SAO PAULO/BRASILIA, March 28 (Reuters) – Brazilian logistics company Rumo SA on Thursday won an auction to build and operate a 1,537-kilometer freight railway for 30 years, with a bid of 2.7 billion reais ($694 million), according to the government.

Rumo Chief Executive Julio Fontana said that the Norte-Sul Railway would be used to transport primarily agricultural commodities, but would also ship some fuel and bauxite. The railway could be operational within 2 years, Fontana said.

 

By Aluisio Alves and Jake Spring

 

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China is open to negotiate trade and investment agreements with Brazil, including a double tax treaty, as part of a broader move to engage the Latin American commodities giant, Beijing’s new ambassador in Brasilia said.

“We’re willing to study, together with the Brazilian side, measures to facilitate and liberate trade and investments, negotiate agreements to protect investments and avoid double taxation,” Ambassador Yang Wanming wrote in response to questions from Bloomberg.

 

By Samy Adghirni via Bloomberg

 

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Join Brazilian and U.S. law firms’ partners, representatives from the public sector,
law professors, economists, and business leaders to discuss economic, political and
legal issues about the country’s priorities on reforms, privatization, foreign
investments, cross-border transactions, and technology.

The Brazilian government signed a space technology safeguard agreement (TSA) with the US with hopes to revive its own activities in the sector and cash in on commercial opportunities.

The idea is that Brazil would be able to claim a share of the space launch business, estimated to generate nearly $300 billion a year, by allowing US companies to launch out of the Brazilian Air Force’s Alcantara Launch Center.

 

By Angelica Mari via ZD Net

 

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Travelers are scrambling to get plane tickets to Brazil now that the country has erased the need for a visa.

Australian, Canadian, Japanese and American tourists will no longer need a visa starting June 17, 2019, and a new Kayak survey revealed searches for flights have shown double-digit increases. The highest increase was registered in Australia (36 percent), followed by the United States (31 percent), Canada (19 percent) and Japan (4 percent).

 

By Janeen Christoff via Travel Pulse

 

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RIO DE JANEIRO, March 27 (Reuters) – Brazilian energy firm Eneva SA announced a secondary offering of 49.97 million shares in a securities filing on Wednesday, confirming an earlier Reuters report.

The firm, which owns gas-fired power plants and natural gas exploration and production assets in northeastern Brazil, said shareholders Itau Unibanco Holding SA, Uniper Holding GmbH, Banco BTG Pactual SA, Banco Pine SA , and Dommo Austria GmbH, a unit of Brazil’s Dommo Energia SA, plan to sell shares in the offering.

 

By Gram Slattery via Reuters

 

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On Wednesday (03), the Rural Landscapes Project will be launched in Brasilia, an initiative focused on environmental conservation and restoration and the promotion of low-carbon farming practices in selected basins in the Cerrado.

The launch will be hosted by the Agriculture and Livestock Confederation and will be attended by the Minister of Agriculture, Tereza Cristina, the German ambassador to Brazil, Georg Witschel, the interim director of the World Bank in the country, Doina Petrescu, and the president of CNA , João Martins.

 

By DATAGRO

 

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O Consulado-Geral do Brasil em Nova York / Consulate General of Brazil in NYC tem o prazer de informar que a ICC World Chambers Federation organizará, em parceria com a CACB – Confederação das Associações Comerciais e Empresariais do Brasil, o 11 Congresso Mundial de Câmaras, no Rio de Janeiro, entre os dias 12 e 14 de Junho de 2019.
Estão previstos mais de 1200 participantes de 100 países e 80 palestrantes.

O material do congresso está disponível em https://bit.ly/2JJyffd

Para informações adicionais, entre em contato com juliana.kampf@cacb.org.br

SAO PAULO, March 25 (Reuters) – Brazil’s Raízen Energia SA, the world’s largest sugar maker, raised 900 million reais ($233 million) using Agribusiness Receivables Certificates (CRA), the company’s chief financial officer told Reuters on Monday.

Guilherme Cerqueira, the CFO, said the company initially expected to earn 750 million reais from the operation but raised more due to demand, which exceeded expectations by more than double.

 

By Roberto Samora via Reuters

 

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Brazil has just overtaken China in terms of consumer sentiment, as the world’s second-largest economy slows down and spending intention on big ticket items decline, according to a Credit Suisse survey released Monday.

