Valero Energy Corp., the largest U.S. refiner, said it will permanently close its Delaware City, Delaware, plant because of mounting losses after the recession eroded demand for gasoline and diesel.

Japan's Honda Motor Co. Ltd. has again produced the most fuel-efficient and least-polluting vehicles on American roads, the U.S. government projections for 2009 showed on Friday.

Barnes & Noble Inc. said on Friday it had sold out of its newly-launched Nook electronic readers due to high demand — a pre-holiday miscalculation that analysts said could boost sales of rival Amazon.com Inc.'s market-leading Kindle. The news followed a similar announcement on Thursday by Sony Corp. about its electronic reader.

U.S. chocolate maker Hershey Co. is considering launching a bid of at least US$17 billion for British chocolatier Cadbury Plc. as it seeks to trump a hostile offer by Kraft Foods Inc., a source familiar with the matter said on Friday.

Taiwan-based fabless chip vendor MediaTek Inc. announced Friday that it had reached a deal with U.S.-based Qualcomm Inc. under which the two companies will allow each other to utilize technology covered by their respective patent portfolios.

Taiwan's GreTai Securities Market (GTSM), commonly known as the over-the-counter (OTC) exchange, launched yesterday the online trading service for international bond investment.

Asia's airline industry is pulling out of a slump sparked by the global recession with signs passenger numbers are rising, a regional body said Friday, but there were warnings a rebound will be slow.

Some of the computer-industry's biggest players — such as IBM Corp., Intel Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. — have wowed Wall Street this fall with stronger-than-expected profits.

Consumers will have to wait until next year's holiday shopping season to find out if Google Inc.'s new operating system can deliver on its promise to make low-cost computers run faster.

Google Inc., owner of the most popular Internet search engine, and a group of authors and publishers won preliminary approval of a revised settlement over the company's plans to make millions of books available online.