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Foster's Group Ltd. announced today that the group has appointed Christine Nixon, a former Victorian chief police commissioner, as a non executive director. Ms. Nixon will join the board immediately. Premier John Brumby said that he saw this appointment as a positive step towards gender equality.

Foster's expects that the leadership experience and strong community focus of Ms. Nixon would benefit the company.

Intec Telecom Systems warned today that the first half revenues of the company are now supposed to come below the forecasts it made earlier. Intec said that the decreased revenues could make a bad impact on its profits for the first half of the fiscal. This announcement by the company took its shares to the ground today, falling by almost 40% to 57.5 pence.

Australia's manufacturing sector grew at a slower rate in the month of March, according to the data released today by the Australian Industry Group and PricewaterhouseCoopers. The performance of manufacturing index (PMI) dropped to 50.2 points in the month of March, decreasing by 3.6 index points.

The decline in the growth rate was mainly attributable to weak demand, a strong local currency and higher interest rates.

Sports Direct announced today that it is pulling its takeover bid back for Blacks Leisure, which runs the Blacks Outdoor and Millets chains. The British retailer said that it is taking this step as it fears that key suppliers would not support Blacks if it took control.

Sports Direct, earlier this week, blamed Blacks of leaking the names of suppliers that were unwilling to do business with Sports Direct. However, Blacks denied the allegation made by Sports Direct.

Virgin Blue Holdings Ltd. announced today that it has signed a contract with aircraft maker Boeing Ltd for as much as 105 Boeing 737 aircrafts. This is the biggest ever single plane order by Virgin, the second biggest carrier in Australia.

Virgin said that the deal comes after nine months of talks. The financial terms of the deal were not revealed by the company.

Toy making company, Hornby saw its share price go up by 12 per cent on Wednesday morning. This has happened because it saw a "significant improvement" in its Scalextric, Airfix, Humbrol and Corgi brands.

The company has promised that it will show a very good performance in the new financial year.

The Kent-based company said that the past year had been very challenging. On one hand, it was the financial crisis and on the other it was the major currency swings. And since, most of the company's costs were linked to the US dollar, it did face many troubles.