6. Decide which of the following statements are right and which are wrong. Give the correct variants.

1. Mr. Mittal has taken following the creation of his new steel company.

2. The company will be listed on New York stock exchange and will be controlled by Mittal family.

3. Mr. Mittal is the sole shareholder, that’s why his dividend was $2bn.

4. Before this week’s deal, LNM Group was already the third biggest steel company in the world.

5. Most of LNM Holdings activities were in low-wage countries such as Ukraine and Bulgaria where operating costs are rather lower than in western countries.

6. When it came to buying ISG, the combined Ispat LNM had to offer a fuller valuation.

7. By early afternoon yesterday, Ispat shares were traded below the bottom of the range.

8. Mr. Mittal is willing to shed the light on his previous dividends, because this information is publicly disclosed.

7. Make up your own sentences using the words and word combinations given below.

To disclose payments, to merge one’s current steel assets, to be listed, to shield one’s activity, to hold a respectable place in a league table, to shed light on previous payments, to be available publicly, operating costs, to agglomerate interests, to remove suspicion.

8. Debate the following statement with your groupmates: “It is better for a college graduate to go to work to a large corporation than to start his or her own business because the risks are less, the salary is secure, the fringe benefits are ample, and the chances for promotion are good.”

9. Get an annual report of a large corporation from the library or from the Internet. What are the firm’s annual sales? Net income (profit)? Number of common shareholders? Profit shareholders receive in dividends?

FINANCIAL TIMES OCTOBER 29 2004

Bargains from cyberspace free for the asking

A new online network makes the disposal of unwanted goods an effortless process. Paul Rubens examines the spread of Freecycle

Imagine an online marketplace like eBay, but where everything on offer is free. That is the idea behind Freecycle, a network of internet-based giveaway clubs that is gaining hundreds of thousands of new members around the world every month.

Freecycle groups operate in small areas and their appeal is easy to understand: members get their hands on all kinds of free goods, and can also get rid of unwanted items without the bother of packaging them and posting them – as they would have to if they sold them to a bidder at an online auction. They are also relieved of the environmental worries of throwing them away.

In any market, the lower an item's price, the higher the demand for it. If the price is zero the chances are high that someone close by will want it. So on Freecycle everything but the most useless of junk is usually snapped up within hours.

Freecycle is the brainchild of Deron Beal, an environmentalist from Tucson, Arizona. He started it almost by accident, he says. “I was working for a not-for-profit recycling organisation in downtown Tucson and people were always giving me junk to find new homes for. So I set up an automated e-mailing list that anyone could subscribe to and I'd e-mail out lists of the things I wanted to get rid of. Overnight I got several hundred subscribers, which is when I realised I was on to something huge.”

In February 2004 Mr Beal started the Freecycle network website at www.free-cycle.org. It includes instructions on how to create local Freecycle groups anywhere in the world using Yahoo Groups – a free web-based service that offers the message boards and automated e-mailing lists members use to advertise the goods they are offering or want. The site now also contains links to all the local Freecycle sites in each country. In June the movement appeared to reach critical mass and the number of Freecycle members jumped from 50,000 to more than half a million, according to Mr Beal. The largest group, in Portland, Oregon, has more than 10,000 members, but smaller groups are appearing in places as far-flung as Azerbaijan, China and Trinidad. The UK has more than 20 groups, including one in London with more than 600 members.

Surprisingly, most of the goods offered on the Free-cycle network are far from worthless, says Rachelle Strauss, founder of the Gloucestershire Freecycle Group. “I thought when I started the group we’d just get a lot rubbish, but we’ve had a car offered, a Sony television and plenty of other good stuff. People could sell these kinds of things on eBay, but then there is always a wait while the auction takes place, and the risk that it goes wrong and the buyer doesn't pay. Perhaps people also just like giving things away,” she says.

The benefits of a free marketplace have been recognised by charities and other non-profit making organisations and Freecycle has become an informal way for individuals and companies to use the internet to channel unwanted items to good causes. International Business Machines, in particular, has used the network to find charities to take computer hardware off its hands, according to Mr Beal, and many of the local groups have specific requests for items from charities.

The overriding rule on Freecycle is that everything offered on the network must be free, yet Mr Beal recognises that some things in life have to be paid for: an injection of cash will soon be needed to buy more powerful software so that new features can be added to Freecycle, he says. These will include the ability for members to leave feedback about transactions with other members – similar to the system used by eBay to help rate the honesty and reliability of its members.

For this to happen, Free-cycle needs to find a corporate sponsor. Mr Beal has already discovered that the network's environmentally aware yet tech-savvy membership is appealing and is in talks with potential sponsors. “If I can find a big organisation to sponsor us I will certainly take the money and do some good with it,” he says.