UAE paper: Time for global markets to seize the moment

Now that the New Year celebrations are over and corporations and enterprises around the world are getting back to business, they will at least be buoyed by the showing of global financial markets during 2013, commented a UAE daily. The past five years have been rough, providing a difficult climate for businesses to plan and lay out concrete and fiscally-sound plans for the future. Last year, investors snapped up stocks on bourses around the world, recognising that companies are leaner and more productive than before, providing good opportunities to increase equity prices, the "Gulf News" said in its editorial. "Companies have had to manage their inventories carefully, cut staffing costs, increase productivity, learning to do more with less. Those pains of surviving the fiscal downturn now mean that these companies are poised for growth and increased profits, now that conditions in the marketplace are once more in their favour," the paper wrote. Whether through future acquisitions and mergers or by growing businesses in new directions as a result of the opportunities afforded by the downturn, investors see this as a golden time to take advantage of a period of prolonged growth in global bourses, the paper added.