FRANKFURT/NEW YORK (Reuters) – Research in Motion Ltd’s (RIM.TO: Quote, Profile, Research) could have chosen a fiery, inspirational new CEO but they chose a stoic engineer instead, dashing investor hopes for a quick turnaround for the struggling BlackBerry maker.

The softspoken and bespectacled Thorsten Heins, who had worked at Germany’s Siemens AG (SIEGn.DE: Quote, Profile, Research) for more than 20 years before RIM, failed to inspire Wall Street on Monday as he pledged to continue on the same path as his predecessors.

RIM shares closed down 8.5 percent at $15.56 on Nasdaq as the promotion of the largely unknown former chief operating officer was a disconcerting surprise for investors who were skeptical about his ability to turn around the Canadian group’s fortunes, particularly after Heins suggested RIM didn’t need new a strategic overhaul in his first TV appearances.

“I am a little concerned about some of the statements that the new CEO made around not needing drastic changes, focusing on marketing and having had issues with being too innovative,” Carolina Milanesi, analyst at research firm Gartner said.

For his part, Heins tried mightily to rally RIM employees, analysts and investors around the sudden executive suite change.

“We will take this to new heights,” he promised after taking over from co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, who finally bowed to investor pressure and resigned. “Innovation is endless, we will have a lot of fun.”

But taking a look at his past at former employer, German engineering group Siemens, Heins is not one for transformation.

FRANKFURT (Reuters) – Insider Thorsten Heins, the new chief executive at BlackBerry maker RIM, is a surprise choice for those looking for a “transformational” leader from outside to turn around the Canadian group’s fortunes.

Tall, soft-spoken and bespectacled, the Munich-born Heins, 54, spent most of his working life at German engineering giant Siemens, where he oversaw a mobile telephone business which faced fierce pricing pressure and quality issues.

An avid fan of NBA basketball team the Miami Heat after having lived in Florida for four years, Heins rides a BMW motorbike when he is not road cycling or embarking on long-distance charity rides.

“We will take this to new heights,” said Heins after taking over at Research in Motion from co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, who finally bowed to investor pressure and resigned. “Innovation is endless, we will have a lot of fun.”

Heins spent more than 20 years at Siemens, having joined straight from university in 1984 where he met his wife Petra, a mathematician and physicist. The couple have a 21-year-old son and a 23-year-old daughter.

Heins’ German roots were evident when he was asked about his choice of motorcycle. “Of course it’s a BMW, I’m German.”

By the mid-2000s, he had worked his way up to the helm of Siemens’s mobile phone business, so he was no stranger to mobiles when he joined RIM.

FRANKFURT (Reuters) – SAP, the world’s biggest maker of business software, was upbeat on its topline growth this year citing its investment in new technologies and robust corporate spending.

Investors have worried that they may have overestimated the resilience of corporate tech spending in a deteriorating global economy, especially after SAP’s big rival Oracle Corp reported weak quarterly results last month.

But there have been increasing signs that the outlook may not be as dim as some feared. IBM Corp, the world’s largest technology services company, brimmed with confidence for 2012 as it posted strong results last week.

“We have significant momentum going into 2012,” SAP said on Wednesday as it published its full financial results for 2011.

The German company expects operating profit will rise to 5.05-5.25 billion euros ($6.6-$6.8 billion) at constant currencies from a 40-year record level of 4.71 billion in 2011.

SAP shares were down 0.2 percent at 44.32 euros by 1223 GMT, while the German blue-chip index was 0.7 percent lower.

SAP had already reported a better-than-expected rise in fourth-quarter sales and profit on January 13.

FRANKFURT, Jan 23 (Reuters) – Insider Thorsten Heins, the new chief executive at BlackBerry maker RIM, is a surprise choice for those looking for a “transformational” leader from outside to turn around the Canadian group’s fortunes.

