Mitsubishi offers to buy 10% stake in Alstom

Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries is offering to buy a 10 percent stake in Alstom, a report said Sunday, as it seeks to sweeten a joint bid with Siemens to acquire some of the French firm’s energy assets.

Mitsubishi’s offer comes as it tries to convince the French government to choose the German-Japanese bid for Alstom’s assets over a rival offer from General Electric, the Nikkei business daily said, without citing sources.

Mitsubishi and Siemens are reportedly offering $10 billion for Alstom’s gas and steam turbine business, while the United States’ GE has offered $17 billion for the French conglomerate’s wider energy group.

A source told AFP on Thursday that Mitsubishi is now eyeing a minority stake in Alstom as it looks to reassure the French government of its intentions by forging a broader industrial alliance with the French “national jewel”.

Mitsubishi’s planned capital injection marks an attempt to sweeten its offer to ensure its joint bid with the German giant is accepted, the Nikkei said.

The French government views Alstom as a firm of national strategic importance and is concerned about safeguarding jobs at the company — one of France’s biggest private sector employers, with about 18,000 staff nationwide — as it battles record unemployment and declining industrial competitiveness.

The German-Japanese joint offer could scupper GE’s bid, which has already run into political opposition in France.

France is worried that Alstom’s business base may weaken should its energy assets be bought by foreign firms.

A Mitsubishi spokesman could not immediately confirm the Nikkei report. “We cannot comment on it as we are still in negotiations,” he said.

How Good is Your Country in this: The 10 Best & Worst Countries For Drivers

There are lots ways to die. There are also lots of people on Planet Earth tracking when and how people die. Two of those people — Michael Sivak and Brandon Schoettle — have compiled much of that data to show us where folks are most prone to die on the road.

The study is called Mortality from Road Crashes in 193 Countries: A Comparison with Other Leading Causes of Death (PDF). The title’s a little somber for our tastes, but in fairness, the report deals with a very somber subject, so we’ll it slide.

To compile their report, Sivak and Schoettle, who head up the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, pored over fatality statistics published by the World Health Organization in 2008. Though the two were keenly interested in traffic-related deaths, they also took note of fatalities from three other causes: heart disease, malignant neoplasms (shorthand: cancer), and cerebrovascular disease (shorthand: strokes). Then, they mapped that data, calculating the highest and lowest fatality rates associated with each illness, the fatality rates associated with auto accidents, and how the former and latter overlapped.

The good news is that, on average, strokes, heart disease, and cancer are much bigger threats to human beings than car accidents. The bad news is that in some countries, that’s not entirely true. In Namibia, for example, you’re 53 percent more likely to die in automobile collision than from cancer. And in Qatar, you’re more than five times as likely to die in a car accident than from a stroke. You’ve been warned.

Here are the ten deadliest countries for all four measured causes, with the number of deaths per 100,000 residents in parentheses. Not surprisingly, many of these countries are in the developing world and/or in regions experiencing significant civil conflict.

1. Chad (1717)
2. Guinea-Bissau (1675)
3. Central African Republic (1671)
4. Ukraine (1638)
5. Malawi (1627)
6. Afghanistan (1612)
7. Democratic Republic of the Congo (1607)
8. Somalia (1560)
9. Lesotho (1559)
10. Mozambique (1559)

And here are the deadliest countries with regard to just automobile accidents, along with the number of fatalities per 100,000 residents. Note that there’s only one overlapping country, Malawi. (“Congo” refers to the Republic of the Congo, not the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is a completely separate country.)

1. Namibia (45)
2. Thailand (44)
3. Iran (38)
4. Sudan (36)
5. Swaziland (36)
6. Venezuela (35)
7. Congo (34)
8. Malawi (32)
9. Dominican Republic (32)
10. Iraq (32)

And now, to the other end of the chart: the lowest fatality rates from all four causes of death…

183. Nicaragua (439)
184. Costa Rica (434)
185. Saudi Arabia (404)
186. Maldives (380)
187. Syria (364)
188. Oman (331)
189. Brunei Darussalam (310)
190. Bahrain (296)
191. Kuwait (175)
192. United Arab Emirates (155)
193. Qatar (141)

And the lowest fatality rates from auto accidents. Again, there’s little overlap, other than Maldives:

184. Switzerland (5)
185. Netherlands (4)
186. Antigua and Barbuda (4)
187. Tonga (4)
188. Israel (4)
189. Marshall Islands (4)
190. Fiji (4)
191. Malta (3)
192. Tajikistan (3)
193. Maldives (2)

For reference, the U.S. had 817 deaths per 100,000 residents from all four causes, which is slightly better than the average global fatality rate of 844.  In terms of auto fatalities, the U.S. had 14 deaths per 100,000, placing it above the global average of 18.

We should point out that the report leaves out a few countries that might’ve made the “ten safest” lists, but weren’t included — countries like Greenland and Vatican City. It also overlooks some troubled areas that could’ve ended up on the bottom, like South Sudan and Palestine. Just so you know.

SO, WHAT DOES ALL THIS MEAN?

Maybe we’re Type-A personalities, but when we read a report, we expect to walk away with a few bullet points. Sivak and Schoettle’s findings, however, are a bit subtle for that. True, their per-country comparisons of various causes of death are interesting (e.g. the overwhelming likelihood that Qataris will die in auto accidents rather than from strokes), but the authors don’t draw any conclusions from those stats or offer any suggestions to explain them.

Perhaps Sivak and Schoettle began their work assuming/hoping that they’d find some overlap between the various causes of death. Unfortunately, they were comparing apples to apples, and such Freakonomic-style linkages occur more often when comparing apples to oranges — in this case, for example, looking for parallels between education rates or GDP and auto fatalities.

And so, we’re left with three major takeaways:

1. The knowledge that auto fatalities constitute a mere sliver of the world’s deaths: “For the world, fatalities from road crashes represented 2.1% of fatalities from all causes…. The highest percentage by country (15.9% in the United Arab Emirates) was 53 times the lowest percentage (0.3% in the Marshall Islands).”

2. Math still works: “For a country to have fatalities from road crashes corresponding to a high percentage of fatalities from another cause requires either a high fatality rate per population from road crashes, or a low fatality rate from the other cause, or both. The converse applies to a low percentage.” Which is a complicated sentence, but also duh.

3. Decent, if grisly fodder for cocktail party conversations.

If you’re intrigued by this kind of data, you should really check out a similar study published by the Pulitzer Center based on WHO data from 2010. Though many of the best and worst performers are the same as in Sivak and Schoettle’s report, the findings are far more nuanced.

The Pulitzer Center looked only at auto fatalities, taking into account the number of people killed as auto passengers as well as those killed while riding motorcycles, bicycles, and while walking. It also provided data on legal efforts to curb auto fatalities in each country, which was immensely interesting to data hounds like us.

Granted, the folks at Pulitzer didn’t draw many telling conclusions, either, but at least their data’s pretty.

Have you heard?

Today, Australia’s auto industry was dealt a death blow. In a press release, Toyota Australia revealed “that it will stop building cars in Australia by the end of 2017 and become a national sales and distribution company.”

Toyota Australia’s president and CEO, Max Yasuda, and Toyota Motor Corporation president and CEO, Akio Toyoda, delivered the bad news in person at a press conference. Mr. Yasuda called it “one of the saddest days in Toyota’s history”.

Making the situation worse is the fact that Toyota was the last major automaker building cars in the country. With Toyota out of the picture, Australia’s auto industry is dead.