Business and Finance Archives - Page 5 of 11

Target Earning Results

Target just issued its earning results, reporting $.086 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter. They hit the Zacks’ consensus estimate of $.086, as reported by MarketBeat.com. Target earned $17.60 billion during the quarter, just over the consensus estimate of $17.57 billion. Their revenues are up 2.1% on a year-over-year basis.

Thursday, they opened at 69.78. Their quarterly divided will be paid on Thursday, December 10th. As the article explained, “Shareholders of record on Wednesday, November 18th will be given a $0.56 dividend. The ex-dividend date is Monday, November 16th. This represents a $2.24 dividend on an annualized basis and a yield of 3.21%.”

Major Gift: Northwestern University School of Law

In recent, and very exciting news for Northwestern University School of Law, alumnus J.B. Pritzker and his wife, M.K. Pritzker, have made a $100 million gift to the 156 year old school. The law school will change its name to the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, as this is the single largest gift ever made to any law school.

Certainly, this will have an impact on everyone at for Northwestern University School of Law, from the students to the adjunct professors like Geoff Richards and the senior lecturers like Herbert N. Beller.

The announcement about the gift was made at the Law School on October 22, 2015 by Northwestern President Morton Schapiro and Law School Dean Daniel B. Rodriguez. The gift will support several social justice centers at the Law School including the Center on Wrongful Convictions, the Children and Family Justice Center, the Center on International Human Rights and the Environmental Law Center. The gift will also permanently endow and rename the Law School’s Entrepreneurship Law Center as the Donald Pritzker Entrepreneurial Law Center.

As Dean Rodriguez said, “Our increasingly complex and dynamic world demands lawyers who are trained to tackle difficult legal and policy problems and to work imaginatively at the interface of law, business and technology. This extraordinary gift will help provide the financial foundation for this law school to produce a new breed of highly skilled, adaptive lawyers—creative, constructive problem-solvers armed with multidisciplinary skills and resolutely committed to social justice and the rule of law.”

The Pritzker gift will have a long-standing impact on everyone at Northwestern, including faculty and adjunct faculty, from Ronald J. Allen and Karen Alter to Geoff Richards and Robert P. Burns. As President Schapiro said, “J.B. and M.K. are such good friends of the University, and their extraordinary commitment will allow a bold future for an already great law school.”

Combining Music Listening and Watching: Pandora and Ticketfly

Pandora, the streaming music company, has just said that they are buying ticket seller Ticketfly for $450 million. Pandora says that 80 million people use their service each month for music and comedy. The combination, they believe, will allow them to use their data to tell fans when bands will be in town and to sell tickets.

As Stifel Nicolaus analyst John Egbert said,

“We believe this acquisition closes the loop for Pandora by creating a one-stop-shop for artist discovery, marketing, and concert ticket sales. Pandora can now share in the upside of live music industry growth that is undoubtedly being driven in large part by rapid growth in streaming music consumption.”

Egbert believes that the sale will make Pandora “the premier platform for independent artist marketing.”

HP Job Cuts on the Horizon

Possible Sale of Ariad Pharmaceuticals

Reuters recently reported that drugmaker Baxalta Inc. is in talks with Ariad Pharmaceuticals Inc. to buy Ariad. Ariad is a developer of leukemia and lung-cancer treatments and their shares have jumped approximately 43% to a two-year high of $10.

Bloomberg reported that Baxalta was working with bankers to buy an unidentified US-based oncology specialist valued at about $2 billion.

Time will tell if the deal goes through, but it is worthwhile to watch these companies in the interim.

China Economic Slowdown Creates Impact On Japan?

China’s economic slowdown may impact Japanese policymakers and their exports, according to central bank Deputy Governor Hiroshi Nakaso. As Nakaso told business leaders in Kumamoto, southern Japan,

“Even if China’s economy maintained its growth rate, the main contribution would be from public investment, so the effect on Asian economies and Japan’s exports warrants due attention.”

Nakaso did show confidence that Japan’s economy can weather the storm and stressed that exports will, hopefully, remain strong.