Tall, soft-spoken and bespectacled, the Munich-born Heins, 54, spent most of his working life at German engineering giant Siemens, where he oversaw a mobile telephone business which faced fierce pricing pressure and quality issues.

An avid fan of NBA basketball team the Miami Heat after having lived in Florida for four years, Heins rides a BMW motorbike when he is not road cycling or embarking on long-distance charity rides.

“We will take this to new heights,” said Heins after taking over at Research in Motion from co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, who finally bowed to investor pressure and resigned. “Innovation is endless, we will have a lot of fun.”

Heins spent more than 20 years at Siemens, having joined straight from university in 1984 where he met his wife Petra, a mathematician and physicist. The couple have a 21-year-old son and a 23-year-old daughter.

Heins’ German roots were evident when he was asked about his choice of motorcycle. “Of course it’s a BMW, I’m German.”

By the mid-2000s, he had worked his way up to the helm of Siemens’s mobile phone business, so he was no stranger to mobiles when he joined RIM.

FRANKFURT (Reuters) – Germany’s SAP (SAPG.DE: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), the world’s biggest maker of business software, reported a better than expected rise in fourth-quarter sales and profits on Friday, sending its shares up 4 percent.

Operating profits were up 10 percent at 1.78 billion euros ($2.28 billion) in the quarter, ahead of the consensus forecast of 1.65 billion euros expected by analysts, according to Thomson Reuters StarMine.

The company attributed the strong performance to demand for its biggest software products and growing demand for its HANA offering — which allows companies to analyze business data quickly — and said it had won market share overall.

SAP’s share price was up 3.8 percent at 43.02 euros by 1450 GMT, when the German market’s DAX index .GDAXI was 0.7 percent lower.

“We believed that SAP would show an in-line quarter and are therefore positively surprised by the outperformance on the license side and in particular with the realtime solution HANA,” DZ Bank analyst Oliver Finger said.

Expectations had also been dimmed by poor quarterly results from SAP’s big rival Oracle Corp (ORCL.O: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) last month, sending shock waves across the technology sector as investors feared they may have overestimated the resilience of corporate tech spending in a deteriorating global economy.

SAP’s sales of software and related services, which are key to future lucrative maintenance revenue streams, rose 12 percent from a year ago to 3.72 billion euros in the fourth quarter.

FRANKFURT (Reuters) – Audi, the premium car brand of Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), posted record sales in 2011 as demand for luxury cars in China and Russia helped it gain ground on bigger rivals like BMW (BMWG.DE: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and Daimler’s (DAIGn.DE: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) Mercedes-Benz.

Audi on Monday unveiled sales growth of 19.2 percent for last year, outpacing 12.8 percent for the BMW brand and 8.0 percent at Daimler’s luxury brand.

The VW unit sold 1.30 million cars in the year, compared with 1.38 million BMWs and 1.26 million at Mercedes-Benz.

Audi wants to dethrone BMW as the world’s number one premium car maker by 2015 through powering ahead in China and the United States, the world’s biggest luxury car market.

BMW is betting on the same thing and believes demand in these two key markets will keep it ahead of the pack.

BMW finance chief Friedrich Eichiner said last week he expected the global market for premium cars to grow at more than 8 percent this year, more than twice as fast as the overall car market.

Credit Suisse analyst Arndt Ellinghorst raised his target price on BMW shares to 76 euros from 72 euros, saying he expects premium car makers to come out ahead this year as the gap between the strong and the weak widens further.

FRANKFURT, Jan 6 (Reuters) – European retailers, already battling weak consumer demand, look set to find their shelves laden with scarves, coats, toboggans and de-icers due to an unseasonably mild winter.

Toboggans, a hot commodity during last year’s snowy winter, are shelf warmers this year, Germany’s retailers’ association HDE said on Friday. It also said sales of winter clothes and ski equipment were so far falling short of year-earlier levels.

“Retailers responded by offering discounts unusually early,” a spokesman for HDE said. He said many retailers cut prices before Christmas, which they usually do after the holidays.

