Picking winners and losers is always an interesting and dicey exercise. Lux Research took that plunge and issued a report this week that pointed to likely winners in revenues and IPO candidates over the coming year, as well as some companies that they issued “caution” on. The winners names that popped out included Amonix, Enphase Energy and Abound Solar — the cautions were for Solyndra and Nanosolar.

Lux’s Jason Eckstein, author of the report, argued that a new shakeout is coming as government subsidies in countries such as Germany and France are set to decline. These subsidies, the feed-in tariffs, are supposed to fall gradually as production scale and technologies improve and presumably the prices for them should fall as well. That puts pressure on manufacturers to lower the prices of their goods. Plus, the market is getting new entrants who believe they’ve got something the dominant players don’t.

Eckstein anointed Amonix, Enphase and Abound as breakout stars in their class and, as a result, are likely to go public and reward their investors some nice returns. Kleiner Perkins-backed Amonix is a high-concentrating PV panel maker based in Seal Beach, Calif., that seems to have emerged from hibernation to win some utility-scale contracts. The company has been around since 1989, and it closed a B round of $129.4 million earlier this year. Last month, news came about Amonix’s biggest deal announced to date: a 30-megawatt project in Colorado by Cogentrix Energy, which signed a power sales agreement with Public Service Co.

Enphase got the nod because it was early to the market of microinverters and has “high sales volumes,� according to Lux. Microinverters, unlike centralized inverters, are added to each solar panel to convert direct current to alternating current for feeding the grid. The Petaluma, Calif.-based startup, another Kleiner Perkins pick, is likely to dash across the IPO line quicker than others, Eckstein said. The company’s use of contract manufacturers is a smart move because it eliminates the need to raise a lot of money to build and operate factories, he added.

Lux isn’t alone is feeling bullish about the microinverter technology. In a report released last month, IMS Research said microinverters and their cousin technology the DC-DC power optimizers are likely to generate more than $1.5 billion in revenue over the next five years worldwide.

We all know that First Solar has been super successful. Startups want the same thing. Lux selected Abound Solar from the lot as a rising star in making cadmium-telluride solar panels. Abound, based in Loveland, Colo., and backed by DCM, last raised venture capital in 2008 ($104 million), opened its first factory in 2009 and won a $400 million federal loan guarantee to expand manufacturing in 2010. Its panels can achieve about 10 percent efficiency. First Solar can do 11.2 percent efficiency.

Eckstein also didn’t forget the biggest army in the war for solar market dominance: companies making crystalline silicon solar panels and their suppliers. Not surprisingly, he noted the rise of Chinese solar panel makers, some of whom have their own plants to make polysilicon, ingots and wafers, the materials necessary to make solar cells and then panels. Yingli Green Energy and Trina Solar are examples. He also gave a shout out to newer players such as Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics.

Despite the high amount of buzz about thin film solar players Nanosolar and Solyndra, the Lux report issued cautions on these startups. Nanosolar received low marks for both technical value and business execution, while Solyndra drew low marks for technical value. Solyndra withdrew its IPO plans earlier this year. The Lux report says “The space is becoming bifurcated as start-ups such as Solyndra and Nanosolar fail to execute on their ramp-ups and become long-shots.”

The solar market is still young and relies heavily on government subsidies to grow. That, by definition, means it will be in flux and not so predictable. Already, forecasts for 2011 solar power project installations vary widely, from nearly 13 gigawatts to almost 19 gigawatts.

To learn more about clean tech financing deals see GigaOM Pro (subscription required):

Report: Cleantech Financing Trends: 2010 and Beyond

While it looks like you can officially order Nissan’s all-electric LEAF this Tuesday, there’s another all-electric car option coming to market soon — within months — from startup Coda Automotive that’s promising a longer, more reliable, range. In an extended interview at Coda’s headquarters in Santa Monica, Calif. last Thursday, Coda CEO Kevin Czinger told to us that Coda will start delivering electric sedans to customers in December, and he said compared to the LEAF, the Coda Sedan can get 40 percent more driving range under most conditions. Czinger also told us that Coda just last week passed a crucial phase in its DOE loan application, and that the company is also in the process of raising another $125 million round of financing, with participation by Morgan Stanley.

