Jin Liqun, chairman of China Investment Corp.
Get instant health insurance quotes, compare medical insurance plans, and find affordable health insurance to fit your health care coverage needs.
For 10 years, Daniela Ballico has been knocking on Romans
Cash advance loans and personal loans available today. Apply now and receive up to $1500 fast cash advance in as little as 1 hour, direct lenders.
Avon shares plunged 14 percent in premarket trading Tuesday after Coty dropped its $10.7 billion takeover bid for the cosmetics company.
Coty Inc., a privately held rival, had raised its original offer last week by about 6.5 percent, but set a deadline of Monday for the company to accept the bid.
Avon asked for more time to consider the bid over the weekend, but it appears that Coty would have not of it. It slammed that door shut on the troubled company Monday and investors are following suite even before the markets open Tuesday in some heavy trading.
If the current prices hold, Avon shares will be worth less than when Coty made its original offer back in April. Shares fell $3.06 to $17.90.
The big question now is what comes next for Avon?
The company is embroiled in a bribery scandal that led to the ouster of its vice chairman in January personal business card. The investigation, which initially involved executives in Asia, has spread and late last year federal regulators began looking into the New York company’s dealings with financial analysts.
Earlier this month, under the leadership of recently arrived CEO, Sherilyn McCoy, Avon reported that its first-quarter profit tumbled 82 percent, even worse that Wall Street had feared.
That has become the norm. Profits have been shrinking for three years and Avon is suffering even in places it had seen as strongholds.
Avon Products Inc. holds its shareholders meeting in two weeks.
The Wendy’s Co. returned to a first-quarter profit as it recorded a large gain on the sale of an investment.
The casual dining chain reported net income of $12.4 million, or 3 cents per share for the period ended April 1. That compares with a loss of $1.4 million, or breakeven results, a year ago.
Excluding items, earnings were 1 cent per share. Analysts expected earnings of 3 cents per share.
Revenue rose 2 percent to $593.2 million. That missed Wall Street’s estimate of $608.1 million.
Its shares fell 22 cents, or 4.5 percent, to $4.65 in premarket trading.
Company-run restaurant margin fell due to increased commodity costs, particularly for fresh beef.
The Dublin, Ohio company cut its 2012 earnings forecast mostly because of weaker-than-expected sales and the company-run restaurant margin.
It’s barely a rounding error in their multimillion-dollar pay packages, but America’s imperial CEOs are losing some of the trappings of power.
Companies that once paid for their leaders’ cars and club memberships – and sometimes handed them extra cash to pay the taxes on those goodies – are now taking a principled stand against perquisites.
Among St. Louis firms, Olin and Spartech eliminated their executive perks at the beginning of last year. Express Scripts, Reinsurance Group of America, MEMC Electronic Materials and a few others already had no-perks policies.
Spartech used to give auto allowances of more than $10,000 to some executives. Olin provided company cars along with financial planning services to help executives manage their millions. As of last year, those goodies are gone.
Pay consultant Steven Hall says Olin and Spartech are part of a trend. “In the last few years, companies have been eliminating these kinds of benefits,” he said. “In some cases, the amounts are not meaningful at all, but companies are saying it’s a matter of principle.”
Hall, managing director of Steven Hall & Partners in New York, was speaking about the largest U.S. companies, which tend to be trendsetters in pay practices. St. Louis CEOs, especially at smaller companies, have been slower to give up their perks.
Among 40 St. Louis companies that have made their pay disclosures for 2011, three-fourths offered special benefits to top executives. A car allowance was the most common perk, offered by 17 companies. Fourteen firms let the boss and/or a spouse take personal flights on the company dime, and 12 paid for club dues. Six gave the boss extra cash to pay taxes on the benefits, a practice that shareholder-advocacy groups frown upon.
One of the longest lists of perks went to payday loan.stltoday.com/business/columns/david-nicklaus/smaller-bonus-shrinks-pay-total-for-viasystems-ceo/article_84c7c0e0-7384-11e1-b7ba-0019bb30f31a.html” target=”_blank”>Viasystems Chief Executive David Sindelar: a $33,994 car allowance, $15,337 worth of financial consulting, $31,296 in club dues, $61,603 for entertainment, $6,110 worth of continuing education and $1,000 in charitable contributions. Some of those amounts were grossed up to cover taxes.
The biggest single perk, though, belonged to David Farr, chief executive of Emerson. Farr took $304,007 worth of personal flights on company aircraft, a practice that Emerson justifies on security grounds.
Other frequent fliers included Energizer CEO Ward Klein, who took $176,478 worth of free flights; Brown Shoe Chairman Ronald Fromm ($165,365) and Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant ($124,665).
Free flights seem to be the one perk that isn’t going away, Hall says. Companies justify it based on security – Emerson and others actually require their CEOs to use company planes for all trips – and efficiency.
For watchdog groups, though, such perks are a red flag. They are indicators of an entitlement mentality and a situation in which the board is subservient to an imperial CEO.
As the Corporate Library, a governance-research firm that’s now part of GMI Ratings, said in a 2010 study, “If the board cannot set appropriate limits for the CEO in this regard, will it be able to do so in matters of greater strategic consequence?”
No one took issue with Antonio Hegwood’s dreadlocks when he worked for the temp service. Or the fast food restaurant before that.
But in mid-April, four months after a service station and convenience store hired him as an overnight clerk, Hegwood learned his hair style had suddenly became a problem.
