Cursed with slender profit margins and price-cutting competition from Wal-Mart, supermarkets have been anything but super for years.
Price-cutting competition in telecoms will come more from new providers such as call-back services, which allow callers in Japan to take advantage of cheaper rates elsewhere.
At the World Championship Cutting Competition, held last month in a suburban Atlanta parking lot, Gary Bond, a 48-year-old maintenance worker who named his knife "Bruiser, " was among the strongest contenders to knock out Mr. Phillips.
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One can expect governments to throw up legal roadblocks to prevent such competition from cutting into the lucrative business of printing money.
All the more reason, perhaps, to eschew old-fashioned price-fixing, and to move ahead with the more sensible among their recent proposals, such as cutting import tariffs and encouraging competition.
With underemployed graduates and dropouts increasingly unable to repay loans, state legislatures cutting appropriations, and innovative competition making inroads, the bubble appeared ready to burst, or at least deflate.
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ArcelorMittal Steel USA is finding an uncommon way to beat the competition: It is cutting energy consumption at one of its steel plants in Chicago by re-using heat to make electricity.
Their questions typically are about cutting costs, how to beat the competition, and what to do to make improvements to existing products.
The result was a capacity glut, ferocious competition and frantic price-cutting.
Yet they face tough competition and must rely on cost cutting and a steady stream of new models to maintain profit margins that are already low.
Asian exporters face slower growth abroad, high raw-material prices, growing competition from China and diminishing returns from cost cutting.
Virginia-based OPower has won many contracts with utilities, such as San Francisco-based Pacific Gas and Electric, to use personalized data, competition and even social media to prod consumers into cutting their electricity consumption.
In a brief spell as finance minister in 1994 (when he belonged to Mr Cardoso's party), Mr Gomes followed the sort of neoliberal policies he now criticises, such as cutting import tariffs to expose the local car industry to foreign competition.
Air France-KLM is renegotiating pay and conditions with its staff and cutting more than 5, 000 jobs, as high fuel costs and competition from low-cost airlines take their toll on the debt-laden company.
Their competition will nip at them constantly, under-pricing their products and cutting their margins.
Antitrust regulators worry especially about the effects on competition and innovation when it is a maverick, like the price-cutting TNT, that is being eliminated.
"I will be setting out on Monday how we can do even more to boost broadband roll-out - by stimulating competition and creating an environment in which business can flourish by removing barriers and cutting costs, " he said in a statement.
Cost-cutting alone is not a path to survival in the face of continued declines in print revenue and fierce competition in the digital world.
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