john ferro, my colleague in london is a real sports guy. i will toss it over to him. earnings looking at bt and you can't talk about bt without talking about sky. it is a battle for sports rights. you have record acquisitions over at sky for the last quarter , how many customers did bt get? we will find out in about 48 minutes. >> thanks. >> just ahead, amazon sees signs of trouble in its sales growth outside the u.s. thenext guest says retailers ability to plan long-term is what sets it apart. stay with us on "countdown." ♪ >> time for today's company news. google's fourth-quarter sales topped estimates. thanue rose 11% to more $13 billion. share at the tech giant are up in after hours trading. revenue rose 11% to $13 billion. google fine-tuned its mobile strategy recently by exiting smartphone manufacturing and selling its motorola handset unit. yahoo! attempts to break into identifies an e-mail hacking attempt. yahoo! is the biggest u.s. web portal and yahoo! mail has more than 100 million daily users. volkswagen is seeking to hire former daimler executive i'm cris

john ferro was just telling you that south africans are going to anemic 0.25%. you can see the momentum coming through in those emerging markets. let's have look at the map of equities. there are spanish retail sales doing better than the market had estimated. this is equity markets at their best. they get a little shot in the arm. what you have going on with the indian central bank, the turkish central bank, we are going to look after ourselves. do what you want to do over there in the fed but you are slaughtering our currencies. we're going to take action. they may not have the reserves to actually hold out but they are going to take action. the betting is that the south africans will now -- equities are getting a buzz. let's check in in the u.k. and see what is driving. minors up by 5%. that ties in with the whole american story. fran, you mentioned a couple of companies. let's give you an indication of where some of them are. under performing at the opening in the ftse. that is a bigger structural story at play at royal dutch. bayer gets a little good news i

for more on what we can expect, let's get to john ferro in the newsroom. >> good morning.etty big headline numbers from this company. they could paste their first profit gain in over a year. how many iphones, ipods were sold over christmas? it could be 65 million phones, 25 million ipads. the new releases are going to get you a bump a quarter. we have the ipad air, the new iphone too. another point of interest is the forecast. as they team up with china mobile, how optimistic are they about sales in that region? there have been a lot of people talking about a new iphone that may have a bigger screen. , this isle complain just evolution of existing products. what a lot of people want are some big innovations. >> basil evolution and innovation debate that you have been talking about, apple has not entered a new product category since 2010. there has been a lot of talk about what they could do in the mobile payment space. is that something to watch? >> there has been a big buzz about this over the weekend. 400 million, that is how many credit card details apple has on file wi

john ferro joining us with the latest.ine, back to davos and you. >> we have a packed show coming up. he says it was a tough year for european oil and gas companies. our interview with the tetra tech ceo is next. they with us, live from davos. ♪ wechsler comeback. you're watching "the pulse." everyone is now familiar with the nsa and the nsa is probably pretty familiar with you. but why is this a threat to the nsa? this is a free software technology that allows users to keep their online residence anonymous, making it very difficult for the nsa to track your activity. sam grobart explains how it works and reveals the surprising source behind the funding. >> with all this talk about the nsa and encrypted data, you might be wondering if there is a way to keep your online activity on the down low. turns out there is a way. it is a software technology. it stands for the onion router. referring to the vegetable wash many layers. tor is free software you can download onto your pc or smartphone which will anonymize your data. how

john ferro joins us now.s been looking at what is happening in the latest data. >> if you look at some of the latest data, nationwide house prices coming in this morning, and 8.4% rise on the year. , house prices going on a bit of a tear. this is the debate in this country at the moment. after the heavy days of 2007, the fear of a house bubble firmly in the psyche of those at the bank of england. you have energy costs rising, food costs rising. interest rates at record lows. plenty of people asking the question, what happens to the consumer? when those mortgage rates do start to rise. let me tell you the big issue in this country. it is the fact that demand continues to outstrip supply. some would say you have the government wrongly focusing on the demand side of the equation. looking at the help to buy scheme. if you look at some of the numbers coming out, you will see one billion pounds of mortgages applied for through that help to buy scheme in the first 12 weeks. this is not just about london. look at the

john ferro is here to tell us how these became the most successful in the world. they do versus the market? this is the benchmark. 16 of there only world's largest hedge funds that beat the s&p 500. 16. it is printed right across the front page. big pressure on them. these guys have paid a lot of money. the guy right at the top, and 84% gain. larry robbins, remarkable. where did he put his money? we are talking about a mix between politics and business. he saw that was obamacare came over those final legal hurdles, that more people eventually would get insurance provisions. it meant that more paying customers arrived at hospitals, more volume, more money. join the dots, put it together, go in hard. that is what he did. facilitieshcare runs across multiple states. it saw a gain of 45% by october. with these guys is, is there consistency? how did they do five years before that? if i am putting money with you, you can have one great year and if you have four bad years after that i am not interested. >> it was almost a perfect storm for larry robbins. this is a guy th

