Munich - China has ordered 100 high-speed trains from German engineering giant Siemens and its Chinese partners, the company announced in Munich on Friday.

Siemens will supply components worth 750 million euros (1 billion dollars) for the Velaro trains, which will be assembled in China and used on the Beijing-Shanghai route from 2010.

The Velaro, a development of Siemen's successful ICE model used in Germany, has a total length of 400 metres, making it world's longest single train used in high-speed transportation.

Munich  - Luca Toni remains sidelined at his German club Bayern Munich and also had to cancel two World Cup qualifiers for Italy due to Achilles tendon problems, coach Juergen Klinsmann said on Thursday.

Klinsmann told the Bayern website that Toni is not fully fit again and won't play in the weekend Bundesliga match against bottom club SC Karlsruhe.

The Italy forward, who has been sidelined for three weeks, also cancelled his appearance in the World Cup qualifiers in Montenegro on March 28 and against Ireland on April 1.

Munich
- Bayern Munich captain Mark van Bommel has extended his contract with
the German champions by a further season, the club confirmed Thursday.

"We have reached an agreement with Mark to extend his contract by a year," Bayern general managher Uli Hoeness said.

Van Bommel's current contract was due to run out at the end of the
season but the 31-year-old midfielder will now stay with Juergen
Klinsmann's side until the end of the 2010 season.

Munich - Argentina defender Martin Demichelis has agreed a new three-year contract at German champions Bayern Munich, club chairman Karl-Heinz Rummenigge was reported Wednesday as saying.

Demichelis, 28, who has been at Bayern since 2003, has been offered a deal keeping him at the club until the end of the 2011/2012 season.

"We have agreed in principle on a contract extension. Martin is staying," Rummenigge was quoted as saying by the Munich newspaper tz.

Munich - The world's leading luxury carmaker BMW said Wednesday that it expects a further drop in sales this year and plans to extend short-time working.

"We don't believe we can reach the sales turnover of 2008," chief executive Norbert Reithofer told the company's annual press conference.

Last year BMW sold 1.4 million vehicles, 4.3 per cent down from 2007. Reithofer declined to make a prediction for 2009, saying it would be a year of transition.

Munich  - A monthly Bundesliga viewing licence proposal from Bayern Munich general manager Uli Hoeness was met with scepticism and outright opposition on Monday.

Hoeness told the Wirtschaftswoche magazine that the 37 million television households should pay 2 euros (2.6 dollars) a month which would generate around 900 million euros per year and bring Germany closer to the big football TV deals in England and elsewhere.