So while the deep-pocketed Nissan has been ramping up an all-out marketing bonanza around its LEAF (see the latest commercial here), which will be the first mass-produced all-electric car on the market, Coda — a venture-backed three-year-old startup — will be raising funds and also kicking its marketing and outreach into high gear over the next three months. Coda and Nissan have vastly different origins and some different intentions, but it’s not hard to start making comparisons between their inaugural cars, given they are the first two all-electric mainstream-targeted cars on the market.

LEAF vs Coda Sedan

Czinger says Coda plans to sell 14,000 of its electric Sedans — 7,000 to consumers and 7,000 to fleets — between December 2010 and the end of 2011, and the company is only focusing on the California market for those initial cars. Coda plans to sell the sedan in the low to mid thirty thousand dollar range with federal and state incentives, and Czinger says Coda will announce final pricing on the car over the next few weeks. The Coda Sedan will likely be priced a tad higher than the Nissan LEAF, which has a price tag of $32,780 before incentives, but Czinger emphasized to me that he didn’t think the initial group of buyers for all-electric mainstream cars will be super price sensitive.

Nissan — Japan’s third largest automaker — has been targeting sales of 6,000 units for the LEAF in Japan and aiming to bring in 25,000 reservations for the model in the U.S. before it launches in select markets, including Arizona, California, Washington and Tennessee. Nissan has also said it has an output capacity of 10,000 units for the business year ending in March 2011, but there’s been reports that only 3,300 Nissan LEAFs will be delivered in the U.S. by March 2011.

While the Coda Sedan will probably cost several thousand dollars more than the LEAF when its final pricing is announced, Czinger says that the range, the reliability of the range, and the thermal management system of the battery for the Coda Sedan are superior to the LEAF. The Coda Sedan can deliver between 90 to 100 miles range according to the US06 driving test, which has an average 48 mile per hour driving speed, says Czinger. In comparison the LEAF is touting a 100 mile range based on the LA4 driving test, which Cziger says “is not a realistic test for the consumer.” Under the LA4 test the Coda Sedan gets 120 to 130 mile range, says Czinger: “So apples to apples, we probably have under most conditions 40 percent more range than a Nissan LEAF.”

Czinger says the range of the Coda Sedan holds up to that 90 to 100 mile range despite extreme hot and cold weather because of its high-volume air-cooled battery thermal management system. But, in comparison, Czinger says the LEAF can get as low as a 40 mile range in extreme hot and cold weather because of its lack of a sufficient active thermal management system for the battery pack. Czinger says:

I think our range is the minimum real usable range that you’d want in an initial all electric car if youre going to meet consumer needs. If you don’t have an active thermal management system to provide that range dependably, I think youre going to have consumers that are unhappy.

Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk has expressed a similar sentiment about the LEAF battery pack thermal management system, and said on his company’s earnings call earlier this year that the LEAF has a “much more primitive level of technologyâ€� compared with the sophistication of even Tesla’s first prototype. As a result, Musk said the LEAF pack will have temperatures “all over the place,â€� causing it to suffer “huge degradationâ€� in cold environments and basically “shut offâ€� in hot environments.

Coda’s sedan also has a 34 kwh battery, while the Nissan LEAF has a 24 kwh battery. Czinger notes that means Coda’s sedan has 40 percent plus more available energy than the LEAF.

Coda Road Map

Coda is betting that consumers and fleet owners will recognize what it says is a superior technology as an edge in the market. The company has spent three years developing the battery, the battery management system and the chassis (frame) of the car around an electric vehicle. Other car companies are leaning more heavily on traditional internal combustion based cars for the chassis for their EVs. Coda has often been described as a spin out from Miles Electric, and while Coda was born out of the Miles team, Czinger describes Coda’s emergence as a coming out of a stealth project that had been incubating within Miles for years.

The company’s other bet is on China — Czinger said he’s taken 31 round trips to China over the last three years. To get the cost of the battery cells down considerably — to enable it to sell an EV in the mainstream price range — Coda has created a joint venture with China battery maker Lishen, called Lio (oil spelled backward). Coda and Lishen agreed to invest $100 million in their venture, and said they’ve received a commitment for a $327 million line of credit from the Bank of Tianjin Joint-Stock Co. Czinger says that Lio owns the intellectual property for the battery cell production, but that Coda has retained all rights to the advanced thermal dynamics and battery management system.

