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The Czech Republic is undergoing a revolution in the way passengers pay for public transportation services, writes news site idnes.cz. Around 2,000 bus and tram services now enable ticket payments to be made using a contactless card. And that number is set to continue to grow, says Petr Zlámalík, of Mastercard Advisors, the professional services arm of card payments processing giant Mastercard.

Energetický a průmyslový holding, or EPH, is gearing up to buy two gas fired power plants in Great Britain through daughter company EP UK Investments, the Czech News Agency reports. The price tag is expected to be in almost 10 billion crowns.

Following a promo campaign in its Holešovice showroom the biggest Czech e-shop Alza.cz has just launched the sale of electric cars. The company says it firmly believes that the Czech Republic will soon follow the example of Germany, Austria and Norway in gradually increasing the number of electric cars on its roads.

Digitisation and the increased use of robots in industry could lead to the loss of more than half of all the jobs in the Czech Republic, according to former prime minister Vladimír Špidla. Even in the next 20 years one 10th of today’s jobs could go, suggests a new study.

Czech trade unions are planning to sell their headquarters in the Czech capital, a building from the 1930s in the Prague-Žižkov neighbourhood, the price of which is estimated at 300 million crowns (around 11.5 million euros), financial daily Hospodářské noviny reported on Thursday.

The Czech Republic’s biggest construction firm Metrostav has been expanding abroad to compensate for the lack of contracts at home, the daily Hospodářské noviny reported on Thursday. While 10 years ago, foreign commissions accounted to just about three percent of the Czech unit’s business, last year it was already 23 percent and in the first quarter of 2017, the proportion reached 26 percent.

In the late 1990s and following decade there was a sort of gold rush in the Czech Republic. But what the foreign prospectors were panning for was not gold but water itself. Clearly though they believed that water could be turned into gold.

Construction companies are often regarded as a litmus test of the local economy. But in the Czech case the test comes up somewhat short. While many sectors, especially manufacturing, have been booming, the construction sector has struggled to equal or even get close to the halcyon days of its fastest growth in 2008.

The Czech mobile phone operators T-Mobile and Vodafone have just introduced roaming services that cost the same as domestic usage within the European Union. The country’s third major operator, O2, is set to follow suit before an EU directive banning roaming surcharges takes effect later this week.

The Czech steel industry this week permitted itself a bit of navel gazing with a conference dedicated to its present and future hosted by the Ministry of Industry and Trade. The event followed on the heels of mixed 2016 results for the sector.