The big spender who won this year's "Power Lunch with Warren Buffett" charity auction with a record high bid of $2,110,100 is Zhao Danyang of the Hong-Kong based Pure Heart China Growth Investment Fund, according to a spokesperson for San Francisco's Glide Foundation.

I spoke with Zhao by telephone late tonight. He told me his investment philosophy is very similar to Buffett's and he has "lots of questions" to ask him. He's especially interested in Buffett's opinion on China and its economy, in light of the fact that country has "grown up" very quickly.

An article in Asia Times Online last February described Zhao as an early investor in China's class-A shares, who liquidated all five of his firm's mainland funds to lock in profits from that market's enormous gains. That decision, says Asia Times, was "like a stone thrown into a quiet lake" because Zhao had been praised for establishing a China fund in 2004 "when the market at the time was dominated by bears."

Zhao told me he decided to sell when price to earnings ratios grew too high and he started having trouble finding "cheap and good" stocks.

Zhao says he sold before Buffett's own decision to eliminate his stake in PetroChina last fall based on its massive price appreciation.

Pure Heart's website includes a page on its investment philosophy headlined "Abandon Pure Technical Analysis and Adhere to Company Fundamentals."

Glide is also a big winner tonight as it gets 100 percent of the proceeds from the eBay Charity Works

FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) -- Conglomerate Siemens AG, wracked by a wide-ranging corruption scandal, will cut up to 4 percent of its work force worldwide, or about 17,200 jobs, a pair of newspapers reported Saturday.

The Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported that the Munich-based company was set to shed the jobs -- mostly white-collar and administrative -- without citing any sources. The Wall Street Journal also reported a similar figure, citing a person who was familiar with the matter.

Siemens did not comment on either report, only to say that it did not comment on market rumors.

The German paper said that of the cuts to the company's global work force of approximately 435,000 staffers, some 6,400 could come in Germany, where it employs around 136,000 people.

Both papers said the company cited the rough economic conditions worldwide as one reason for the cuts, but Siemens CEO Peter Loescher warned earlier this year that the company faced a bumpy road.

In March, Siemens issued a profit warning saying that weaker-than-expected performance in its major business projects this quarter was going to pull earnings down by approximately $1.41 billion.

The warning was a surprise for the conglomerate, whose diverse products include trams, turbines and telecommunications equipment, given that it had said in January that sales were expected to double the