QUOTE OF THE DAY “The industry is stronger and more profitable than a year ago.” Gerard Cassidy, RBC Capital Markets banking analyst, on results of the Federal Reserve’s annual bank “stress tests” Article,1D
Wild Turkey migrates to Kentucky plant Wild Turkey will no longer be bottled in Fort Smith as of next Saturday.
Parent company Gruppo Campari will move its Wild Turkey bottling to a plant in Lawrenceburg, Ky. Pernod Ricard USA, which owns the Fort Smith plant, will continue bottling Seagram’s Gin, Kahlua and Hiram Walker Liqueurs in Fort Smith.
Wild Turkey bottling represented roughly 20 percent of Fort Smith’s production, according to release from Pernod Ricard USA. Gruppo Campari purchased Wild Turkey from Pernod Ricard in 2009 but kept its bottling operations in Fort Smith until construction on the Lawrenceburg plant was complete.
Fourteen workers in Fort Smith will lose their jobs as a result of the move. The laid-off employees will receive severance packages and “outplacement services,” the company said.
No additional jobs will be lost, plant manager Melissa Hanesworth said. Pernod Ricard employs 216 in Fort Smith.
“Wild Turkey is a brand our company no longer owns,” Hanesworth said. “We’ll continue to bottle the Pernod brand.”Unemployment drops in 6 areas in state
The unemployment rate dropped in six of Arkansas’ seven metropolitan areas in January, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics said Friday.
Northwest Arkansas had the lowest unemployment rate at 5.9 percent in January, down from 6.3 percent in January last year. The Little Rock metropolitan area had the next lowest unemployment rate at 7.1 percent, down from 7.4 percent in January 2013.
Other January unemployment rates in Arkansas’ metropolitan areas, compared with January last year, were:
Texarkana, 7.3 percent, down from 7.5 percent.
Jonesboro, 7.8 percent, down from 8.2 percent.
Fort Smith, 7.8 percent, down from 9.2 percent.
Hot Springs, 8.1 percent, down from 8.7 percent.
Pine Bluff, 10.8 percent, unchanged from January 2013.
Arkansas’ unemployment rate was 7.3 percent in January. The national rate was 6.6 percent.
Cuba raises salaries for doctors, nurses
HAVANA - Cuba is giving its hundreds of thousands of medical workers raises that in some cases exceed 100 percent, official media on the island announced Friday, though pay remains much lower than what medical professionals earn elsewhere.
The Communist Party daily newspaper Granma also reported that Cuba expects to take in $8.2 billion this year for the tens of thousands of medical workers it sends to care for the poor in countries such as Venezuela and Brazil.
Granma published a sample of what the pay increases, which take effect June 1, will look like. At the high end, doctors with two specialties will see their salary go from the equivalent of $26 a month to $67, while an entry-level nurse will make $25, up from $13.
Salaries at government jobs in Cuba average about $20 a month, augmented by a range of free services and subsidies.
The raise will affect more than 440,000 medical-sector employees, Granma said, and was made possible by the elimination of 109,000 redundant jobs in the past four years.
Media General to buy LIN for $1.6 billion
NEW YORK - Media General Inc. has agreed to acquire LIN Media for about $1.6 billion, winning a prized collection of local-TV stations in an industrywide race to take advantage of climbing fees from cable providers.
LIN’s shareholders will get stock or cash worth $27.82 a share, the companies said, a 29 percent premium to Thursday’s closing price. Including debt of $968 million, the purchase would be valued at $2.6 billion, or 10.5 times estimated earnings, slightly above other recent TV deals, said Paul Sweeney, a Bloomberg Industries analyst.
The transaction adds to more than $10 billion in U.S.
TV acquisitions in the past year by companies such as Tribune Co. and Gannett Co. Payments by cable companies to carry local broadcasts have made the business more lucrative, providing a new source of revenue on top of ad sales, and LIN was considered an attractive takeover candidate, Sweeney said.
“They have a strong management team that’s really made a huge commitment to digital media, to migrating the television business online,” he said. “They’ve got good TV stations and a growing digital business.”
Tribune acquired Local TV Holdings’s 19 TV stations for $2.73 billion in December, the same month Gannett closed its $1.5 billion purchase of Belo Corp. Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc. announced $2 billion in deals last year.
Mt. Gox says it found 200,000 bitcoins
Mt. Gox, the Tokyo-based bitcoin exchange that collapsed and filed for bankruptcy last month, said it had found 200,000 bitcoins that were held in an “old-format” wallet, or digital storage file.
Mt. Gox’s Chief Executive Officer Mark Karpeles issued a statement in Japanese and English on the company’s website saying that after it filed for bankruptcy, it began researching the wallets that were used before June 2011. That is when the company discovered the 200,000 bitcoins, which represent about 24 percent of the coins that could not be found when the site failed.
Last month, Mt. Gox said it had lost 750,000 of its customers’ bitcoin holdings and more than 100,000 of its own coins, or more than $450 million worth. Based on today’s rates, the found coins are worth about $114 million.
Since then, plaintiffs have filed a class-action lawsuit, seeking a temporary injunction to keep Karpeles or his company from moving any money outside of the United States. They also want a full accounting of any assets Mt.
Gox has left. Mt. Gox said it reported the discovery of the coins to the bankruptcy court March 10 and that it moved them to an offline site March 14-15.
- Bloomberg News
Business, Pages 28 on 03/22/2014