The Portuguese economy received a double boost Friday as ratings agency Moody's raised its debt rating one notch to Ba2, hours after fellow agency Standard & Poor's upgraded the country's credit outlook.

The announcements provided a timely vote of confidence after Lisbon announced on Sunday it will make a clean exit from its multi-billion-euro EU-IMF bailout package, following in the footsteps of Ireland by foregoing a credit line.

Venezuelans, who enjoy free highways and dirt-cheap gas, are struggling to buy cars as production falters thanks to a lack of foreign currency to pay for imported parts.

Vehicle assembly plants are facing their worst year in the oil-rich OPEC nation, producing five times fewer vehicles than last year due to the lack of imported supplies amid an economic crisis that began last year.

Industrial output across Britain surprisingly slid in March after a solid gain seen the previous month, official data showed on Friday.

Output fell by 0.1 percent in March compared with a jump of 0.8 percent in February, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said in a statement.

Even before Alibaba went online, its founder talked about making the fledgling e-commerce company a global player.

At Alibaba Group's first staff meeting in 1999, a video shot by an employee shows Jack Ma rallying a workforce of 17 of his friends. They met in a cement-floored apartment in Hangzhou, a city southwest of Shanghai, at a time when few Chinese were online. Ma was an English teacher with no training in business or computers.

China's annual inflation fell sharply in April to its lowest level in 18 months, official data showed Friday, raising concerns about the risk of deflation in the world's second-largest economy.

The consumer price index -- a main gauge of inflation -- went up by 1.8 percent year-on-year last month, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said in a statement, down from a rise of 2.4 percent in March.

The dollar was delicately balanced in Asia on Friday as investors braced for disputed local independence referendums in Ukraine that could further ramp up global tension and undermine optimism, analysts said.

While traders were largely holding their breath for events on the ground, a slight rebound in Japanese shares on Friday was providing some temporary support for the greenback.

UAE telecom giant Etisalat said Thursday it expects to complete its purchase of Vivendi's 53 percent stake in Maroc Telecom, Morocco's main provider, on May 14.

French media and entertainment group Vivendi in November announced it had agreed to sell its Maroc Telecom stake to Etisalat for 4.2 billion euros.

Barclays on Thursday said it would axe 7,000 jobs at its struggling investment bank unit and sell or run down about £115 billion of non-core assets, in a major strategic shake-up.

The bank, which was at the heart of the Libor interest-rate rigging scandal, also said the overall number of job cuts planned for this year had risen to 14,000. 

Emirates airlines, the largest Middle East carrier, said Thursday it posted a 43 percent surge in profit to $887 million last year as fuel costs dropped and passenger numbers rose.

Net profit in 2013 hit 3.3 billion dirhams ($887 million) compared to 2.3 billion dirhams ($622 million) the previous year, the company announced.

China's biggest bank ICBC has banned activities related to trading in Bitcoin, it said Thursday, joining at least 10 other Chinese banks participating in a government crackdown on virtual currencies.

Bitcoin, invented in the wake of the global financial crisis by a mysterious computer guru, is a form of cryptography-based e-money that can be stored either virtually or on a user's hard drive, and offers a largely anonymous payment system.