Coda has also been amassing hundreds of millions of dollars in funding. Czinger tells me that on top of the $125 million in funding that Coda has already raised — including backers like Aeris Capital and Singapore-based EDB Investments — it is in the process of raising another $125 million in financing with participation from Morgan Stanley. Overall with its various funding commitments Coda will have raised in the range of $600 million said Czinger.

Coda also submitted an application for low-interest federal loans from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing program (headed up by Jonathan Silver, who we interviewed for this Q&A) earlier this year to help it build lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles in Ohio. Electric vehicle startup competitors Tesla and Fisker already received DOE commitments for loans. Czinger told us during the interview that Coda had just gotten word from the DOE that its loan application had advanced to the next level.

With its funding commitments, its Chinese battery partner and its close to production-ready vehicles coming soon, Coda is following in Tesla’s foot steps as a startup that will actually be putting a considerable volume of electric vehicles on roads. And Coda will likely be the first startup to sell a mainstream — $35,000 to $45,000 — all-electric vehicle. Tesla is still two to three years away from that point.

If Coda can deliver on its promises over the next four months, get ready to hear a lot more about this up-and-comer. Down the road in 2013, Coda is targeting a cheaper, roomier, all-electric 5-passenger sedan that it says will be one third of the weight.

We’ll bring you our latest Green Overdrive video episode of the Coda Sedan on Wednesday of this week, so stay tuned!

For more research on electric cars check out GigaOM Pro (subscription required):

Report: IT Opportunities in Electric Vehicle Management

Why Microsoft’s Electric Vehicle Deal With Ford Matters

ZAP, one of the oldest electric vehicle makers out there, has gotten some less-than-stellar press for under delivering on some big promises. But we went to take a look around their head quarters in Santa Rosa, Calif, to see what they’ve been actually building and working on. The company recently said it’s bought out half of China auto company Jonway and says it plans to buy out the other half next year. What did we find on our trip? An electric SUV taxi being built with Jonway, ZAP’s old-school low speed EV scooters and two-time Indy 500 winner, Al Unser Jr., who told us what it was like to drive ZAP’s three-wheeled high speed entrant in the Auto-X-Prize, the Alias. Check out our trip to ZAP in this week’s Green Overdrive (and catch up on previous episodes):

The use of renewable sources of energy in Europe continues to grow at a brisk pace and energy efficiency also is improving, significantly reducing reliance on coal and natural gas, according to a new report. In
2009, renewable energy accounted for 18.4 percent of the European Union’s primary energy production, an increase of 8.3 percent from 2008, according to a report by Eurostat.

Renewable energy sources now account for nearly as much electricity production as natural gas, which supplies 19.3 percent of the continent’s electricity. The report said that natural gas usage was down 10 percent in 2009 and that use of hard coal decreased by 9 percent. For the sixth consecutive year, “energy intensity� — a measure of how much energy is used to produce a unit of economic input — dropped while GDP continued to increase over the same period.

The shift to cleaner sources of energy has been particularly swift in some nations, including Portugal, which now gets almost 45 percent of its electricity from renewable sources. Meanwhile, energy consumption across the continent fell 5.5 percent in 2009, in part because of the economic recession.

Related posts:

• U.S. Environment Not the Best for EVs
• As Saudi Crude Flows to China, U.S. Need for Biofuels Grows
• Investment in Renewables Outstrip Fossil Fuels in Europe and U.S.
• Wind Investment – Look To Great Britain and China
• Explosion of CO2 Emissions by 2035

How you drive, where you drive and the weather conditions through which you drive an electric vehicle can change the vehicle’s range (how far the vehicle can go on a single battery charge) dramatically. That’s because batteries perform less than ideally in extreme hot and cold weather. For example, earlier this year former GM front man Bob Lutz said he only got 28 miles worth of juice from the Volt’s battery, in contrast to the advertised 40 miles, when he drove it for a weekend in Detroit this winter.

It’s a problem that Karen Pease, CEO of software maker Celadon Applications, thinks her startup can tackle. The year-old Celadon has built an application that can aggregate all sorts of data, including topographical, weather, weather forecasts, terrain, altitude, temperature, drivetrain performance, torque, and RPM, among other things, and bundles all that information into an interface that alerts electric vehicle drivers to how much range their cars truly have at any given second.

