Industries
With the construction of a $14.7-million B.C.-Canada House Pavilion underway in Beijing, several of B.C.’s trade associations are assembling their delegations and hoping to expand BC business in China, using the 2008 Beijing Olympics as a convenient springboard. “China is clearly an emerging market for us, and this is a very good opportunity to kick down a few doors and learn more about it,” says Pascal Spothelfer, president and CEO of the B.C. Technology Industry Association (BCTIA).
Real estate is booming, so why are so few developers on the Top 100 list of B.C.’s biggest companies? Mainly because revenue, our basis for ranking companies, is one bit of information few developers are willing to disclose.
This year’s Top 100 numbers back up economists’ claims that B.C. is well positioned to weather any economic downturn associated with the U.S. housing crisis. Aggregate revenues for the Top 100 companies were $122.2 billion, an increase of 8.9 per cent over last year’s tally. The surge outpaces the 6.2 per cent rise in the province’s nominal GDP. And the threshold for making the list this year inched up to $223.9 million in annual revenues, $40 million more than last year.
For better viewing, click the "full screen" button. BCBusiness assistant art director Ben Oliver and digital editor John Bucher narrate a photographic tour of three major projects now being built in the Lower Mainland: the Sea to Sky Highway expansion, the Athlete's Village in False Creek, and Richmond's speed-skating oval. Photographs...
Recently, I wrapped up a college course I was teaching called “Writing for Magazines.” Twenty-one aspiring writers—most too young to remember the pre-Internet era—sat attentively, if quizzically, for eight weeks as I made the case for that 18th-century technology: the magazine. The course was part of an intensive magazine publishing program;...
1. Geoduck – Is the largest burrowing clam in the world that is also called the elephant trunk clam in Chinese. The majority of geoducks are exported to Honk Kong and mainland China, while a small amount is exported to US...
Here's a gem of an ad from VANOC, and, man, does it say a lot about the organization. The ad features a crowd of be-merchandised, cheering fans with a mannequin in their midst, clothed in obviously-fake Olympic swag. The caption...
Canada is doing a crappy job of protecting its web users from defamation suits – and that’s bad news for anyone north of the 49th who carries on conversations, hosts websites or does business in virtual space. The central problem...
Not that long ago, the rail industry in B.C. looked like it was headed the way of commercial fishing. Trucking was gobbling up market share. Derailments seemed like a weekly occurrence. Canadian National Railway Co. (CN) and Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd. (CP) were digging up sections of unused track, while bureaucracy and stale thinking made the companies sluggish and unwieldy.
I like to drive. There, I said it. I’m one of those people melting ice caps and enriching Middle Eastern despots not because I can’t earn a living without a car and not because the housing market is forcing me to commute from Mission (or wherever it is desperate Vancouverites are buying single-family homes these days).