Being the world’s most successful networking company Cisco’s ubiquity is a given and it has been ‘present’ in Malta as throughout Europe and the Mediterranean area for decades through its channel partners. However its physical presence only dates from 2008, when an office was set up under its current manager Ruben Azzopardi, a man with a deep understanding of Cisco’s products and capabilities as a senior executive at one of its principal local customers.

I was in 1902 that a mining engineer by the name of Georges Bia first opened up a sales office in Brussels. It is here that the routes of the BIA Group can be traced back to. Today, 113 years later, BIA exists as a leading international company in the field of machine distribution for the civil engineering and construction industries, with its head offices remaining in Belgium.

Operational Excellence is not a continuous improvement initiative, nor a lean program where we seek out waste and eliminate it. It is very tangible and real, and has practical definition that applies to everyone in the organization: Operational Excellence is when, “Each and every employee can see the flow of value to the customer, and fix that flow before it breaks down.” But Operational Excellence is not easy to achieve.

Several years ago, a company that produced capital equipment initiated a firm-wide project designed to gain an advantage against competitors in a market that cared about both product quality and cost. The firm’s leadership put pressure on basically every department in the organization to come up with new ideas that could translate into marketplace success. Their efforts yielded some results, but the outcome fell far short of what had been hoped when the project had been started.

The purchase of the airports and other assets from the Spanish firm Abertis will cost a total of 284 million euros. The move, which does still require the approval of minority shareholders and US regulators, will see ADC & HAS Airports Worldwide add to its portfolio, which includes interests in airports in Costa Rica and Ecuador.

The plans involve various tax breaks, including a proposal to cut the tax on some of the income generated from producing shale gas from 62 percent to 30 percent. The government claims that this would make the UK the most generous regime for shale gas in the world.

Alibaba’s announcement that it has experienced a 71 percent jump in quarterly sales to $1.4 billion has resulted in shares in its owner Yahoo rising more than ten percent on Wall Street. The figures eclipse those of Yahoo’s overall performance, which included a 13 percent fall in advertising revenue for the same period.

It was in 1929 that O. T. H. Beier, a young pioneer living in Germany, made a life-changing decision, going against the wishes of his family by leaving his home and travelling to Durban to establish himself as a wool merchant. Little could Beier and his family have realised that with this decision he would be sowing the seeds for what would become a business legacy that continues in 2013.