Speaking to CNBC at the Credit Suisse Asian Investment Conference in Hong Kong on Monday, Eugene Klerk, the bank’s managing director of global thematic research said China showed weaker readings in spending intentions compared to Brazil and India.

 

By Shirley Tay via CNBC

 

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Brazil and Chile promise to intensify the rapprochement between Mercosur (Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay, as Venezuela is temporarily suspended) and the Pacific Alliance (Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico and Peru) to a free trade area , informs the “Agência Brasil”. From July, Brazil will hold the presidency-pro tempore of Mercosur and Chile will be at the forefront of the Pacific Alliance.

In Santiago, on the last day of the visit to Chile, President Jair Bolsonaro and Chilean President Sebastián Piñera ratified on Saturday (23) the terms of the free trade agreement between the two trade blocs.

 

By DATAGRO

 

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Amazon is taking its first steps towards evolving its artificial intelligence-enabled voice assistant Alexa in Brazil.

The company said it was “excited to bring Alexa to Brazil” and that it will be asking some of its customers “to help refine her capabilities over the coming months.”

 

By Angelica Mari via ZD Net

 

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BRASILIA (Reuters) – Brazil Mines and Energy Minister Bento Albuquerque said on Thursday that the government will present a program for overhauling the natural gas sector by June, a move aimed at lowering energy costs in the country.

The program will be called the “New Gas Market” and is separate from the “Gas for Growth” program pursued under previous President Michel Temer, Albuquerque told reporters in a briefing.

 

By Jake Spring via Reuters

 

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Brazil’s central bank held its benchmark interest rate at an all-time low in the first meeting under its new boss and signaled it could lower borrowing costs in the future if growth continues to disappoint.

The bank’s board on Wednesday kept the Selic rate unchanged at 6.50 percent for the eighth straight meeting in an announcement expected by all 39 economists in a Bloomberg survey. It was the first monetary policy decision under Roberto Campos Neto, who was sworn in as head of the monetary authority earlier this month.

Petrobras is expected to receive more than $18 billion from a mixture of government and private sources as payment for oil reserves, people familiar with the matter said, potentially resolving a dispute that has dragged on since 2013.

Brazil’s government anticipates that companies seeking to join in deep-water oil projects would need to pay Petrobras more than $9 billion, said the people, who asked not to be named because the information hasn’t been made public. That will add to about $9 billion the state would be willing to pay Petrobras from its own coffers, according to the people.

 

By Sabrina Valle via Bloomberg

 

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The meeting between presidents Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump brought some impacts to bilateral trade in agribusiness. The US government issued a joint statement saying it agreed to take new steps to free the purchase of fresh meat exported by Brazil.

According to a note, a technical visit will be scheduled by the US Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service to audit Brazil’s beef inspection system as soon as the Brazilian government has provided food safety documentation.

 

By DATAGRO

 

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In attending a panel on investment opportunities at Brazil Day in Washington, Minister Tereza Cristina (Agriculture, Livestock and Food Supply) said on Monday (18) that Brazilian agriculture has the capacity to increase food production by 30% without destroying even one tree in all our territory. ” The statement was made to business owners and executives of large US companies in response to a question raised by Donna Hrinak, CEO of Boeing in Brazil, moderator of the event, about alleged environmental impacts caused by Brazilian agricultural production.

“The Brazilian farming industry will continue to grow without deforesting a single tree,” said the minister. “We have the capacity to include almost 30% more production without destroying even one tree, a tree stand all over our territory.”

 

By DATAGRO

 

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Qualcomm is pressing ahead with its plans to develop the semiconductor industry in Brazil and exploit opportunities in the mobility and Internet of Things segments.

Along with Universal Scientific Industrial (USI) and Asus, the company has announced new Asus smartphones that utilize its system-in-package (SiP) technology developed in Brazil.

 

By Angelica Mari via ZD Net

 

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Following the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff in mid-2016 and the inauguration of President Michel Temer, who had been Vice President, the new team responsible for Brazil’s international economic agenda worked diligently for greater integration of our country into the world economy. That has happened in many areas, including relations with international organizations, the domestic framework for officially supported export credits and trade policy.

With regard to relations with international organizations, the team has contributed to deepen Brazil´s participation in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the mandate of which focuses on the discussion and international consolidation of best practices in public policies. 