Hegwood, 24, hasn’t been fired. But he hasn’t collected a paycheck since.
His supervisors at a St. Louis Petro Mart have told Hegwood that he’s welcome to return to work — if he shears the dreadlocks that run about halfway down his neck.
Hegwood doesn’t understand the fuss.
“It’s a gas station,” he said. “People aren’t going to not buy gas just because the clerk has dreads.”
Policies on the personal grooming habits of employees land on the edge of state and federal employment discrimination laws.
Companies doing business in Missourihave the right to terminate or suspend any employee that doesn’t meet established guidelines addressing hair, tattoos or dress.
“An employer may condition a job on an employee’s compliance with the employer’s hair styling preferences, unless the employee’s alternative hair styling preference is connected with the employee’s inclusion in a protected category,” Missouri Department of Labor spokeswoman Amy Susan explained in an e-mail. “For example, a particular hair style may be a tenet of the employee’s religion, or the employer may decline to hire a prospective employee because the employee is considered to be disabled because of his or her hair style (such as believing someone without hair to be suffering from cancer).”
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is a bit more exacting. It looks at how various groups of people wearing various hairstyles are treated in comparison to other groups.
“The baseline for evaluating grooming policies is to look at their overall burden on different groups of employees,” EEOC spokeswoman Justine Lisser wrote in a general overview of the Petro Mart matter.
“…If an employer prohibits a range of hair styles, such as both corn rows and mohawks, and the no cornrows/dreadlocks policy affects 30% of its African-American employees while the no mohawks affects only 3% of its white employees, we could say that the policy had a disparate impact on African-Americans, even if it applies to all employees.”
Hegwood has sported dreads on and off for years. The dreadlocks were in place when he applied for and was offered the $8.50-an-hour position at Petro Mart late last year.
“They didn’t say anything about it then,” he said.
Nor, Hegwood added, was there any mention of the dreads posing a threat to safety or the health of co-workers.
Owned and operated by Western Oil Co. in Earth City, Petro Mart does have a written policy stipulating that hair should be “kept neat and clean…immoderate styles… such as corn rows, braids etc. must be approved by a supervisor…dreadlocks and mohawks are unacceptable.”
Western Oil did not respond to requests for a response.
A father of three, Hegwood doesn’t know how long he can take a principled stand against Petro Mart and its grooming policy.
He needs a salary to support his children and pay for the remainder of his education at St. Louis Community College-Forest Park, where Hegwood hopes to earn a degree in business.
The worst of the job crisis may be over — unemployment in the St. Louis region dropped to 8.1 percent in March.
But back in the hunt four months after starting a job “I really liked,” Hegwood fears landing employment remains a challenge.
“Maybe I’ll start my own business,” he said, looking ahead. “That way I can wear my hair anyway I want.”
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“We’re all technology companies at heart. Whether you’re a law firm or a bank, the core of your company is technology. And that is kind of shaking the core of the office today.” — Thomas Vecchione, head of Workplace Design at Gensler, the global architectural firm, on the work space evolution that includes “free range” offices in which employees take a seat each day at whatever desk is available.
Source: The Point, WBUR/Boston
BY THE NUMBERS
3.9 million - The population of Oregon — and the number of Americans who continue to suffer the effects of unemployment lasting more than a year. The long-term unemployed represent 29.5 of the nation’s jobless.
Source: The Pew Charitable Trusts
FINAL WORD
“You know, how could you not look?” - Cardinals President Bill DeWitt III on whether he tracks the struggles of a former employee, Albert Pujols, in the box scores each day.
Source: St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Myanmar
Stocks pulled back sharply as Wall Street got its first chance to react to a slowdown in hiring in the United States in March.
The Dow Jones industrial average dropped 136 points to 12,923 in the first half-hour of trading. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index was off 17 at 1,381, and the Nasdaq composite lost 40 points to 3,040.
The losses were broad _ only 13 stocks in the S&P 500 rose. Financial stocks fell the most. Bank of America was off 3 percent, Citigroup 2.5 percent.
The U.S. added just 120,000 jobs in March, about half the pace from December through February. The slowdown interrupted the strongest stretch of job growth since the Great Recession. The government released its jobs report on Friday, but the stock market was closed.
The stock market had already started to pull back from its strongest first quarter since 1998. The Dow closed as high as 13,264 earlier last week, then lost more than 200 points in three days.
Even before the job number came out, investors were worried that the Federal Reserve does not appear inclined to take further steps to stimulate the economy.
This week, investors will turn their attention to first-quarter corporate earnings reports. Aluminum maker Alcoa releases its results Tuesday, becoming the first company among the 30 in the Dow to do so. Two major banks, JPMorgan Chase and Well Fargo, report on Friday.
Analysts are expecting quarterly earnings to decline slightly compared with a year earlier. That would break a streak of nine straight quarters of earnings growth since 2009.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury note fell to 2.04 percent from 2.06 percent Friday.
In other corporate news:
_ AOL shot up 44 percent after the company agreed to sell hundreds of patents and patent applications to Microsoft for a little more than $1 billion. The company plans to return some of the cash to shareholders.
_ Avon fell 3 percent after the struggling beauty products company named a former executive at Johnson & Johnson, Sherilyn S. McCoy, to be its CEO. She starts April 23.
Canada
South Africa
Powered by WordPress -- XHTML 1.0