Beazer to exit some operations, take Q1 charge
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Beazer Homes USA Inc  said on Friday it would cease some operations, including mortgage origination, causing unspecified charges.
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The company may be hinting at going public.
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Company will begin production on sub-1-inch hard drive later this year.
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Freescale Semiconductor Chairman and CEO Michel Mayer will leave his posts as soon as a replacement is found, the company said Friday.&quot;The time is right for me and my family to take some time off before exploring new challenges. The company is well positioned to continue its transformation,&quot; Mayer said in a statement.Freescale officials didn&#39;t respond to requests for comment.Mayer led the company when it spun off from Motorola&#39;s semiconductor group and went public in 2004. He also played a role in Freescale&#39;s buyout by four private equity firms in 2006 for $17.6 billion. The equity firms included The Blackstone Group, The Carlyle Group, Permira Funds and Texas Pacific Group.However, the company has been struggling financially, posting a loss of $525 million on sales of $1.54 billion in the fourth quarter of 2007. For 2007, the company reported a loss of $1.6 billion on net sales of $5.7 billion. Freescale&#39;s sales totaled $6.36 billion in 2006.The company&#39;s key customer remains Motorola, to which it sells chips for wireless handsets, networking infrastructure and other devices such as set-top boxes. Motorola, which is struggling financially and saw a management shakeup in recent months, is considering spinning off its handset business. Ed Zander announced in December that he would step down as Motorola&#39;s CEO.
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BRUCE Wasserstein, the chief executive of Lazard, will be expected to leave if he fails to get a near-$3bn (Â£1.64bn) float of the investment bank away by next June.
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Facing continued top-line weakness, the company may have to cut costs.
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Shares of Beazer Homes  fell  8.4 percent to $9.99 in pre-market trade on Friday after the  homebuilder said it has received &quot;purported&quot; default notices on  some of its debt.
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Beazer, facing a deteriorating housing market and two probes related to its mortgage-origination business, said it believes the default notices are âinvalid and without merit.â
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Credit Suisse will eventually use one brand name only and drop the First Boston moniker from its Credit Suisse First Boston investment banking arm, the bank's head said on Tuesday.
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The layoffs are expected to come by November First, with most coming at Belo&#39;s flagship newspaper, The Dallas Morning News. Belo also says it&#39;s reassessing the future of its Dallas-based Texas Cable News television operation.
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Shares of Beazer Homes  fell 8.4 percent to $9.99 in pre-market trade on Friday after the homebuilder said it has received "purported" default notices on some of its debt.
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Given the silence from the BEA Systems and Oracle camps early this week about Oracle's unsolicited proposal to buy its middleware rival, the community at large can only sit back and guess what might be the next scene in this drama.The two companies have been keeping quiet since last Friday's blockbuster revelation that Oracle was seeking to acquire BEA for $17 per share, or about $6.7 billion. Both have spurned requests this week for media briefings to elaborate on the issue.Undoubtedly, much is taking place behind the scenes, as aggressive Oracle seeks to add BEA to the impressive list of formerly independent companies it has acquired, which has included, among others, PeopleSoft and Siebel Systems. BEA, meanwhile, also has to be pondering its next step.Officials at Sun Microsystems, which invented the Java platform that serves as the backbone of many BEA and Oracle products, seemed to be caught off-guard when asked about the proposed merger at a Sun event in San Francisco on Tuesday evening.Chuckling, Rich Green, Sun executive vice president of software, suggested contacting Oracle CEO Larry Ellison about the matter. But when asked what impacts might be felt by the Java platform itself, Green did not see any negative effects."They're both Java supporters," Green said. "I think it's neutral to Java. I think it's just fine."Sun's James Gosling, a founder of Java and chief technology officer for Sun's client software group, concurred. "They're both big supporters of Java. I don't think it's going to have much effect one way or the other," Gosling said.Oracle has pledged to protect investments customers have made in BEA products. While Oracle's move has been characterized in some circles as a hostile takeover attempt, BEA's initial response merely said the Oracle offer undervalued the company.Major BEA stockholder Carl Icahn has been prodding for a sale of BEA, prompting one BEA insider to suggest Icahn did not have enough shares and would have a hard time getting control of the BEA board of directors in order to make the sale happen. Now, Oracle has forced BEA's hand. If history is any indication, the sale is likely to happen. PeopleSoft opposed Oracle but eventually succumbed."We certainly saw how persistent Oracle was in chasing PeopleSoft," said Dennis Callaghan, enterprise software analyst at the 451 Group, who expects the merger to be completed.Options for BEA to resist Oracle may be limited. To take the company private and avoid a merger, BEA would need to find a private equity partner, Callaghan said. And then there is Icahn, owning a significant stake in the company and wanting the company sold."It's not like [BEA CEO and co-founder] Alfred Chuang can regain control of the company and take it private. He's got to make his shareholders happy," said Callaghan.Even BEA employees could profit on a merger if they bought stock at a discounted price and then were able to sell it at an inflated price as a result of a merger, he said.? They might lose their jobs at BEA, but a lot of them would be very employable, winding up with startup ventures, he said.Callaghan added he expects Oracle to increase its offer. HP is a possibility as another potential buyer for BEA, but HP has had troubles of its own integrating acquired companies, such as Peregrine and Bluestone Software, Callaghan saidHe gave credence to the notion that Oracle may be buying BEA to stock up on its middleware offerings as the database market, which has been Oracle's cash cow, now features free, open source offerings from competitors.? "From what I understand, [databases is] not really a growing business at this point, Callaghan said.A dignitary in the Java development space had a mostly positive reaction to the proposed merger."Oracle and BEA both have amazing engineering teams, but Oracle's business operation is clearly many, many times the size and scale of BEA's," said Rick Ross, founder of the Javalobby Web site for Java developers. Having both teams under the same umbrella would create great opportunities for innovation, Ross said. And BEA's technology, such as the JRockit Java Virtual Machine, could become more widely used, he said.But there could be a down side, Ross noted."As the realized market share of a single player moves to such a dominant position, it becomes less and less likely that the startup innovator can gain a foothold," he said.IBM, BEA, and Oracle are battling in what research firm IDC calls the application deployment software space, which is comprised of application servers, integration software, message-oriented middleware and transaction processing monitors. This market space, valued at $9.4 billion in 2006, is growing at nearly 18 percent year over year because of trends in integration, business process management, and SOA, said Maureen Fleming, IDC program director.When including software mainframes, IBM last year had a 36 percent market share, valued at $3.3 billion. BEA trailed with 11 percent or $1 billion, and Oracle had 9 percent, or $850 million. The figures include license and maintenance revenuesWhen leaving out mainframe software, the market size dropped to $6.5 billion, with IBM still leading with a 20 percent market share, or $1.3 billion and Oracle garnering 13 percent or $850,000. BEA came in right behind Oracle with 12 percent or $840,000.
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Home builder Beazer Homes USA Inc   said on Friday it received &quot;purported&quot; default notices  related to some senior notes from the bank that serves as  trustee for the notes, sending shares down as much as 15  percent.
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WebLogic flat One of the executives credited with helping stabilize BEA Systems is quitting as the company continues to iron out troubling kinks in its global sales operations.â¦
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Chicago - Motorola will cut 1 000 jobs and take a charge of $50 million (R320.5 million) for severance benefits as it moves to complete a spinoff of its money-losing semiconductor unit, the company said.
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The company has decided to leave the public markets.
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Builder Beazer Homes USA Inc  said on Friday that it had asked a federal court for a preliminary injunction ordering debt trustees to withdraw default notices.