Lots of stores on Frankfurt’s busiest shopping street offered discounts on winter coats and boots in the run-up to the Christmas holidays to try to loosen shoppers’ purse strings.

Multi-brand retailers such as Peek & Cloppenburg and AppelrathCuepper had rows of winter coats on sale, including Hugo Boss woollen coats and classic Burberry trenches with prices cut by anywhere from 18 to 30 percent.

BLAME IT ON THE WEATHERMAN

Average temperatures in Germany in December were 3.8 degrees centigrade, and the first few days of January were even warmer at 6 degrees.

FRANKFURT, Jan 3 (Reuters) – A bidding war over rights to show top-flight German soccer league matches could prove risky for Sky Deutschland.

The German pay-TV broadcaster’s stock has lost about a quarter of its value over the past three months on concern that a battle with Deutsche Telekom for Bundesliga rights could hurt profit and that it may need a capital increase soon.

The Bundesliga is Sky Deutschland’s main draw.

While bears see the risks as too big to make Sky Deutschland a worthwhile investment at the moment, more bulls are emerging who say that talk of the risk from a rights bidding war is overdone, and that Sky Deutschland’s operating performance has become more solid.

BUY

Royal Bank of Scotland analysts raised their recommendation on Sky Deutschland stock to “buy” from “hold” on Tuesday, saying they expect the outcome of both the Bundesliga auction and any capital increase to be satisfactory, helping its stock recover.

They also said innovations such as high definition TV and 3D were helping Sky Deutschland, in which News Corp holds a 49.9 percent stake, to gain traction in Germany.

FRANKFURT/PARIS (Reuters) – Germany’s Lufthansa told passengers on Monday to brace for higher ticket prices as it refuses to shoulder the costs of a carbon trading scheme at the centre of a brewing trade spat.

The world’s second largest long-haul carrier after Dubai’s Emirates said it faced 130 million euros ($169 million) in extra costs this year and became the first major operator to announce possible surcharges since the EU scheme took effect on January 1.

The increases will not go into effect straightaway.

Under plans to tackle climate change, airlines touching down or taking off in the 27-nation European Union and three neighbouring nations must account for their CO2 emissions as part of an expansion of the world’s largest carbon market.

The United States, China, India and others have attacked the scheme on the grounds that it infringes their sovereignty and that the EU should not act alone. Some have warned of counter-measures, firing talk of the world’s first carbon trade war.

The EU says its Emissions Trading Scheme, which already applies to other industries, is the fairest way to cope with aviation’s contribution to global warming and cuts through years of inconclusive efforts to come up with a worldwide alternative.

Analysts say Lufthansa is among the airlines most affected by the scheme, along with other European network rivals British Airways owner IAG and Air France-KLM or United Continental and Singapore Airlines.

FRANKFURT, Dec 22 (Reuters) – RWE AG and Gazprom have terminated talks about joint power production ventures, a setback in the German utility’s efforts to seek Russian-funded growth to help make up for its domestic market’s exit from nuclear power.

“Although our discussions were conducted in a very constructive manner we were unfortunately not able to agree on a framework for cooperation which would be sustainable for both parties,” RWE Chief Executive Juergen Grossmann said in a statement on Thursday.

Gazprom declined to give an immediate comment.

The cancellation of talks means that Gazprom is unlikely to strike any further cooperation deals this year as its board had its last meeting for this year on Wednesday.

RWE had an exclusivity deal with Gazprom, and sources close to the matter said that the cooperation partly fell through because Gazprom struck a deal with Danish utility Dong earlier this year to explore opportunities for promoting gas-fired power generation in Europe.

“There seems to be a view of first-come-first-serve here, and differing price expectations (for gas supplies) also did their part in derailing the deal,” one source at Gazprom said.

The two companies had announced in the middle of July that they had started exclusive talks on proposals for joint power plants in Germany, Britain and the Benelux countries, which were restricted to three months initially.