Anglo-Dutch publisher Reed Elsevier on Wednesday declined to comment on renewed merger speculation linking it with software king Microsoft.
Reed Elsevier's shares, which hit year lows two weeks ago after a profit warning, made a sharp rebound as dealers replayed talk that Microsoft might make a bid for the publisher.
"We never comment on these sort of market rumors at all," a spokeswoman for Reed International said in London. For its part, Elsevier in Amsterdam also declined to comment.
Reed's shares jumped 7 percent, or 31 pence, to 473 by midday, while Elsevier surged nearly 6 percent, gaining 1.4 guilders to 26.20 in Amsterdam.
Microsoft (MSFT) has long been seen as one of the few companies large enough to swallow Reed Elsevier, a world leader in professional and academic publishing. Its brands range from the Lexis-Nexis database to the show-business trade newspaper Variety.
Reed's shares scraped year lows of about 428 pence this month, after the company warned its full-year profits would fall short of market forecasts due to weak results across most of its divisions.
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Retailing surges on AOL: America Online (AOL) said Wednesday holiday traffic on its shopping channel has been three-and-a-half times higher than last year, with shoppers spending an average of 50 percent more than they did in 1997.
This included 750,000 first-time online shoppers in the first two weeks of the season, AOL said. Members of the online service are buying more often -- an average of two items every week -- and are spending 48 percent more on each purchase, for an average of US$54 an item. AOL defines "traffic" as the number of visitors to its sites, and views its shopping channel as a mall where shoppers can buy from any of 110 online merchants, spokeswoman Wendy Goldberg said.
While AOL did not release the specific number of buyers or visitors, 48 percent of its 14 million members had shopped online as of October. This was an increase from the prior year, when 42 percent of 10 million members had shopped online.
The most popular holiday category this year was toys and other items for children, closely followed by apparel. Last year's most popular category was apparel, marking the first influx of mass-market consumers, Goldberg said. In 1996, the No. 1 online shopping category was computer products, she said.
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A portal for Bedouins: Orientation, an international portal producer, and the United Arab Emirates, a union of seven kingdoms on the southern coast of the Persian Gulf, on Wednesday unveiled an Internet directory geared toward Middle Eastern computer users.
Orientation UAE offers many of the features Western portals do, including a search engine, breaking news, discussion groups, and online retailing. The site's content is presented in English, but it also has a bit of Middle Eastern spice: sports updates on desert cricket, hourly news updates from regional news sources, and a weekly poll area to measure opinion on items of regional interest.
Orientation UAE is a joint production by Commedia, an UAE communications agency, and Orientation, a private Hong Kong company that sets up regional ISPs and portals around the world. Orientation UAE joins similar Orientation products launched in Costa Rica, Sri Lanka, Romania, and Kenya.
Reuters contributed to this report.