 

By Marcello Estevão via International Banker

 

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President Jair Bolsonaro’s market friendly agenda faces a key test on Friday with an airport auction that will serve as a gauge of investors’ appetite for the administration’s massive privatization plan.

The tender is expected to generate 3.5 billion reais ($910 million) in investments in the next 30 years. That figure includes a minimum initial fee of 219 million reais and a minimum investment of 1.48 billion reais in the next five years –starting on the sixth year of the license, operators will also pay the government a percentage of their gross revenue.

 

By Vinicius Andrade and Fabiola Moura via Bloomberg

 

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What makes some oil plays more valuable than others? The answer: big discoveries in excellent reservoirs that are cheap to exploit. Few places on earth do all three. Brazil does, as I was reminded on a trip to Rio last month. Its pre-salt Santos basin fields, such as Lula and Libra, have these attributes in abundance.

The reservoirs in these giants lie at the “Goldilocks” depth – not too expensive to drill, but deep enough for oil to flow freely to surface. Individual wells in the exceptional pre-salt carbonate reservoirs can produce up to 50,000 barrels in a single day – a good Permian fracked well takes two months to do that. Many producing wells are choked because the subsea flow lines or platform just can’t cope with the sheer volumes. Nice work if you can get it.

 

By Simon Flowers and Wood Mackenzie via Forbes

 

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Brazil’s central bank would be better equipped to keep inflation low if its autonomy to decide on monetary policy were guaranteed by law, the bank’s new chief said as he was sworn in on Wednesday.

“It’s important to keep the recent gains obtained in monetary policy,” Roberto Campos Neto said, stressing that increased central bank credibility has been crucial for reining in inflation. “We believe that an autonomous central bank would be better prepared to consolidate these recent gains.”

 

By Rachel Gamarski via Bloomberg

 

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RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – On Tuesday, March 12th, Brazil’s Minister of Agriculture, Tereza Cristina, said that she was optimistic that talks to reopen the U.S. market for Brazil’s fresh beef will be successful after a nearly two year ban of beef imports coming from Brazil.

Cristina is part of the contingent accompanying Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro on his visit to the United States next week.

 

By Nelson Belen, via The Rio Times

 

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The generation of electric energy and the production of biofertilizers from livestock wastes is already a reality in Brazilian cattle breeding. After some frustrated experiments in the 1970s and 1980s, growers who adopt a feedlot system, in which cattle are raised in large stables, started to generate the electricity consumed on the farm, and in some cases even sell the surplus distribution companies.

 

The adoption of technology is still low among dairy farmers, but researcher Marcelo Henrique Otenio, who coordinates studies on biodigesters at Embrapa Gado de Leite (MG), says that the use of biogas is booming in the sector and shows returns financial resources. “We have assembled a multidisciplinary research team from several institutions and our studies indicate that it is economically viable to use biodigesters in dairy farming for free stall production systems with more than eighty cows” , reveals Otenio.

 

Via DATAGRO

 

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SAO PAULO (Reuters) – Brazil’s Sao Paulo state said on Friday it would offer fresh tax incentives to automakers, weeks after Ford Motor Co said it would shut down a plant there with 3,000 employees and General Motors Co hinted it might do the same before backtracking.

Sao Paulo is the historical center of Brazil’s auto industry, which was one of the world’s five biggest until a recent downturn from which it is still recovering. It has been losing ground in recent years to other Brazilian states which have showered automakers with incentives.

 

By Aluisio Alves via Reuters

 

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After SoftBank announced its plans to launch a $5 billion innovation fund in Latin America, we reached out to the good folks at the Latin American Venture Capital Association (LAVCA) for some context, and what they told me only validates the reasoning behind SoftBank’s interest in the region. (In 2017, we reported on the growing interest in Latin America.)

Let’s start with some numbers. Venture funding in Latin American startups is up — way up — from previous years. Specifically, LAVCA’s data shows that VC funding more than doubled in 2017 to $1.14 billion compared to $500 million in 2016. While 2018 numbers haven’t been finalized, LAVCA is projecting another record year with venture investments topping $1.5 billion.

 

By Mary Ann Azevedo via Techcrunch

 

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Gaining prominence in the domestic economy in recent years, Brazilian agribusiness should follow this trend of growth and increase its share in international trade for the next ten years, especially with sales of its main items such as soy, corn, sugar and meats. The conclusion is from the study “Outlook Fiesp 2028 – Projections for Brazilian Agribusiness”, prepared by the Federation of Industries of the State of São Paulo (Fiesp).

