The Costa Rica Star recently reported about America Movil moving into Costa Rica to offer Television services with a 15 year license. America Movil, one of the leading telecom carriers in South America, has recently gained a 15-year license to market its cable television in Costa Rica. The multi-year agreement also has a renewal option for another ten years, depending on the company's profitabi...

If you own a local business, you want new customers, and you don't want to spend any unnecessary funds to accomplish this. Making a calculated decision on how to spend your advertising dollars shouldn't be taken lightly. It's easy to put an advertisement on Facebook, and target a specific demographic in Costa Rica, but that does not help you with permanent ongoing search engine optimization...

The Spanish Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy, and the president of Costa Rica, Laura Chinchilla, held a meeting this past week in Santiago de Chile in which they expressed their desire to expand the business relationship between the two countries. Both considered relations optimal, according to Spanish sources, but still have enormous potential. In that sense, Chinchilla thanked Spain for its d...

América Móvil's Claro (AMX) has been granted a 15 year license to sell cable television with the option to renew it for another decade if they actually turn a profit. The contract was signed last October but they could not start selling the new service until now. I want my HBO This is bad news for DirecTV (DTV) and Televisa (TV) which have been selling satellite TV for decades in Costa Rica ...

If you haven't noticed recently, imported beers from Miller and Budweiser are often much less expensive then Imperial or Pilsen. Florida Bebidas should reassess their market approach, obviously they have a choke hold on the industry here in Costa Rica, but long term, you never know how business will unfold unless you are competitively pricing your beers. Take for example, the new Mas Por Men...

Costa Rica’s central bank is “very likely” to impose more currency controls to stem the flow of capital from developed markets that has driven the colon higher, President Laura Chinchilla said. “It is very likely that the the bank will have to announce some measures on their own in the coming days,” Chinchilla said today in an interview in Davos, Switzerland, where she is attending the World Ec...

Costa Rica wants to become the door for Chinese exports and investment to Latin America, as bilateral trade and investment has been growing rapidly since the two countries signed a free trade agreement in 2010. "We've seen very positive results in the field of trade and investment since we signed the free trade agreement with China," said Costa Rica's President Laura Chinchilla in an interview ...

Public and private institutions have been empowered to provide financial resources and all kinds of help to the state phytosanitary service in order to handle the emergency. A statement from the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock reads: EMERGENCY PHYTOSANITARY DECREE DECLARED TO AID COFFEE PRODUCERS Decree will expedite procedures for disease control -State of emergency will be exte...

The Costa Rican Social Security Department is putting out to Tender nine X-ray machines for the hospitals Calderon Guardia, Mexico, San Juan de Dios, Escalante Pradilla, Ciudad Neily and Monseñor Sanabria. The call is for the Public Acquisition of nine X-ray machines for conventional use for single studies of various types (column and overhead) or modalities (digital or analog). The installatio...

National and provincial statistics have been released from the 2011 Census on the major geographic features as migration, demographic, social, economic, educational and housing. A statement from the National Institute of Statistics and Census (INEC) reads: INEC publishes provincial indicators The publication provides insight into the similarities and differences between the provinces, beg...

San Jose, Costa Rica (PRWEB) January 23, 2013 Juanlotrae.com, the first comprehensive online food ordering service in Costa Rica, brings convenience to food-lovers and profits to restaurants by connecting them through an advanced online platform supported by a multilingual call center, a localized delivery fleet, customer service, and useful features that benefit both diners and business owners...

A bill is being prepared to impose taxes on money which enters the country seeking to exploit the gap between interest rates in local currency and in dollars. Furthermore President Chinchilla has issued a directive to state banks to stop competing with each other to attract investments from large institutions, such as the Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad, the Social Security Department, ...

Today is the last day employers have to pay the annual Christmas Bonus (Aguinaldo). In an interview with La Extra on Wednesday, Labor Minister Olman Segura stated that employers who don't pay the bonus are subject to strong penalties, including jail time. Segura said that it would be embarrassing for any employer to be penalized for not paying what is a right every worker has, and explained tha...

By Katharina Bart and Tom Miles ZURICH | Wed Dec 19, 2012 9:10am EST ZURICH (Reuters) - Swiss bank UBS admitted fraud and accepted a $1.5 billion fine on Wednesday for its role in manipulating global benchmark interest rates. Dozens of UBS staff rigged the Libor rate, which is used to price trillions of dollars worth of loans, in collusion with b...

