Archive for May 24th, 2008
Microsoft in pursuit of ways to spend acquisition pot of $50bn – Times Online
Posted on: May 24, 2008
Microsoft tried to shrug off its rejection by Yahoo! yesterday after insisting that it was looking for other ways to spend its $50 billion (£25 billion) acquisition pot.
The software company was forced to abandon its $47.5 billion approach for Yahoo! this month, after the online search company insisted on a higher price and threatened to hive off the most lucrative part of its business should Microsoft turn hostile.
Since then Microsoft has reopened talks to buy a much smaller part of Yahoo! and acquire a modest, passive stake in the internet group.
Both companies are discussing the feasibility of combining their online advertising businesses.
At a conference in Moscow yesterday, Steve Ballmer, the chief executive of Microsoft, said: “You can buy a whole lot of things for $50 billion.”
It is understood that after Microsoft walked away from the initial talks, the company was both approached, and itself contacted, by a number of parties that had also been in discussions with Yahoo!. Of those, it is believed that Microsoft began talks with Time Warner with a view to buying AOL, the cable company’s internet arm.
Mr Ballmer said: “Yahoo! was never the strategy we were pursuing – it was a way to accelerate our online advertising business. We will spend money on some acquisitions.” Microsoft needs to do a deal to compete more effectively with Google, the world’s biggest internet company. Google holds the lion’s share of the online advertising market, estimated to be worth $40 billion a year and which is expected to double by 2010.
Mr Ballmer had argued three weeks ago that the main reason the company had walked away from Yahoo! was because of price. He had said: “We are interested to pay for it [Yahoo!] at some level and beyond that level we’re not willing to pay for it.” Although Mr Ballmer offered to raise his valuation of Yahoo! from $31 a share to $33 a share, Jerry Yang, the co-founder of Yahoo! said that he would not sell for less than $37.
Although Yahoo! has managed to dodge a full takeover from Microsoft, it also has to contend with the threat of a boardroom coup orchestrated by Carl Icahn, the billionaire shareholder activist.
Regulator investigates £50m gas overcharging claims against npower – Times Online
Posted on: May 24, 2008
- In: $50M | - | against | claims | gas | investigates | npower | overcharging | Regulator | Times Online
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Millions of consumers may have been overcharged by at least £25 on their gas bills by one of the biggest energy companies, The Times has learnt.
Ofgem, the energy regulator, is investigating claims that up to 2.2 million customers of npower may have been billed too much for gas usage. Energywatch, the energy watchdog, believes that excess charges could total more than £50 million.
The problem has come to light after readers of The Times uncovered apparent flaws in npower’s billing systems and alerted the watchdog, which referred the matter to Ofgem.
Energywatch is urging all npower’s gas customers to check their bills for the past 12 months. A spokesman said: “We think up to 2.2 million npower customers could have suffered from the same problem that Times readers have identified. If we are proved correct we want to know what the company will be doing to compensate those who have lost out.”
The problem centres on how many units of gas npower is entitled to charge customers each year at the higher of its two rates. In literature and on its website, the company states that the higher charge applies to a maximum of 4,572 units per annum — after which customers pay at a lower rate.
However, the company claims this figure refers to a “tariff year”, not a calendar year. In 2007, npower’s “tariff year” lasted only seven months — from April to November, when the tariff was altered — meaning that many customers ended up paying significantly more than 4,572 units at the higher rate over the course of the year.
Consumers are already facing sharply higher energy costs. Since January 2006 the average annual household energy bill has risen from £735 to £1,048, according to uSwitch, the price-comparison website. The increase for npower customers has been even steeper, from £671 to £1,056.
Since the start of 2006 npower’s gas customers have suffered no fewer than four price increases. In January 2006 npower put up prices by 13.7 per cent, and followed this up with further rises of 15 per cent in March and 17.2 per cent in October.
There was a 16 per cent cut in 2007 but this was more than wiped out by a further 17.2 per cent rise in January 2008. A typical npower gas customer now faces an annual bill of £631, compared with £466 at the start of 2006.
Domestic energy bills could rise by a further 25 per cent this year as the wholesale cost of gas surges higher.
- In: $50 Billion | - | Apart | Deal | Falls | NYTimes.com | Telecom
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The world’s largest corporate deal in an emerging market, a tie-up worth nearly $50 billion between two telecommunication companies, Bharti Airtel in India and MTN Group in South Africa, came to a screeching halt Saturday.
Bharti called off negotiations after MTN turned Bharti’s takeover plan upside down, proposing to take over Bharti instead. After bankers from both sides agreed in principle to a Bharti-controlled structure on May 16, MTN’s board met this week and proposed a different transaction, in which Bharti Airtel would become a subsidiary of MTN, Bharti said Saturday.
“This convoluted way of getting an indirect control of the combined entity would have compromised the minority shareholders of Bharti Airtel and also would not capture the synergies of a combined entity,” Bharti said in a statement.
“More importantly,” Bharti added, “Bharti’s vision of transforming itself from a homegrown Indian company to a true Indian multinational telecom giant, symbolizing the pride of India, would have been severely compromised.” The situation was “completely unacceptable,” Bharti said.
MTN Group had no immediate comment.
(Reuters) From Google Health to Wii Fit, Americans have an increasingly wide array of tools for tracking their health backgrounds and statistics but their understanding of what that data means is poor, threatening their health and costing the economy billions of dollars.
Just 12 percent of American adults are health literate at a level that allows them to manage their care, the latest News and Numbers statement from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) showed.
The AHRQ release is based on information from the 2007 National Healthcare Quality and Disparities Report , which found that the majority of Americans lacked the skills required to correctly complete health care-related activities like reading a prescription bottle, figuring out medication dosage, filling out forms or calculating insurance coverage. That lack of literacy can negatively affect the quality of care a patient receives and costs the U.S. economy between $106 billion and $236 billion annually, the University of Connecticut said in a report last year. That’s enough to insure all of the more than 47 million Americans currently without coverage.
“There is a number of areas and ranges within the health care system where low health literacy really leads to vast inefficiencies and resource utilization,” said John Vernon, the report’s lead author.
A survey done in 2003 classified Americans into four health literacy categories: proficient, intermediate, basic and below basic. Twenty-two percent were classified as having basic health literacy while 14 percent were below basic. In other words, more than a third of the respondents likely couldn’t determine medication dosage from the instructions on a prescription bottle, said Cindy Brach , a health literacy expert with the AHRQ.
- In: charts | David Cook | Download | Idol's | iTunes | tops | U.S
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Cook, 25, a Missouri guitarist who was tending bar before auditioning for the most watched show on U.S. television, also said his best musical advice came from Frank Sinatra.
Cook won the seventh season of the singing competition and a recording contract on Wednesday, beating 17-year-old crooner David Archuleta by a 12 million-vote margin in the record 97.5 million votes cast by viewers by telephone and text message.
Cook’s first single “The Time of My Life” and the three songs he sang in this week’s “American Idol” finale were the top four downloads on Apple Inc’s iTunes music store on Friday.
Cook said he would not be putting out an album of standards even though he won fans on the show, which is broadcast on the Fox network, a unit of News Corp, with alternative versions of pop classics such as “Billie Jean” and Lionel Richie’s “Hello.”
“I think it’s going to be a mixture of my writing and hopefully writing with other people. I just want to come out of the gate with a solid record,” he told reporters in a telephone conference call.
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