(04-20) 04:23 PDT BEIJING, China (AP) —

Automakers issued ambitious forecasts Sunday of up to 65 percent sales growth in China’s booming market this year Д a striking contrast to the gloom in the United States and elsewhere.

Sales of some individual models to newly prosperous Chinese drivers soared by up to 100 percent in the first quarter over the same period of 2007, said executives speaking at the Beijing auto show.

Toyota Motor Corp. expects to sell 700,000 vehicles in China this year, up 40 percent from 2007, executive Yuzo Ushiyama said.

“As the 40 percent (target) is much bigger than the overall market growth, this is challenging,” Ushiyama told reporters. “But we want to try (700,000 vehicles) as our goal.”

Automakers are looking to China to drive sagging sales at a time when demand in the United States is expected to decline this year while Europe and Japan are flat.

Sales in China, already the world’s No. 2 vehicle market after the United States, are forecast to grow 15 to 20 percent this year, driven by a boom that saw the economy grow by 10.6 percent in the first quarter.

Last year, Chinese drivers bought 5.5 million cars, minivans and SUVs and 3 million commercial vehicles, up from just 1.6 million vehicles sold in 1997. J.D. Power and Associates says sales should grow by 1 million vehicles annually through 2015.

“I think every year for some time in the future the same thing is going to happen,” said Philip Murtaugh, Chrysler LLC’s chief executive for Asia.

The number of Chinese families that can afford a car is expected to mushroom from 10 million in 2005 to 75 million in 2005, according to Jim Raymond, a General Motors executive.

The rivalry for a share of China’s market has turned the Beijing auto show into a major industry event that this year drew more than 100 Chinese and foreign automakers. On Sunday, as companies held presentations for reporters, they competed for attention with live bands, acrobats and dancers. The show opens to the public on Thursday.

On Sunday, Daimler CEO Dieter Zetsche was joined on stage by Chinese film star Zhang Ziyi as he showed off the new Mercedes-Benz SUV, the GLK, which goes on sale in China next year.

Major U.S., Japanese and European competitors are growing faster than the market as a whole, building market share at the expense of China’s dozens of tiny automakers.

Volkswagen AG’s sales in China grew 32 percent in the first quarter, executives said. They gave no full-year projection but said they hope to top 1 million vehicles in 2008, which would be a 10 percent increase over 2007’s 910,491 cars.

“In no other country does this brand sell as many cars as in China,” VW chairman Martin Winterkorn said.

Hyundai Motor Co.’s Chinese joint venture expects to see sales rise 65 percent this year to 380,000 cars, executive vice president Li Honglu told Dow Jones Newswires.

France’s PSA Peugeot-Citroen expects to sell 150,000 cars in China this year, a 30 percent increase over 2007’s 115,000 vehicles, according to Jean-Louis Chamla, vice president of international sales and marketing.

Daimler AG said Mercedes-Benz sales in China rose 42 percent in the first quarter. That included a 110 percent jump in sales of the R-class minivan.

Zetsche declined to give a 2008 forecast but said Mercedes will add 20 new dealerships in China this year, bringing the total to 120.

Still, automakers said they face intense competition and pressure to cut prices in China, where dozens of small Chinese producers measure their share of the fragmented market in fractions of a percentage point.

“I think this is just the most competitive market in the world,” said Carlos Tavares, executive vice president of Nissan.

SYDNEY: The chaotic and ignominious end to the private-equity bid to take over Qantas Airways nearly two weeks ago was greeted with jubilation by many in its home country, part of a larger backlash against what many here see as faceless foreign billionaires lining their pockets with Australias patrimony.

Debt-financed buyouts have been surging worldwide. Proposed and actual global leveraged buyouts more than doubled in 2006, to some $800 billion, but the growth in Australia has been even more spectacular. They rose from about 1.7 billion Australian dollars in 2005 to over 25 billion dollars in 2006, or from $1.44 billion to $30 billion, according to the Australian Venture Capital Association and Thomson Financial.

The relatively small size of the Australian market has magnified the effect, creating opportunities for private-equity consortiums and provoking opposition among the public, politicians and some bankers.

Private-equity companies typically use large quantities of debt to finance the purchase 100 percent of a listed company that they then take private, guaranteeing the debt against the companys assets. After restructuring the company, and typically paying themselves large fees, the private-equity group then recoups its investment by selling the company, either in a private sale or through an initial public offering on the stock market.

Critics contend that this process endangers companies by loading them up with debt and narrows the options for ordinary investors by removing companies from the stock market.