john ferro, over to you. >> free styling here on the markets. , you see itkets again here with the turkisha. record though i guess the dollar and the euro. this is the turkish lira against the euro over the last six months. a 24% move lower. each of these countries have got their own respective political instability. risk aversion, that is the theme across global markets. this is not contained to emerging markets. you see the selloff in europe once again. for the 100 down by 0.25%. down by a third on the dax. a slowdown in the second-largest economy, china on a big concern there. over to the u.k., here in london a big debate about forward guidance. signs that the bank of england may step away from it, the big question, has it failed? check out the british pound against the dollar. one pound now buys you $1.66. let me tell you where or what got us started, right down here. i will let you decide whether that is a failure. >> you could argue that is a huge success or a huge failure. when the pound goes up the view is that interest rates go up. we're going to take a break. still to come, we ar

. >> john, thank you so much. jonathan ferrot the very latest on the u.k.. >> tech companies and google are looking to transform smart technology to four wheels. european business correspondent caroline hyde joins us now with more details. today we had an announcement from google that they launched an open automotive alliance. carmakers, general motors is in there, honda, on develop looking to android software and customize it for cars. samsung similarly partnering software thathave will run in car systems as well. why these tech companies falling over themselves? because her market could be huge. we understand that ihs thinks 150 million in excess of 150 million cars will be on the road and connected to the internet by 2020. that's more than all the cars that will be reduced globally this year alone. in fact, we are seeing the amount of chips, the value of chip net technology in each car is just wrapping ever higher. in fact, the value is something like 65% higher than it was a decade ago. the way younating, can get technology

. >> john, thank you so much. jonathan ferrovery latest on the jobs report. >> call it a case of the x- files. google's secretive group has overseeing -- met with researchers who oversee medical devices. hans nichols joins us with more. what is the story? >> here is what we know. in the united states, they are outside of washington dc, from their public calendar, they had meetings with google's employees. the group that the fda is the same group that monitors cardiovascular devices. as well as eyewear. you put two and two together and you crosscheck which google employees were actually at the meeting -- some of them are google employees that work for this research x lab that came up with google eyewear. they are always innovating there. one of the names for you ryan otis, a professor at the university of washington. he is a part-time employee at google. he is on leave from the university of washington. he holds a patent for a wireless contact lens. that is driving some speculation. google has been very open about wanting to inno

jonathan ferro has been digging into the top funds. do not miss that. do not miss john rogers later on "countdown." us at 7:00 in the second hour of "countdown." alan is out of the race to be microsoft's new chief executive. mulally said he will stay through 2014. hans nichols is here in person. --come back onset eared welcome back onset. >> i couldn't drive the f-150 h ere. he finally ends the speculation that he will not be heading microsoft. andave associated press confirm to bloomberg that he has no plans to do anything other than serve ford. they seem to be having a hard time finding people. there have been a few candidates. eve of qualcomm was in the running. john donohue of ebay was also talking about it. these last two declined to even be considered. who is left? you have essentially internal candidates. several internal candidates. if you think microsoft needs a fresh ejection, new blood and new ideas, it looks like they will go through the same pool. here the challenge -- you have two former ceos on their board. gates on the board. it is hard to have two ceos

john lewis as they score record sales leaving competitors trailing. >> welcome to "countdown." i'm caroline hyde. >> i'm ryan chilcote. >> i'm jonathan pharaoh. -- ferro. have dider does not you completed yet. here with more is ryan. -- they don't have the deal done yet with fiat. 41.5% in their actually only paying $1.75 billion. the remaining is in installments. it's not everyday you can buy a carmaker in installments. just 13 days ago, he was saying he was prepared to pay $4.2 billion and we had this ipo. was about price discovery. basically, the results of the ipo was looking at a $10 billion or $11 billion valuation. paying $4.35 billion looks like a fair deal all things considered. >> money strapped chrysler will have the deal but what does it mean for the leader of this group? >> he's been working on this for the last 10 years ever since becoming the ceo of fiat. he tried to buy gm europe then he went all over to try and win that deal and they decided they would not sell. this was plan b. sincebeen working on it 2009. it's very helpful for him in the sense that fiat is still lossmaking. he can still use this plus get access to the cache file ch