Clorox Acquiring Burt’s Bees
I love Burt’s Bees lip balm. It’s an awesome product. I dunno though. Mentioning Clorox in the same sentence with Burt’s Bees just stings. Really bad.
Clorox Co (CLX.N) on Wednesday posted a quarterly profit that was little changed but beat analysts’ estimates, and said it will acquire privately owned Burt’s Bees to enter into the natural personal care business.
Clorox said it will buy Burt’s Bees, which makes lip balm, soaps, and other products from natural ingredients, for $925 million net of an additional $25 million for expected tax benefits.
Excluding one-time acquisition costs, Clorox expects the deal to be neutral to earnings in fiscal 2008 and add “solidly” to earnings in fiscal 2009.
Now there’s a company where I do not want to see cross-product advertising. Ha!
The Gap In Honest Reporting
I love articles like this. Read the first paragraph…
Fourteen children working in a textiles factory have been rescued after media reports said an Indian clothing supplier to US retailer Gap was employing underage workers, an activist said Tuesday.
Police carried out the raid after alerts by a non-profit organisation which acted on a British newspaper report that Indian children as young as 10 were working for a Gap supplier in New Delhi.
Since most people read nothing more than the headlines and one or two paragraphs of a news story, you would think, based on what we’ve read that the Gap is using child labor to supply some of it’s products. Right? Not quite.
The children who were rescued late Monday worked in the building that houses the Gap supplier, but did not produce clothes for the US label, said the Save the Childhood Foundation, which works to rehabilitate child workers
“When we went there, we found a room where they had been living and working. Some children were ill and some were not being paid at all,” said Bhuwan Ribhu of the group.
Yes, the children were there, but no, they were not working for the supplier for the Gap. The article does not mention which company they may have been working for. But even so, the Gap pulled some clothes from their line. Talk about peer pressure.
Gap withdrew some garments from sale after Britain’s Observer newspaper said an Indian supplier in New Delhi’s Shahpur Jat area employed child workers.
My question is, if they weren’t working on garments for the Gap, who were they making them for? I couldn’t have been any “big” companies, or they would have mentioned them instead of, or in addition to, the Gap.
Sphere: Related ContentOil Hits $93 A Barrel
I knew something was up. Gas has gone up 23 cents per gallon since I got back from Las Vegas.
Oil leapt to a record high for a third day on Monday, surpassing $93 as investors bet on another U.S. interest rate cut this week, the dollar struck new lows and Mexico briefly halted one-fifth of its oil production.
U.S. crude, which hit a high of $93.20 a barrel earlier, was trading at $91.92 by 11:07 a.m. EST, up six cents from the previous close. London Brent, which hit a record $90, was up 33 cents at $89.02 a barrel.
I remember some of the analysts on the evening news re-assuring us that the price of oil would never hit $100 a barrel. How much you wanna bet that happens before Christmas?
Sphere: Related ContentCountrywide Acts Like They Care
It’s a little late isn’t it? I already know about a dozen people who have lost their homes because Countrywide wouldn’t talk to them, let alone work with them.
Countrywide Financial Corp (CFC.N), the largest U.S. mortgage lender, on Tuesday offered to refinance or restructure up to $16 billion of adjustable-rate mortgages through the end of 2008.
The lender said its program may help about 82,000 borrowers who face higher payments stay in their homes.
It announced the program as pressure mounts on the mortgage industry from politicians and consumer groups worried about rising foreclosures to clean up lending excesses, and make only home loans that consumers can afford in the first place.
Countrywide plans to offer new mortgages to 52,000 subprime borrowers with $10 billion of home loans. It also plans to modify $4 billion of loans for 20,000 prime and subprime borrowers who cannot refinance, and $2.2 billion of mortgages for 10,000 subprime borrowers who are already delinquent.
Some will say “better late than never”, but in this case, it’s “too little, too late”.
New Home Construction Still Falling
Stocks were expected to open higher… But then Morgan Stanley sold their shares of the NY Times and all hell broke loose.
U.S. home construction starts fell in September to their lowest level in more than 14 years, while consumer prices rose at the sharpest rate in four months, separate reports showed on Wednesday.
Weak housing data boosted U.S. government bond prices and the U.S. dollar slipped versus euro and yen as some investors saw the data as a sign of continuing headwinds for the economy.