By Ryan Vlastelica NEW YORK | Wed Dec 19, 2012 10:16am EST NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks were little changed on Wednesday as investors found scant reason to continue buying following the best two-day rally for the S&P in a month. The Nasdaq notched slight gains, helped by technology shares following strong results at Oracle Corp (ORCL.O).The S&...

By Ben Klayman Wed Dec 19, 2012 9:34am EST (Reuters) - General Motors Co (GM.N) said on Wednesday it will buy back 200 million of its shares from the U.S. Treasury, which intends to sell the rest of its GM stake over the next 15 months, bringing to an end ownership that led to the nickname "Government Motors." Chief Financial Officer Dan Ammann said GM wi...

By Matthew Goldstein and Emily Flitter and Jennifer Ablan NEW YORK | Wed Dec 19, 2012 9:25am EST NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. authorities are examining trading by one of SAC Capital Advisors' most successful portfolio managers, Gabriel Plotkin, as part of a probe into the $14 billion hedge fund firm's investment in Weight Watchers International Inc ...

By Lucia Mutikani WASHINGTON | Wed Dec 19, 2012 9:19am EST WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Permits for future home construction touched their highest level in nearly 4-1/2 years in November, pointing to underlying strength in the housing market, even though starts dropped after three straight months of strong gains. The Commerce Department said on Wednesd...

By Rodrigo Campos NEW YORK | Tue Dec 18, 2012 5:14pm EST NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. stocks rallied on strong volume on Tuesday, capping off the S&P 500's best two-day run in a month, on confidence that a deal would be struck in Washington to avoid painful spending cuts and tax hikes that could hurt the economy. Banks, energy and technology - s...

By Thomas Ferraro and Richard Cowan WASHINGTON | Tue Dec 18, 2012 6:12pm EST WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Republicans tried to wring more tax-rate concessions out of the White House on Tuesday as political maneuvering intensified over an agreement to keep the U.S. economy from tumbling off the "fiscal cliff" next year. Markets rallied on hopes for a de...

By Greg Roumeliotis and Sakthi Prasad Tue Dec 18, 2012 1:28pm EST (Reuters) - The company whose AR-15 type Bushmaster rifle was used in the Newtown school massacre in Connecticut will be immediately put up for sale, its private equity owner Cerberus Capital Management LP said on Tuesday in response to investor concerns. The secretive private equity firm r...

By Caroline Valetkevitch NEW YORK | Mon Dec 17, 2012 4:57pm EST NEW YORK (Reuters) - The S&P 500 ended at its highest level in almost two months on Monday on rising hopes that negotiations over the "fiscal cliff" were making progress and that a deal could be reached in days. After weeks of stalemate, President Barack Obama and Republican Hous...

By Richard Cowan and Matt Spetalnick WASHINGTON | Mon Dec 17, 2012 4:09pm EST WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama and top Republican John Boehner met at the White House on Monday as hopes rose that Washington will be able to head off steep tax hikes and spending cuts that could push the economy into recession next year. Aides from both ...

By Aruna Viswanatha Mon Dec 17, 2012 2:35pm EST (Reuters) - The U.S. credit union regulator sued JPMorgan Securities and Bear Stearns & Co on Monday over $3.6 billion in mortgage securities the bank allegedly sold to credit unions that collapsed because of losses from the securities. The lawsuit by the National Credit Union Administration is its secon...

The Social Security universal health care system (Caja), faced with higher costs and unfavorable demographics, is getting tough with employers who fall behind in paying into the benefit fund. In what Caja financial manager Gustavo Picado termed "unprecedented in the life of the institution," the institution filed a court suit against an Upala man who is charged with withholding benefits from an...

WARSAW | Sat Dec 15, 2012 7:41am EST WARSAW (Reuters) - Poland could adopt the euro as soon as 2016, the president's adviser said on Saturday, encouraging the government to take bolder action to prepare for possibility of joining the shared currency. The largest member of the EU's emerging east has so far treated euro entry as a distant prospect. But top...

ZURICH | Sat Dec 15, 2012 7:36am EST ZURICH (Reuters) - UBS (UBSN.VX) faces a fine of 1.5 billion Swiss francs ($1.63 billion) to settle interest rate rigging charges, a Swiss newspaper reported on Saturday. Citing unnamed sources, Tages-Anzeiger daily said the bank would admit 36 traders around the globe manipulated yen Libor between 2005 and 2010. A UB...

