Swatch Group, the world's largest watchmaker, prides itself on marching to its own beat, and now it has decided to have some fun with its annual report.

According to media reports, Swatch released its annual report in Swiss-German, an idiosyncratic dialect that many German speakers don't understand. Swiss movies in German, one of Switzerland's four official languages, are shown with subtitles in neighboring Germany.

"This act of true Swissness was done partly to shake up our compatriots who -- in their fondness for what is safe -- sometimes allow themselves to follow a rather conventional, prudent and comfortable path," Swatch Chairwoman Nayla Hayek told investors in a letter to shareholders quoted by Reuters. 

A lot has changed since J.C. Penney (JCP) Chief Executive Ron Johnson secured his job in 2011 with the fervid support of hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman. 

For starters, Johnson has lost Ackman -- and many other Penney shareholders -- a lot of money. He has also alienated much of Penney's core customer base by eliminating coupons and sales, bringing the more than 100-year-old retailer to a precarious position.

Now, Penney's board is losing patience with Johnson's leadership and is considering either selling Penney or replacing Johnson, if it can't reverse a steep decline in sales within the year, according to The Wall Street Journal. 

The 11-person board includes Ackman -- the retailer's largest shareholder, who championed Johnson's appointment

 

Staples (SPLS) shares are slumping in Wednesday trading after the office supply retailer posted disappointing earnings and gave lackluster guidance.

Net income at the Framingham, Mass., company fell 72% to $78.1 million, or 12 cents per share, compared with $283.6 million, or 41 cents per share, a year earlier. Excluding one-time items, profit was 46 cents per share, a penny better than Wall Street expectations. Revenue jumped 3% to $6.57 billion but missed analysts' forecast of $6.72 billion.

North American same-store sales, a key retail metric for stores opened at least a year, fell 5% in the fourth quarter.

Ron Sargent, Staples’ chairman and chief executive officer, spooked analysts with his talk of a "challenging sales environment." 

Yahoo (YHOO) caused a stir when 37-year-old CEO Marissa Mayer recently gave an ultimatum to her employees: Telecommuters must come into the office or leave the company. 

But now Best Buy (BBY) is following her lead. It's ending a program called the "results-only work environment," or ROWE, which evaluated workers on performance instead of the amount of time spent in the office. That allowed staff to work whenever and wherever they wanted, as long as they performed, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

With these big American companies shifting their policies, it raises the question of whether a backlash against telecommuting is brewing. While some question whether the ban undermines families, others point to the benefits of working under one roof: collaboration, innovation and creativity.

 

Looking for your own island paradise, at fire-sale prices? You might want to check out Greece.

Qatar's royal family is doing just that. It's buying six Greek islands in the Ionian Sea for a mere $11 million (€8.5million) to create a private family resort. The deal is one of the largest private investments ever in Greece, whose ongoing debt crisis has made it the European Union's most bankrupt country.

And the emir of Qatar apparently knows how to drive a hard bargain. The first of the islands for sale, uninhabited Oxia, was originally offered at $9.13 million (€7 million) before its owner agreed to $6.93 million (€4.9 million).

"The islands have been in my family for over 150 years but we are not rich enough to be able to keep such valuable properties any longer," Denis Grivas told The Guardian.

 

It really is the end of an era for a lot of movie theaters and their customers, especially at independent movie houses in areas where the chains like Regal (RGC) and AMC (purchased last year by a Chinese conglomerate) don't operate. That's because the film industry is getting ready to complete its conversion from film to digital movie projectors.

This change has been coming for over a decade, but the switch to digital projectors was slowed by the new devices' expense -- and arguments between theater owners and Hollywood over who would absorb those costs.

Gary Susman at Moviefone notes the film studios "stand to save as much as $1 billion per year on the cost of striking and shipping film prints, once they can simply stream or email a digital file to every booked screen with a single click."

 

Why is Mars, the world's largest candy company, urging the confectionery industry to take a more proactive stance on combating obesity? To avoid having government officials force it to take action.

Candy makers, whose products account for about 2% of the calories consumed in the typical American diet, are already feeling the heat. Some states have implemented candy taxes, and celebrities have been criticized for promoting what are considered to be unhealthy food and drinks. More government actions may follow.

"We need the whole industry to step up," Mars North America President Debra Sandler told a recent industry conference, according to Confectionery News. "We are not judged by the leaders of the category but by those who do not take responsibility for change." 

Think the U.S. housing bubble was bad? Check out the extraordinary images of empty buildings, neighborhoods and even entire towns in China featured on "60 Minutes" this week.

The country may be experiencing the largest housing bubble in human history, Lesley Stahl reports.

On the outskirts of many major cities lie ghost towns -- vacant skyscrapers, new apartment towers with no residents, empty shopping malls that have never been used. But they aren't waiting to be sold. Most of the properties were eagerly snapped up by Chinese investors. But even in the most populated nation in the world, there aren't enough people to live in them.

The problem is that people in China's emerging middle class don't have many places to invest their savings.