Supporters say that it can allow underperforming companies to be restructured away from the short-term pressures of the market and that the prospect of a private-equity takeover can encourage managers of listed companies to manage their assets as efficiently as possible.

So far this year, excluding the Qantas bid, more than 35 billion dollars in deals involving private equity have been proposed in Australia. Private-equity groups have been stalking the countrys second largest retailer, Coles, which is thought to be worth about 20 billion dollars, and Australias largest power distribution company, Alinta, which is in play for about 8 billion dollars.

These are companies with huge local profiles, and the prospect of their possible sale has led to public soul-searching.

“I think that whats causing a lot of public disquiet is the very fact that private equity is less transparent than normal public firms,” Glenn Withers, professor of Public Policy at Australian National University in Canberra, said Wednesday in a telephone interview.

“Weve always had to live with this distinction between publicly listed and privately owned companies: it just seems that a lot more money is pouring into the less transparent form in new ways, and money that comes from sources that might appear opportunistic. People are wondering why this is happening and they are scared of speculative bubbles.”

The center-right government of Prime Minister John Howard has repeatedly shown its reluctance to intervene in the working of the markets, and the treasurer approved the Qantas bid. But with elections this year, supporting the privatization of companies like Qantas and Coles poses considerable political risks.

Even before the Qantas bid crashed, the government began a Senate inquiry on private-equity investment and its effects on capital markets, and particularly whether more regulation is required.

Senator Barnaby Joyce, a populist member of Howards coalition who sits on the inquiry committee, said Friday in a telephone interview from Canberra, “Private equity adds a whole new dynamic we dont have the legislation on board to manage.”

Joyce says that the debt that private-equity companies take on effectively hands control of important companies to those who hold the debt rather than the managers installed by the private-equity groups themselves.

Joyce broke party ranks this year to vote against a bill that would have granted foreign private-equity investors tax breaks on their capital gains.

“The Foreign Investment Review Board guidelines have to take on board the control mechanisms of debt,” he said.

Joyce also says he is concerned that companies taken over by private-equity groups pay little or no tax because most of their taxable profits service the debt. “It puts a huge hole in the taxation revenue of a government,” he said.

The committee is scheduled to report next month. Withers, the professor, say he does not believe that there will be any substantial regulatory change, but he says the continued scrutiny could in itself prove valuable.

Alongside the political and public concerns about the power of the private-equity funds, there is also disquiet in the financial markets. In the short term, some analysts have expressed worries as to whether Australias relatively small market can absorb the wave of cash that private equity is unleashing, a fear played down by Martin Duncan, chief equity strategist at JPMorgan in Sydney.

(01-30) 07:45 PST CAIRO, Egypt (AP) —

Internet outages disrupted business and personal usage across a wide swathe of the Middle East on Wednesday after an undersea cable in the Mediterranean was damaged, government officials and Internet service providers said.

In Cairo, the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology said the cut in the international communications cable had led to a partial disruption of Internet services and other telecommunications across much of Egypt.

Emergency teams were quickly trying to find alternative routes, including satellite connections, to end the disruptions, Minister Tariq Kamel said. But service was still slow or nonexistent by late afternoon Wednesday.

Internet service also was disrupted in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates in the Gulf, which markets itself as a top Mideast business and luxury tourist hub. One of two Internet service providers, DU, was completely down.

It was not clear what caused the damage to the cable.

An official who works in the customer care department of DU told The Associated Press that the reason for the outage was a fault on a submarine cable located between Alexandria, Egypt, and Palermo, Italy.

The official, who identified himself only as Hamed because he said he was not authorized to speak publicly, said he was not in a position to describe the technical fault but that engineers contracted by DU were working to solve the problem.

By early afternoon, the service was flooded with complaints and the ISP had found alternative routes but Hamed said “there is slowness while browsing on the Internet.”

There was no total outage in Kuwait, but service was interrupted Tuesday and Wednesday. The Gulfnet International Company apologized in an e-mail Wednesday to its customers for the “degraded performance in Internet browsing,” which it said was caused by a cable cut in the Mediterranean.

In Saudi Arabia, some users said Internet was functioning fine but others said it was slow or totally down.

A staffer at a Saudi ISP said that employees were told that a cable rupture was the cause of the problem, which began early Wednesday. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. Calls to Saudi Telecom went unanswered Wednesday afternoon, the start of the weekend in Saudi Arabia.

Users in Bahrain and Qatar also complained of slow Internet.