BERLIN | Sat Dec 15, 2012 6:43am EST BERLIN (Reuters) - Economic growth is slowing to a worrying degree across the euro zone and not only in the periphery, European Central Bank Governing Council member Erkki Liikanen said in an interview to be published on Sunday in Germany's Welt am Sonntag newspaper. "There are a number of indications that the economy...

By Angela Moon NEW YORK | Sat Dec 15, 2012 5:10am EST NEW YORK (Reuters) - The last two weeks of December are traditionally quiet for stocks, but traders accustomed to a bit of time off are staying close to their mobile devices, thanks to the "fiscal cliff." Last-minute negotiations in Washington on the so-called fiscal cliff - nearly $600 billio...

NEW DELHI | Sat Dec 15, 2012 3:48am EST NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India will speed up the sale of stakes in state companies to revive the stock market and will push ahead with reforms aimed at spurring an investment recovery in the flagging economy, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said on Saturday. Selling equity in large public industries is a central plank o...

By Nick Brown Sat Dec 15, 2012 12:09am EST (Reuters) - Edison Mission Energy, a power company that operates in more than a dozen U.S. states, is preparing a possible bankruptcy filing as it tries to restructure about $5 billion in debt, according to a source close to the matter. Edison Mission, the unregulated power generation business of Edison Internati...

By Pete Sweeney SHANGHAI | Fri Dec 14, 2012 11:44pm EST SHANGHAI (Reuters) - China's foreign exchange regulator has removed the $1 billion limit for foreign sovereign wealth funds, central banks and monetary authorities buying Chinese assets through the Qualified Institutional Investor Programme (QFII). The new regulations, published on the websi...

By Aruna Viswanatha and Rick Rothacker WASHINGTON/CHARLOTTE | Fri Dec 14, 2012 8:09pm EST WASHINGTON/CHARLOTTE (Reuters) - Securities regulators have made inquiries into the mortgage repurchase practices at Bank of America Corp's Countrywide unit, according to a transcript filed in a lawsuit against the bank by insurer MBIA Inc. The details of th...

By Katharina Bart and Huw Jones ZURICH/LONDON | Fri Dec 14, 2012 5:24pm EST ZURICH/LONDON (Reuters) - UBS (UBSN.VX) will admit to criminal wrongdoing by its Japanese arm, where one of the Swiss bank's traders manipulated yen Libor and euroyen contracts, to secure a $1-billion-plus settlement with regulators, people familiar with the matter said o...

By Dhanya Skariachan and Nivedita Bhattacharjee Fri Dec 14, 2012 11:09am EST (Reuters) - Best Buy Co Inc (BBY.N) agreed to extend the deadline to February 28 for founder Richard Schulze to make a bid for the company, continuing the uncertainty for shareholders over whether he can put a bid together. Best Buy shares fell 14.2 percent to $12.12 on the New Y...

Fri Dec 14, 2012 11:01am EST (Reuters) - Warren Buffett is mulling the prospect of owning at least one of Tribune Co's newspapers. Buffett told The Morning Call in Allentown, Pennsylvania that "Allentown is our kind of place," in response to a question of whether his conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway was interested in the 84,000 daily circulation paper.Tribune is e...

By Jim Finkle and Rick Rothacker BOSTON/CHARLOTTE, North Carolina | Fri Dec 14, 2012 10:44am EST BOSTON/CHARLOTTE, North Carolina (Reuters) - Bank of America Corp, JPMorgan Chase & Co and U.S. Bancorp and other major U.S. banks seem to have stopped a group of hacker activists from seriously disrupting their online banking operations. A financ...

By Lucia Mutikani WASHINGTON | Fri Dec 14, 2012 10:41am EST WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Factory output posted its sharpest increase in nearly a year in November as auto production staged a rebound, while consumer prices slipped, welcome signs for the struggling economic recovery. A separate report on Friday suggested the manufacturing strength continu...

By Karen Freifeld Fri Dec 14, 2012 10:37am EST (Reuters) - Bank of America Corp (BAC.N) has sued bond insurer MBIA Inc (MBI.N) in a New York state court for allegedly interfering with a tender offer to buy MBIA's bonds. At issue is a change MBIA sought to make to the terms of some bonds to eliminate the risk that it might be considered in default if a tro...

By Leah Schnurr NEW YORK | Fri Dec 14, 2012 10:23am EST NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks were little changed on Friday, with the Nasdaq weighed by a 3-percent drop in shares of tech giant Apple, amid investor worries about a lack of progress by politicians in ongoing fiscal negotiations. Apple (AAPL.O) was down 2.8 percent at $515.11 as UBS cut its pr...