HMC&R seized several hundred Fake Nintendo DS consoles this weekend, and warned of the potential Fire Risks from faulty power supplies.  The units come from Asia, and the power units have not been properly tested.

Nintendo is also warning of Fake DSi units and also Wii being sold online.  ELSPA, the trade body that represents games publishers, is working hard to get websites selling fake consoles and games taken down.

It can be hard to spot a fake, particularly if you are buying for a present, and you yourself are not a regular games player or buyer.  The first tell tell sign will be the price.  As the old saying goes if something looks to good to be true then it probably is.  The proper original new DS units sell at around £100 each, the fake’s sell at prices around £40.  No retailer is discounting genuine consoles by this amount, so if its that cheap, the liklihood is that it is a fake.

BBC’s Newsround has put together a very help webpage which outlines the boxes and contents to help people identify whether or not they have purchased a fake.  The link is here

Volvo cited a number of reasons, including the economic slowdown, increased costs of raw materials, and new environmental legislation.

“In Europe, customers are continuing to adopt a wait-and-see attitude to the ordering of new vehicles and equipment,” Johansson said. “Moreover, they have increasingly opted to cancel already placed orders. For our part, we have made sure to diligently go through and cleanse out orders in order to secure the quality in our order books.”

The early months of this summer saw record diesel prices, with prices reaching £1.50 per litre.  The HGV trucks cover between 8 and 10 miles per gallon, therefore price increases of up to 50% mean that operators have to question every choice that they make with regard to their vehicle base.

This is a very real example of how changes in fuel prices can totally influence companies decisions to expand, grow and capital expenditure spend.  In Fantasy Couriers, players will need to take account of the these real and frequently changing fuel prices.  When the price of oil goes up, players margins are going to get squeezed, so it is vital that players are going to need to pay particular attention to their pricing, monitor closely their costs, and consider carefully plans to purchase new vehicles in the current ecominc climate.

We finally see a supermarket war has broken out, and the result is lower petrol pump prices, finally back below that £1 a litre mark.

The thing is, the price of a barrel of oil has fallen form $150 to $80 but we’re still only slowly seeing 1p – 3p reductions working their way through to the pumps.  It’s also very interesting to note that it’s not the oil companies launching the price cuts, but instead the supermarkets, shaming the oil companies into following suit.

It has been said that it can take up to 6 weeks for a reduction in a barrel of crude to work it’s way through to the petrol pump price.  However, increases in the price of crude seem to have an immediate, sameday, increase in our fuel bills.

Do we have a case of the oil companies wanting to have it both ways?  Or is there any underlying commercial reason that the price cuts have been so slow to work their way through to the consumers.  Some my cite the financial crises, unstable markets, fuel companies being reluctant to pass on cuts incase the next week they need to increase the prices again, and all the bad PR that would bring with it.

Or is it simply the case that the fuel companies will charge what the markets will bear, and that during the last few weeks consumers, the media and everyone else has taken their eyes off the price of fuel, and have been watching the FTSE instead, and so the oil companies have simply sat quietly by and taken advantage of a couple of weeks of higher margins.

If this is the case, is it wrong?  Are we right to expect the oil companies to pass on the reduction in the price of crude, after all they are all commercial companies there to make a profit.  They know that there are lean times coming and that now is not a time for a low margin/loss making price war.  After all, many of the banks failed to pass on the government’s required 1/2 % interest rate cut onto new borrowers, choosing instead to keep it and use that to give themselves a bit of a cushion and to make a bit of a profit to cover those great big losses.

The price cut does however co-incide with the Prime Minsters’s call last week for the oil companies to cut the price of fuel.  It seems that someone is still keeping a close eye on them.