Japanese firm buys sauce brands
AMSTERDAM » Unilever PLC says it has agreed to sell ownership of its Ragu and Bertolli sauce brands in North America to Japan’s Mizkan Group for $2.15 billion.
Ragu is the best-selling pasta sauce in the United States. Unilever said in a statement last week the two businesses have combined annual sales of $600 million.
The deal includes ownership of two factories: a sauce processing and packaging facility in Owensboro, Ky., and a tomato processing plant in Stockton, Calif.
Mizkan is a privately held maker of condiments and sauces that started as a rice vinegar maker in Central Japan more than 200 years ago. It is seeking to expand its international businesses to counterbalance poor prospects in its domestic market due to Japan’s aging population.
Unilever said the deal will close in June.
Slowness cost us, Sony CEO says
TOKYO » Sony Corp. Chief Executive Kazuo Hirai said last week the company accumulated huge losses because it didn’t respond quickly enough to changing market conditions, but promised a return to profit next year.
Earlier this month Sony reported a $1.3 billion loss for the fiscal year ended March. It is forecasting a $490 million loss for the current fiscal year. Sony has repeatedly disappointed investors by not achieving its profit forecasts.
"We must acknowledge that our steps to take action had come much too slowly," he told reporters at the Japanese entertainment and electronics giant’s Tokyo headquarters. "We are going to fully complete our structural reforms."
Hirai’s vision of Sony’s turnaround centers on key technologies such as image sensors, cloud-based services and wearable devices.
He stressed that although Sony’s electronics business was ailing, it was doing well in other areas such as finance, which includes a bank, insurance services and entertainment, which boasts a successful "Spider-Man" film franchise and the PlayStation 4 video game machine.
He denied the company will sell or pull the plug on its money-losing TV business. Once a leader in TVs, Sony has lost out to competitors such as South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co., which led in the shift to flat panels.
Bernanke fetches top dollar for sharing his thoughts
On Tuesday, Ben Bernanke spoke in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; on Wednesday, he was in Johannesburg. By Friday, he was in Houston. That week in March was a particularly busy one for Bernanke, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve.
During his eight years as steward of the world’s largest economy, Bernanke’s salary was about $200,000 a year. Now he makes that in just a few hours speaking to bankers, hedge fund billionaires and leaders of industry. This year alone, he is poised to make millions of dollars from speaking engagements.
Bernanke is following a well-trodden path that his predecessor, Alan Greenspan, and other Washington policymakers have taken. On the speaking circuit, he is putting just one foot through the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street, being paid by financial firms but not employed by one.
Investors are dealing with an economy that is in large part the creature of Fed policies under Bernanke, and they are willing to pay top dollar for his words of wisdom as a result.
Bernanke has agreed to speak with a Middle Eastern bank, private equity firms and trade associations, as well as at investment bank get-togethers, charging his hosts fees that range from $200,000 in the United States to $400,000 for engagements in Asia. He has dined with hedge fund managers at small events arranged by investment and brokerage firms including JPMorgan Chase, but other Wall Street firms have balked at the high fees.
"I think that the markets and investors will put more credence on what Bernanke says," said David Rosenberg, chief economist and strategist at Gluskin Sheff. Referring to Bernanke’s successor, Janet Yellen, Rosenberg added: "There is a pervasive belief that Bernanke and Yellen are joined at the hip."
Total recall
About 1.4 million Office Depot Gibson Leather Task Chairs are being recalled. The affected chairs have the SKU number 105479 and the registration numbers PA 27248 (CN), PA 25498 (CN), PA 25276 (HK) or CA 35181 (RC) that can be found next to the words "Made in China" which is printed on a label on the underside of the seats. They were sold at Office Depot retail stores and online from 2003 through 2012. The mounting plate weld can break and separate the seat from the base of the chair, posing a fall hazard to consumers.
Call Office Depot at 866-403-3763 or visit www.officedepot.com and select Recall Notices under "Customer Service" at the bottom of the page.
Health care sector job growth anemic
WASHINGTON >> In the dark hours of the Great Recession, it was one of the few economic bright spots.
Week in, week out, the health care sector was adding jobs — at a time when construction, manufacturing and retail hiring were mired in quicksand.
Now health care is a laggard. Health care hiring continues, but it’s rising this year at a stubbornly slow annual rate of 1.4 percent, hit by a sluggish economic recovery, mandatory cuts in government spending and the streamlining required by the Affordable Care Act.
That’s down from 1.6 percent in 2013 and 1.8 percent for 2012 and 2011. From 2004 to 2008 the rate of growth in hiring exceeded 2 percent, peaking in 2008, the year the financial crisis began, at 2.7 percent.
“Throughout the recession and recovery, non-health care jobs were slowly climbing back, but health care was pretty steady,” said Ani Turner, deputy director of the Altarum Institute’s Center for Sustainable Health Spending, a nonpartisan research center that studies health care costs.
Some analysts say it’s partly a side effect of the Affordable Care Act, dubbed Obamacare, which aims to penalize inefficiency and waste. It also intends to slow rising health care costs, which were accounting for a greater share of the nation’s economy every year.