He said, “The slowdown in exports and output are likely temporary.”

Read the whole article and understand the in-depth analysis.

LEGO Looks to the Environment

When a company that makes 60 billion pieces a year out of plastic says that it’s going green – it’s time to take notice. LEGO says that it plans to invest $1 billion over the next 15 years to replace their classic plastic blocks with other materials. They also want their packaging to be more sustainable. What, however, do they plan to make their LEGO out of instead?

They are still in the development stages of answering this question. LEGO CEO Jørgen Vig Knudstorp has said,

“Several factors influence the environmental sustainability of a material — the composition of the material, how it is sourced and what happens when the product reaches the end of its life.”

More than 100 new employees will be working on the project at LEGO’s sustainable material center in Denmark and they expect to finish by 2016.

And everyone will be eagerly anticipating their latest, more environmentally friendly, answer to the classic LEGO.

YouTube Gaming Coming Your Way

Keep your eyes open for YouTube Gaming, as Google Inc. is launching a live streaming gaming service. The service will be available in the form of an app and a website and will focus exclusively to gamers and gaming. There will be over 25,000 games that will each have their own page on the site. Users will have the opportunity to subscribe to channels, add games to their collection and receive recommendations for new games based on the ones they already follow.

YouTube Gaming will become available on the web, on mobile platforms and on tablets for both Android and iOS operating systems. It will launch this summer in the UK and the US.

Crescent Petroleum with Majid Jafar at Dead Sea Summit

In late May, Majid Jafar, CEO of Crescent Petroleum and a member of the Global Agenda Council on the Middle East and North Africa at the World Economic Forum spoke at the MENA Summit at the Dead Sea in Jordan. On a panel alongside former British Prime Minster Gordon Brown and the Vice Chairman of GE, Mr. John Rice, the panel was entitled “Infrastructure for Development” and Jafar spoke about Crescent Petroleum in the post Saddam Hussein era. The event was held from May 21-23 at the Dead Sea with the theme “Creating a Regional Framework for Prosperity and Peace through Public-Private Cooperation.” The summit brought together more than 1000 leaders from business fields, the government, civil society and more to look at solutions to regional issues.

As Jafar said,

“The key regional social and economic challenges – especially demand for jobs for young people – require new era of public-private partnership in infrastructure to support the over $100 billion needed for investment and maintenance each year in the MENA region.”

Youth unemployment is at a shocking rate of 29.8% in the area in 2015, and Majid Jafar explained that, for every $1bn invested in the area on infrastructure, over 110,000 jobs could then be created in oil-importing countries. This could also be 26,000 jobs in the GCC.

For Crescent Petroleum, Saddam Hussein long gone, and a promising future ahead, Jafar said, “On average across the MENA Region, about 5% of GDP is allocated to infrastructure, whereas the proportion in China is three times higher at 15%. Tackling energy subsidy reform in our region can free up hundreds of billions of dollars for productive investment that will lead to more jobs, higher standards of living, and stronger economic competitiveness for our region’s future.”

No Ownership Taking over the Retail Business

A new age of consumers is looking at their purchases in an entirely new way. Rather than purchasing items, from clothes and appliances to electronics and more, they are looking at the idea of “no ownership.” This is disrupting traditional retailing processes. Millennials, those born between 1980 and 2000, are more interested in bartering, sharing and trading. Their interest in such ideas has been the key to success of companies like Zipcar, Uber and Airbnb.

as Jamie Gutfreund, chief marketing officer for Deep Focus, said “Instead of paying for something and getting rid of it with no value when you are done – swap and resale gives Millennials the ability to extend the value. It’s efficient and it’s green.”

Crossroads Trading, where people can shop for gently used second hand items, and then resell them to the store when they don’t want them anymore, is having great success. Their sister store, Fillmore & 5th, has opened six boutiques since 2012. As their director of marketing, Erin Wallace, said, “A lot of people can’t afford the timeless brands new but they still appreciate the quality.”

Learn more about this trend and the influence it is having.