Opinion & investing ideas
Home Depot is hiring more than 600 San Diego County workers for the spring, the busiest time of the year for home-improvement projects.
Spring is when many homeowners start sprucing up their lawns, planting gardens, and improving their patios to get ready for summer grilling. There are 21 county Home Depot stores and one in Temecula.
Nationwide, the retailer is hiring 70,000 seasonal associates, the same number as last year — a sign that the world's largest home-improvement retailer is taking a conservative view of 2012.
These are temporary positions that typically last for about 120 days, but some associates become permanent employees, according to Atlanta-based Home Depot. About half of the company's 2011 seasonal hires stayed on in permanent positions such as cashiers, sales associates, lot associates and garden associates.
If notorious perfectionist Steve Jobs was still alive, today's bungled launch of the iPhone 4S in Beijing might have given him a heart attack. Would-be customers who waited all night in freezing temperatures became furious when Apple's flagship Beijing store abruptly announced that the phone would not go on sale on schedule, AP reports. Police cordoned off the store after the angry crowd pelted it with eggs.
The crowd included dozens of migrant laborers hired by resellers who ended up going home without pay, business week reports. An Apple spokeswoman says they were unable to open the store because of the size of the crowd. The iPhone "will not be available in our retail stores in Beijing and Shanghai for the time being," she added. Other Apple stores in China opened, and the iPhone 4S quickly sold out
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In a recent interview Cameco Corp’s CEO Tim Gitzel said some investors underestimate the potential for supply shortfalls to spur higher prices for the nuclear fuel. From the article in Bloomberg:
As evidenced by the developing world’s plans to expand nuclear energy capabilities, uranium will remain a key component of the global energy bull market. Valuations of companies in the sector are depressed because of a unique event. It was a tragic event but the world’s nuclear initiatives are moving forward and I believe we will one day look back at this selloff as a historic buying opportunity. I am actively accumulating shares in Cameco and Denison Mines .Global mined uranium supply was 53,663 tons in 2010, according to the World Nuclear Association. That’s not enough to cover global demand, and so some utilities also use fuel recovered from Russian warheads under the Highly Enriched Uraniumagreement, which has run since the 1990s.
Gitzel said Russia will withdraw from the HEU accord by the end of 2013, removing 24 million pounds of supply. “There’s a lot, and I spoke to some of them this week, who think the HEU agreement is still going to be around,” Gitzel said. “We don’t.”
Although Germany plans to phase out nuclear power, there will be a net 93 new reactors by the end of the decade, Gitzel said. That compares with Cameco’s projection prior to the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of as many as 104, he said.
A nearly 4% drop in shares of Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) on Monday weighed on exchange traded funds that invest in Nasdaq-listed stocks. The tech giant’s shares was failing after Motorola Mobility (NYSE: MMI), which Google is in a deal to acquire, preannounced lackluster quarterly revenue.
Motorola Mobility after Friday’s closing bell estimated its fourth-quarter revenue totaled $3.4 billion, below consensus estimates. It expects “modest profitability” for the quarter and said its results were hurt by the increased competitive environment in the mobile device business.
