Business news in brief

Saturday, May 18, 2013

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“I’m not surprised major hubs have fared better.The larger the population base, the more potential travelers.”

John Parker, Fort Smith Airport director, about a new study showing small U.S. airports have lost commercial airline flights over the past five years.

Article, 1D

Hot Springs family buying Rison bank

The family of Lewis Ray Gardner of Hot Springs is in the process of buying the Bank of Rison, the future chief executive of the bank said Friday.

The bank’s owners have accepted the offer, but the deal still must be approved by regulators, said Troy Duke of Little Rock, a long-time banker who will be chief executive officer of the Bank of Rison when the deal closes. Duke declined to disclose the price paid for the bank.

The Gardner family, which sold a chain of convenience stores in Arkansas last year, will be majority owners of the bank, and Duke will have a minority interest, Duke said.

The Bank of Rison is the smallest bank in the state with $25 million in assets.

The Gardners do not plan to make major changes with the Bank of Rison, other than offering more banking products, Duke said. There are no plans to open branches of the bank in larger markets, he said.

Arkansas Best freezes non-union pensions

FORT SMITH - Arkansas Best Corp. of Fort Smith announced Friday it has frozen its pension plan for non-union employees, including executives and other managers.

“The change is being made to reduce the on-going costs, including administrative and regulatory costs, associated with the [pension] plan,” according to a company news release.

The trucking company has about 11,250 employees. About 3,700 are not in a union.

Friday’s release said the “precise amount of net savings” from freezing the pension plan isn’t known. Current participants won’t accrue further benefits after July 1 this year, although benefits until then will be preserved.

Arkansas Best’s largest subsidiary, ABF Freight System Inc.

of Fort Smith, reached a tentative agreement May 3 with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters union on a new five-year contract. Details haven’t been released. The trucking company has said it must cut costs to compete with other companies.

Wal-Mart warns about phishing e-mail

Wal-Mart is warning customers about a false e-mail sent to an unknown number of e-mail accounts Thursday morning claiming to be from Wal-Mart.com, spelled Wallmart.com.

Wal-Mart Corporate Communications said the e-mail is actually a phishing scam attempting to gather information from the unwitting recipient. The e-mail looks like a confirmation of a purchase made on Walmart.com

“This email is not from Walmart.com, and it is important that recipients do not click on any links in the e-mail or respond in any way. We are investigating the source of the e-mail and working with appropriate authorities,” officials with the company said.

Anyone receiving the phishing e-mail should delete the email and not click on any of the links within it.

Walmart.com customers were told their accounts were not compromised, but as a safety precaution, they should delete any saved payment information and reset their passwords.

Those who happened to click on any of the links in the e-mail are encouraged to make sure their anti-virus software is up to date and scan their systems. They should also monitor their credit card and bank statements for unauthorized charges.

Maker to pull 2 types of hip replacements

Johnson & Johnson, the world’s biggest maker of health-care products, said it will stop selling metal-on-metal and ceramicon-metal hip replacements as demand for the devices ebbs and U.S. regulators propose new rules.

Metal liners in the Ultamet Metal-on-Metal Articulation and the Complete Ceramic-on-Metal Acetabular Hip System will no longer be available worldwide after Aug. 31, the New Brunswick, N.J.-based company said Thursday in an e-mail. Johnson & Johnson’s DePuy Orthopaedics unit will stop selling related products through 2014 to simplify and streamline its offerings, the company said.

Metal-on-metal hip-replacement sales in the United States and Europe plunged from 20 percent of the market in 2007 to less than 2 percent last year as doctors questioned their safety and patients filed lawsuits. U.S. regulators earlier this year requested extensive study of all metal-on-metal implants.

“We won’t have any metal-on-metal or ceramic-on metal hips any longer,” Mindy Tinsley, a spokesman for Johnson & Johnson’s DePuy unit, said in a telephone interview. “We’ve seen, for example, a 90 percent decline in metal-on-metals sales industry wide in the U.S. and Europe since 2007. There’s really not a viable market for these bearing combinations anymore.”

The decision to stop selling the hips isn’t related to safety or effectiveness, and it isn’t a recall, Johnson & Johnson said.

Johnson & Johnson will still market the Pinnacle Acetabular Cup System, one of the most widely used systems for hip replacement. It also will sell a wide range of liners and cups made with other materials, including ceramic and medical grade plastics.

The decision to stop selling the products was unrelated to the 2010 recall of the company’s ASR metal-on-metal hips, Tinsley said. The company is facing more than 10,000 lawsuits over the ASR products. Johnson & Johnson lost the first trial on March 8, when a Los Angeles jury ruled the ASR was defectively designed.

Bloomberg adds client-privacy adviser

NEW YORK - Bloomberg LP, the financial news and information service, on Friday said it has appointed Samuel Palmisano, the former chief executive of IBM, as an independent adviser on its privacy and data standards.

The move comes a week after revelations that Bloomberg journalists had access to some information on customers’ use of Bloomberg’s data terminals, including when they last logged in.

The company apologized for the breach of privacy. The Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank have said they are looking into Bloomberg’s use of data.

Palmisano will review Bloomberg’s practices and policies for client data and advise on changes, the company said.

Bloomberg also said Clark Hoyt, an editor at Bloomberg and the former editor-at-large at The New York Times, will review the relationship between Bloomberg’s news service and its commercial operations.

Bloomberg News reporters had been able to see when any of the company’s 315,000 paying subscribers, mostly stock and bond traders, had last logged into the news and information service. They could also view the types of “functions” individual subscribers had accessed.

Palmisano, 61, retired from the CEO post in January 2012. He remained chairman until October.

Business, Pages 32 on 05/18/2013