U.S. stocks were still expected to open higher with investors more focused on healthy corporate profit reports.
How long do you think it will be before the housing market crisis bottoms out? Has it already bottomed out and we’re still seeing a delayed effect?
Morgan Stanley Sells NY Times Shares
Is it shocking that they sold their shares? Not as shocking as the fact someone wanted to buy them.
Morgan Stanley, the second-biggest shareholder in New York Times Co., sold its entire 7.3 percent stake today, according to a person briefed on the transaction, sending the stock to its lowest in more than 10 years.
The person declined to be identified because Morgan Stanley hasn’t made the sale public yet. Traders with knowledge of the transaction said Merrill Lynch & Co. brokered a $183 million block trade of 10 million New York Times shares this morning.
…
New York Times shares slid 54 cents, or 2.9 percent, to $18.37 at 2:51 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading and fell as low as $18.24, a level not seen since January 1997.
Other newspaper stocks, including Gannett Co., owner of USA Today, and McClatchy Co., publisher of the Miami Herald, are also trading at 10-year lows because of the loss of advertising to new media such as the Internet and the decline in classified ads linked to tumbling housing sales.
[Source: Bloomberg]
Home Sales Still Plunging
We thought it was bad. They said it was bad. Turns out, it is bad.
Sales of houses and condominiums in the most populous Southern California counties fell 29.9 percent from the previous month and 48.5 percent from a year earlier, DataQuick Information Systems said on Tuesday.
The report covers the counties of Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura and showed a total of 12,455 new and existing homes and condos sold in September, the lowest since the company began recording the data in 1988.
[Source: Reuters]
Asian Markets Rise On U.S. Economic Data
It’s nice to hear that phrase…
Asian stocks rose on Monday with exporters such as Sony Corp boosted by strong U.S. retail sales data, while gains in resource shares helped drive the Australian market to a record high.
Data last Friday showed retail sales in Asia’s top export market rose solidly in September, while inflation pressures were largely muted, easing recession fears for the world’s biggest economy.
The upbeat report also underpinned base metals prices, while mounting tensions between Turkey and northern Iraq further drove U.S. crude above $84 a barrel to a record high on Friday. Oil was at $83.64 in early Asian session.
“It looks likely that we’ll see gains thanks to gains in U.S. markets and recent stronger-than-expected U.S. economic reports.
“Stronger-than-expected U.S. economic reports”. Nice.
Banks Trying To Limit Crunch
I still find it ironic that everyone waited until the housing market took a dump to do anything about the whole situation.
Major banks including Citigroup Inc are looking at setting up a roughly $80 billion fund to buy ailing mortgage securities and other assets, in a bid to prevent the credit crunch from further hurting the global economy, sources familiar with the matter said.
Representatives from the U.S. Treasury have organized conversations among top global banks, sources said, as financial institutions grow increasingly concerned that a certain type of investment fund linked to banks may have to dump billions of dollars of repackaged loans onto financial markets.
A fire-sale of assets could lift borrowing costs globally, trigger big losses from investors and force banks to further write down some holdings on their balance sheets. Such sales could trigger huge losses for banks, and in the worst-case scenario tip the U.S. or Europe into recession.
Someone should have done something about the lending practices that got them into this mess in the first place. Then again, they got to show a ton of new loans and lots of numbers on their balance sheets so it all made sense in the beginning. Well, it made sense if you’re a bowling ball.
Sphere: Related ContentSymantec To Buy Vontu
When it comes to security, I’m not so sure I want the “big consolidated company” looking after my small-business interests. Bigger does not necessarily mean better.
Security software giant Symantec is preparing to announce an acquisition of Vontu, one the largest remaining independent providers of data leakage prevention software, which is used to control the flow of sensitive information across corporate networks.
Multiple industry sources have confirmed to InfoWorld that Symantec will soon announce a buyout of Vontu, perhaps as early as next week, which will significantly further the trend of consolidation that has played-out in the red-hot DLP (data leakage prevention) space over the last year.
The deal also gives Symantec a foothold in the burgeoning DLP segment, also referred by some as the ILP (information leakage prevention) space.
What happens when everyone has consolidated and you still can’t get something to work properly? How will we get the big ol’ consolidated companies to listen to us when we want change?