According to the document, which was released by the entity today (07), considering a scenario of fiscal balance and the implementation of economic reforms, the Brazilian agricultural policy could be improved, for example, from the effective prioritization of rural insurance as a guarantee policy of income to the producer. This scenario would also greatly benefit the segments of animal proteins and more elaborate products from the expected income growth.

 

Via DATAGRO

 

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Having shifted from technology to human resources two decades ago, Marcelo Nóbrega is right at the point of convergence between the two areas as he enhances the management of a 50,000-strong Generation Z workforce in McDonald’s restaurants throughout Brazil.

Keeping up with innovation that enhances staff management and productivity is core to the HR director’s work, who joined Arcos Dorados, McDonald’s largest franchisee in the world, in 2014. In his role, Nóbrega is actively looking for innovative approaches to better interact with the workforce with technologies such as artificial intelligence high up on the agenda.

 

By Angelica Mari via Forbes

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Brazil has been through the ringer. The country went from being one of the world’s best-performing emerging economies to one riddled with political instability and beset by one of the worst recessions. In 2014, Brazil reached a record high 65 members on Forbes’Billionaires List. Then the troubles began, and the ranks of Brazil’s superrich fell steadily to just 42 in 2018.

But Brazil has come roaring back—at least when it comes to the very wealthy. A whopping 18 new billionaires hail from the South American country this year, a number of whom have taken their companies public on the São Paulo stock exchange in the recent past. Altogether Forbes found 58 billionaires in Brazil this year worth a combined $175 billion.

 

By Anderson Antunes via Forbes

 

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Demand for digital driving licenses is soaring in Brazil since the introduction of the smartphone-based document last year, available to the country’s 60 million drivers.

According to Brazil’s federal government’s data processing agency (Serpro), the digital license is available countrywide since April, but uptake has increased by 85 percent due to a new remote validation functionality added to the app last month.

 

By Angelica Mari via ZD Net

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27 February 2019, Panama City, Panama – Brazil just became the first country to receive financial resources from the Green Climate Fund (GCF) for having successfully reduced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from deforestation in the past.

The payment from the GCF is based on results achieved by Brazil in the Amazon biome between 2014-2015, and which have been reported and validated by experts from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). This is the essence of REDD+: a mechanism to reward countries for having reduced their deforestation.

 

By UNDP

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GREENSPOON MARDER APPOINTS PARTNER MYRNA MAYSONET AS CHIEF DIVERSITY OFFICER

 

Fort Lauderdale, FL – February 27, 2019 – Greenspoon Marder is pleased to announce the appointment of partner, Myrna Maysonet, as the Chief Diversity Officer. Ms. Maysonet joined Greenspoon Marder in 2000 and went on to become the first female partner. She has since served as a mentor to the firm’s diversity and even worked to provide same sex benefits a decade before it was considered to become a law.

 

“Greenspoon Marder is committed to taking big strides in diversity. Myrna has proven to be an integral part of those efforts over her 18 years with the firm,” comments Michael Marder, Co-Managing Director. “Our firm make-up is regularly changing and adding dynamics which allow us to better serve and connect with our clients. With Myrna’s leadership we plan to continue to diversify our ranks more and more each day,” comments Gerald Greenspoon, Co-Managing Director.

 

Ms. Maysonet is an advocate for LGBTQ and women’s rights and incorporates these values into her practice. She has covered these issues in a number of speaking engagements and panel discussions. Additionally, Ms. Maysonet is regularly featured on local, national and Hispanic networks including El Sentinel Orlando, Univision, Orlando Business Journal, South Florida Business Journal, Law360 and HR Magazine.

 

About Greenspoon Marder

Greenspoon Marder is a national full-service business law firm with more than 200 attorneys and 26 locations across the United States. Since our inception in 1981, our firm has been committed to providing excellent client service through our cross-disciplinary, client-team approach. Our mission is to understand the challenges that our clients face, build collaborative relationships, and craft creative solutions designed and executed with long-term strategic goals in mind. We serve Fortune 500, middle-market public and private companies, start-ups, emerging businesses, individuals and entrepreneurs nationwide. For more information, visit www.gmlaw.com.

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