Topic: Nikkei

Just as foreign investor interest in the Japanese stock market has picked up, old fears have reawakened over the level of insider trading ahead of deals. The FT reports.

Sharp, Japan's last major fabricator of liquid crystal displays for televisions, is seeking more partners to buy stakes in its main Sakai plant in a bid to spin off the LCD production subsidiary, a source familiar with the matter said.

Shares of Taiwan's Hon Hai Precision Industry better known by its trading name Foxconn, rallied over 5 percent Wednesday after it announced it was buying a stake in Japan's Sharp.

Shares of the Apple supplier surged after announcing a deal with Sharp Corp that will make Hon Hai the largest shareholder in Japan's biggest LCD maker. Sharp's shares were untraded with a glut of buy orders.

Shares of Sharp lost 4.1 percent to 509 yen after Japan's largest maker of liquid crystal displays named the head of its global operations Takashi Okuda as president to turn around the company as it faces a record annual loss.

NY Times reports that  Mr. Putin, who grew up in a hardscrabble Soviet housing block, has spent more than a decade in a byzantine world of petitioners and servants. Now, in the year he turns 60, he will face his biggest challenge: coming to grips with a society that has greatly changed under his watch, while he has remained essentially the same.

The sovereign debt crisis crippling the euro zone still threatens other developed economies, leaving Britain and Japan teetering on the edge of recession but with the United States seen several paces away from a slump, a Reuters poll found.