US chemical giant Dow Chemical plans to invest 2.5 billion dollars in China by 2005 to boost its share of a rapidly growing market, the China Daily Business Weekly reported.

With the announcement last week of the setting up of a firm locally to manage its business it will be "much easier" for the company "to oversee the implementation of new projects," Michael Lung, head of China operations for Dow Chemical Pacific, told the newspaper. Last year Dow Chemical signed a letter of intent with affiliate China Petrochemical Corp (Sinopec) in Tianjin, northern China, to build an ethylene plant at a total cost of four billion dollars. Sinopec is 50 percent owned by Dow Chemical.

The US firm, with annual business returns in China of 500 million dollars, 20 per cent of its overall Asia-Pacific figure, also plans projects in Shenzhen in the south and a polystyrene factory at Zhangjiagang in the eastern province of Jiangsu together with Japanese firm AsahiChemical.

Kajima to lose $1.5 billion

Japan's Kajima Corp. is expected to suffer a special loss of 200 billion yen ($1.5 billion) to sell off massive bad assets and speed up its streamlining programme, a daily said. The special loss is seen to send the construction company's annual earnings to a net loss of 170 billion yen in the year to March 1998, Kajima's first net loss since its listing in 1961, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun said. The company estimates losses of planned land sales would reach 120 billion yen,nearly half of the assets it holds for property development, the business daily said.

The remaining 80 billion yen special loss is due to reorganisation and integration of group companies at home and overseas, it said.

Kajima has been suffering a drop in sales of land it bought at higher prices during the "bubble" speculative economy of the late 1980s.

Mercedes to use Australian steering

Every Mercedes-Benz car built in Europe from next year will feature a uniqueAustralian-designed power-steering system under a major joint venture project announced here. The project, which has scheduled production to begin in the second half of 1999, links Mercedes-Benz Lenkungen GmbH, a division of German auto-giant Daimler-Benz Group, with a small Australian engineering firm, Bishop Steering. The Mercedes-Benz E-class range, of which more than 200,000 are built each year,already uses the Bishop system manufactured at the Benz cold rolling plant in Dusseldorf, Bishop Steering said. But a signed memorandum of understanding will lead to capital investment of up to A$30 million within a year in a new hi-technology manufacturing plant either in Poland or in eastern Germany.

Volume will rise from 840 variable ratio steering racks in the first full year OF manufacture to more than 1.7 million by 2005.

Sydney-based Bishop Steering, which is responsible for more than 500 patents worldwide, is a division of the Bishop Group, established as a leading Australian industrial innovator in1957.