Called Road2, Celadon bills its app as “the world’s first electric vehicle range calculator which relies on a physics simulator instead of approximations or other tricks”, and the software can come in the form of a mobile application, an application for a stand-alone vehicle dashboard, or as embedded hardware and software in an electric vehicle. Every few seconds, the application runs over the connected communication network, which is likely a cellular network, and pings Celadon’s servers in the Amazon cloud, evaluating the dynamically changing range in real time.

Celadon’s Pease thinks the company’s biggest opportunity will be in getting its product embedded in electric vehicles, and Pease says Celadon is talking to a couple of automakers about that. If Celadon’s hardware was embedded in the vehicle itself, it could connect with the embedded information in the car’s engine control unit (ECU), which is generally the largest processor in the car and houses information like engine performance and fuel efficiency.

Of course, convincing automakers to take a chance on embedding hardware from a startup will be a tall order. Consumers and fleet operators don’t replace their cars all that often; the time between purchasing new vehicles is potentially longer than a startup selling in this market could survive. The EV makers, like Nissan, are also already building connected services to help appease range anxiety, and the Nissan LEAF uses software overlaid on Google Maps to show a circle of available range of the battery and the closest electric vehicle charging stations (see our video test drive of the Nissan LEAF here).

Pease says a company like Nissan would be a perfect customer for Celadon’s product, as it can add intelligence to that range estimate as a non-dynamic circle of range doesn’t give all that accurate a depiction of the car’s real world range.

Celadon has done some pilot projects with big names already. Pease said that Celadon outfitted a Tesla Roadster with its range intelligence system during the Renew America Road Trip last summer. To date, Pease says Celadon has operated on seed funding. The mobile app isn’t available yet for consumers, but Peace says it will compatible with Android phones, among others.

All the electric vehicle automakers, including Nissan and GM, are embracing mobile — from iPhone apps, to car network services like Onstar — in an effort to help alleviate range anxiety, so Celadon has chosen to focus on a solid market. But it remains to be seen how well Road2 will actually do when it hits the road.

Related research on GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

Cleantech Financing Trends: 2010 and Beyond

IT Opportunities in Electric Vehicle Management

While venture capitalist Vinod Khosla has been backing biofuel startups for years, 2010 could be the first year that he stands to generate returns from his biofuel bets. Two of Khosla’s biofuel portfolio companies have filed for IPOs in recent weeks and the investor’s influence is still clearly felt across the sector. But how well will the firm actually make out?

Synthetic biofuel maker Gevo filed its S-1, last week in an effort to raise up to $150 million in an IPO. According to Gevo’s S-1 Khosla Ventures owns 40.6 percent of Gevo’s shares.

Amyris Biotechnologies, a startup that develops synthetic organisms to make chemicals and biofuels, filed to raise $100 million in an IPO in April. The company raised a total of $244 million in funding and Khosla Ventures, along with Kleiner Perkins, each own 15.4 percent of Amyris’ shares.

While Khosla’s dozen other biofuel firms — which include Range Fuels, Coskata, Mascoma, LS9, and KiOR among others — don’t seem to be aiming for the public markets just yet. But if you look at who Gevo refers to as a competitor, Khosla’s influence over the industry still stands out. Out of two dozen firms that Gevo lists as competitors, a quarter of them have been supported by Khosla.

But Will He Make Money?

So, some of Khosla’s biofuel investments are “coming of age,” so to speak, but will they make Khosla Ventures much money? Well, they definitely won’t be home runs and no, the firm probably won’t make a ton on these two investments. At this point it’s unclear if Gevo or Amyris will have successful IPOs (or will IPO at all), given the companies are both in pre-commercial states, don’t generate much revenues, and certainly aren’t profitable.

Gevo has accumulated a deficit of $50.3 million, and for 2009 generated $660,000 in revenues and lost $19.89 million. As of December 31, 2009, Amyris had accumulated a deficit of $120.4 million, and for 2009 generated $64.61 million in revenues and lost $64.80 million.

Khosla has mostly lost money on biofuels before. As Robert Rapier pointed out in this article in February, Khosla wrote about a company called E3 Biofuels in an article for Wired back in 2006 entitled My Big Bet on Biofuels — Rapier says that E3 Biofuels went out of business shortly after the article came out. Another Khosla-backed firm Range Fuels has been hit with delays and has scaled back its production. Khosla-backed AltraBiofuels has been forced to change courses several times, despite over $400 million in investments and six years in business.

