a miracle that he survived these battles because he was always one of the first people charging against the enemies on the front lines. Among other things his arrogance and superior intellect that compelled him to be the architect of Brazilian independence, and write most of the documents that gave the foundations for Brazilian independence â one of these documents still considered the most important document in Brazilian history. Jose Bonifacio had the greatest authority ever giving to anyone in Brazil - In the history of Brazil never before or after Jose Bonifacio had so much authority and accomplished so much. Jose Bonifacio was not about money, he did not care about money and he had many opportunities over the years to get all kinds of land and tittles and he turned it down every time. If he wanted he could have been the first Emperor of Brazil, but he turned it down a number of times since he did not want to be Emperor of Brazil. He did not die forgotten like you said. At the end of his life he was very sick and spent most of his time tutoring his youngest daughter and he died from cancer in 1838. But the influence of the Andrada Family had not diminished and his brothers Antonio Carlos and Martin Francisco were the most important figures that forced the emancipation of Dom Pedro II to become the second Emperor of Brazil in 1840 â and Antonio Carlos became the new Prime Minister, and Martin Francisco became the Finance Minister for the second time. My great-great-grandfather Jose Bonifacio de Andrada e Silva (O Moco) â they called him O Moco to distinguish him from his grandfather Jose Bonifacio de Andrada e Silva (O Patriarch of Independence). It gets a little confusing because Martim Francisco got married with his niece a daughter of his older brother Jose Bonifacio. And my great-great-grandfather was a son of Martim Francisco. Martim Francisco played a major role in Brazilian history â besides the fact that he is equivalent to Thomas Jefferson in US history â Martim Francisco wrote the document of the declaration of independence of Brazil. Martim Francisco when he was Finance Minister was the person who put in place the financial strategy to compliment the plans of his brother about Brazilian independence. Martim Francisco it is considered the first great financier in Brazilian history, and he served as finance minister for a second time in 1840. Jose Bonifacio, Martim Francisco and later my great-great-grandfather were all considered great abolitionists and they set up the framework to end slavery in Brazil. ****** Gringinho: I don't think the Brazilian educational system is great, although there are of course many smart people here. Too often the example to be followed is one of not following the law to become rich here. The lack in confidence by parents is one of the contributing factors to them undermining the efforts by the educational system. And I'm not talking about the social elite here - but the average Brazilian. ****** SouthAmerica: To put it in the right perspective. We could say the same about the educational system in the United States â most of the US educational system stinks today, but at the same time you also have to put the spotlight on the great educational institutions around the United States such as Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, University of California at Berkley and so onâ¦. You are looking only the bad side of the Brazilian educational system â there are good parts as well. .