Embraer, Brazil’s megabuck aviation company, landed a contract for at least $1.35 billion to sell 45 190-model planes to Air Canada with an option for 45 additional aircraft later on. The news helped shoot up share prices for the Brazilian firm in the local stock market.
The announcement that Air Canada split up the purchase of aircraft for a new fleet between Embraer and Canada-based Bombardier Inc. –the Brazilian company’s top competitor in the market- made Embarer’s high-end stocks close with 5 percent gains in the Sao Paolo Stock Exchange.
Argentine businesspeople from the Patagonian provinces of Tierra del Fuego, Santa Cruz and Chubut announced the creation of a regional stock exchange market for the development of their scaled-back industrial projects.
“We need to count on four different regional stock markets in the country. We now have three, in Rosario (in the Santa Fe province), Cordoba and Mendoza. We thought there was one missing in Patagonia,” said Diego Lo Tartaro, president of the Argentine Institute for the Development of Regional Economies (IADER is the acronym in Spanish).
Tourism experts huddled in Panama said a network of mom-and-pop hotels could chip in considerably to Central America’s economic takeoff and would eventually pan out to be a sustainable activity to keep poverty in the region at bay.
Ecuadorian expert Gonzalo Aguirre, coordinator of the Small Hotel Assistance Program, believes a mesh of efficient small hotels could multiply the region’s travel options and would turn small inns –usually run by families- into big-time generators of wealth and jobs.
Costa Rica’s travel industry will churn out some $1.25 billion by the end of the ongoing year. The nation’s Tourism Minister Abel Pacheco pointed out his country came in for 382,417 tourists in the first five months of 2003, a figure that stands for 27,000 more visitors than in 2002 and raises growth to 6.1 percent.
According to Mr. Pacheco, Costa Rica’s leisure industry generated half a billion dollars worth of revenues between January and May this year, while investments in the sector have so far amounted to $48 million.
Total sales through the Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC) rose 5 percent in November to $4.9 billion, up from 4.7 billion last November. ARC said this is the largest increase seen in 12 months.
Average sales per agency location jumped by 20 percent to $47,157. The number of actual transactions also rose for the first time in a year, up 3 percent.
MasterCard, the megabuck credit card company, amassed a 25.4 percent increase in the first three quarters of 2003 in terms of gross dollars invoiced (GDV) all around Latin America and the Caribbean Basin.
These outcomes lay bare a steady growing trend that ‘s been unchanged since last year regardless of a bleak world economy.