Cello Energy is a (now infamous) company that the EPA once relied upon to generate 70 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol production for a federal mandate (that has since been cut dramatically). Cello was backed by $12.5 million from Khosla, and has since been sued in a fraud case and has been hit with production delays.

Rapier has never been shy of his assessments of Khosla and biofuels:

I felt like he [Khosla] came into the energy industry without a very good comprehension of if, but felt that he would apply his golden touch from Silicon Valley to show the dinosaurs how Silicon Valley innovates. I also felt like he was attracted to people who made grandiose claims, but didn’t have the proper historical perspective to determine when something was truly novel (and really worked).

Learning Curve

But as happened in computing, software, the Internet and telecom, investors can learn from their failures and often keep investing despite the  misses. Khosla seems to be using some of his newer biofuel investments to help with some of the problems of the first generation biofuels.

Gevo has a low capital-intensive business model that’s directly tied to the first-generation of corn ethanol, and the company sells retrofit technology for corn ethanol plants to help them produce and sell isobutanol, a renewable fuel and chemical. The retrofit process takes about 14 months and is estimated to will cost about $22 to $24 million, for a 50-million-gallon-per-year ethanol plant, and $40 and $45 million a 100-million-gallon-per-year ethanol plant, the company estimates in its S-1.

KiOR seems to be the latest biofuel startup that has Khosla Ventures excited and has gotten the latest round of funding from the firm. KiOR raised a whopping $110 million from backers namely Khosla Ventures, for its technology called a “biomass catalytic cracking process,� based on technology derived the traditional oil industry. KiOR’s President Fred Cannon described KiOR’s technology as being able to crunch into seconds the millions of years that it takes to carbonize biomass (turn it into fossil fuels) in nature. That’s the kind of breakthrough that could help bring biofuels back into vogue.

For more research on cleantech financing check out GigaOM Pro (subscription required):

Cleantech Financing Trends: 2010 & Beyond

As our founder Om Malik said in a post tonight, “Mobile changes everything. And it’s changed us, too.” After we launched GigaOM’s iPhone app three months ago we realized a unified experience of all our various properties — from our blogs and subscription service to our events and Twitter feed — is something readers have truly been craving.

We learned from our iPhone app that readers love the diversity, depth and deftness of our content regardless of which network blog it came from. This type of data has prompted us to rethink the branding and overall design of the network, which includes seven (soon to be eight) blogs, a subscription research service, distributed Twitter content, and five totally awesome events. As a result we’ve made some slight navigation changes, part of the overall design project we first began in November 2009.

Through our new navigation we’ll expose you to other sites and writers on the network, as well as highlight content that affects multiple industries and, along with that, multiple sites in the network. For example, we’d more frequently feature content like how data centers used for cloud computing drive up the need for more power, including clean power (Google, that means you). Unifying our content will also speed up page loads across the network.

But for Earth2Tech readers, we want to assure you the content and coverage of greentech issues will not change. We’ll still be bringing you in-depth analysis, scoops, profiles and the latest breaking news about green entrepreneurs and investors in the same way we’ve been doing it over the past three years. The heart of Earth2Tech will remain the same. We’re just getting a fresh coat of paint and joining hands when appropriate with our fellow tech writers.

You can still access our content in the same places it’s always lived.

Twitter feed here and (my personal twitter feed here).

Our RSS feed here.

Our subscription service here.

Our Facebook page here.

We’d love to hear your opinion about these design tweaks and ideas for future changes.

Image courtesy of BRD62.

The future of lighting in commercial, industrial and government buildings is digital, networked and intelligent, though the potentially massive opportunity of retrofitting these buildings with lighting control systems has largely been untapped. But according to a new report on GigaOM Pro (subscription required), written by Trevor Curwin of Kachan & Co., the lighting controls sector is now being driven by a dozen startups that have a solid chance of getting acquired by larger players.

There are hundreds of billions of square feet of existing commercial and industrial building space in the developed world, including 74.5 billion square feet of floor space in commercial buildings currently in the U.S. Commercial and industrial building owners commonly spend 40 percent of their electricity expenditures on lighting, but only seven percent of their buildings in the U.S. have installed lighting control systems of any kind, including retrofitted lighting fixtures, dimmable lighting systems or building automation networks.

So far, the companies that have developed lighting-specific control technology for these buildings are mostly less than three years old, says Curwin’s report. Startups in the space include Cavet, Energy Automation Systems (EASI), Fifth Light Technologies, Adura Technologies, Lumenergi, Easylite, Lutron Electronics, Starfield Controls, Echoflex Solutions, and Universal Lighting Technologies.

Because the market is so young and new, but the market size is substantial, the best of these startups have a good chance of getting acquired by larger players like building automation giants Johnson Controls and Honeywell, or demand response players like EnerNOC, and Comverge.

The success for these startups will rely on having a low upfront capital cost, having the least disruption of the building infrastructure, targeting the private sector (which is underserved) and having a strong sales team. Building owners said that the most important aspects of a lighting controls system were “low-cost dimmable ballast technologies,” a “one-stop integrated solution” and having a “plug-and-play concept.”

At a time when lighting control customers are looking to cut operating costs, and when state and federal-level policies are heavily focused on energy efficiency, the success of these firms’ efforts could be indicative of trends on the broader greentech market.

Image courtesy of Cavet.

Nine vehicles remain in competition for the $10 million Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize, which is seeking to spur development of commercially viable cars that average 100 miles-per-gallon. The competition, the brainchild of Peter Diamandis X Prize Foundation, began 15 months ago with 136 entries and will end on Sept. 16 in Washington D.C. with the announcement of a winner. The final nine vehicles vying for the prize have emerged after a week of performance, safety, and efficiency testing at the Michigan International Speedway.

Finalists were asked to demonstrate a minimum efficiency of 90 miles-per-gallon at this stage (or equivalent for an electric vehicle), along with passing tests for carbon emissions, acceleration (0-60 mph), braking (60 mph), driving range, weight, and more. Several leading teams have emerged, including Virginia-based Edison2, with a combustion, 4-passenger car; X-Tracer, a Swiss team with an electric vehicle that has achieved 197 miles-per-gallon-equivalent in some tests; and Raceabout, a Finnish team with an electric car that has achieved 143 miles-per-gallon-equivalent. The U.S. Department of Energy has contributed more than $9 million towards the competition since its inception.

Here’s a look at some of the top stories informing the international energy outlook this week:

Swiss Agency Pumps Millions into South Africa Energy Efficiency

“There is a lot that we can learn from the Swiss when it comes to energy-efficiency standards,” said South African Energy Minister Dipuo Peters. Swiss energy and power systems giant ABB could see major action from this agreement, so watch NYSE: ABB.

Obama Drives the Chevy Volt Electric Vehicle… Ten Feet

So, the Prez didn’t quite put the pedal to the metal, but Obama’s tour of Detroit manufacturing facilities this week was meant to boost confidence not only in the U.S. auto industry but also in its transition to more energy-efficient models.

Cap-and-Trade Advocates See Tougher Battle After the Elections

Obama and Democratic heads of the Senate and House of Representatives have some major legislative victories under their belts heading into November’s elections, but a pricing system for carbon may soon be farther off than ever. Clean energy system developers at all levels want more certainty in carbon pricing to help drive renewable alternatives forward. As David Brown of Exelon Corp. (NYSE:EXC), a utility services holding company, says in this article, “the urgency to get some clarity in the utility industry” keeps mounting, regardless of the politics.

Molycorp Cuts Stock Debut Price

Rare earth metals producer Molycorp, which is expected to trade on the NYSE as MCP, has cut its IPO price to $14 from a previous range of $15-$17. Rare earth elements like Neodymium and Gadolinium are key components in many 21st century technologies like iPods and hybrid electric vehicle motors. Most rare earth resources are in China, so Molycorp’s production property in California’s Mountain Pass mining sites is important strategically and from an investment standpoint. Cheaper entry barriers for the IPO could signal weakness, or a buying opportunity.

South Korea to Raise Power, Gas Prices for First Time in Over a Year

Highlighting the link between inflation and energy prices, South Korea is letting the lid off electricity and fuel prices for the first time since late June, 2009. Finance Ministry officials say only about one-tenth of one percent should be added to national inflation by hiking power prices, but record earnings from Korean conglomerates Samsung and Hyundai are leading to higher interest rates and positive recovery outlooks in the Asia-Pacific region’s #5 economy.

Have a great weekend,

Chris Hunter