IN THE PAPERS
In The Papers 9 December
09-12-2009
by Sylvia Leatham
Ericsson to cut 950 jobs | Google warns of online scams
The Irish Times reports that mobile company Digicel has completed a USD500 million corporate bond fundraising, as noted by ENN on Tuesday.
The paper also says that Irish firm Wavebob is leading a consortium of companies in testing a wave energy converter off the Portuguese coast. Read more on this story as reported on ENN last week.
The same paper reports that TalkTalk is to create 60 new jobs in Waterford, as reported by ENN on Tuesday.
The paper also notes that Smart Telecom is to exit examinership on Friday. Read more on this story on ENN.
According to the Wall Street Journal, chipmaker Texas Instruments has indicated improving business conditions in the current quarter. The Dallas company says it now expects revenue will come in at the upper end of a range it gave in October, setting a mid-point that indicates growth of 19 percent from a year ago. The chip firm said it expects fourth-quarter revenue to range from USD2.90 billion to USD3.02 billion, compared with a prior forecast of USD2.78 billion to USD3.02 billion. TI also slightly raised its estimated range for earnings per share to USD0.47 to USD0.51, compared to a previous range of USD0.42 to USD0.50.
The Financial Times reports that incoming Ericsson chief Hans Vestberg has announced plans to cut 950 jobs in Sweden, a move that is not part of the existing cost-cutting programme at the mobile network equipment maker. The job losses involve the closure of the company's Gavle factory, which makes base stations for mobile networks based on 3G technology. Ericsson said that fewer employees were needed to make its latest generation of products. Vestberg succeeds Carl-Henric Svanberg as CEO on 1 January. Apart from the 950 job losses, Vestberg will implement an existing plan to secure savings worth SKR10 billion by the middle of next year.
The paper also says that IBM has announced a USD200 million software deal with a technology partner in Brazil. In an interview with the paper, Steve Mills, head of IBM's software division, said that his company was seeing "pretty solid single-digit" growth in Brazil, India, China and parts of south-east Asia. IBM said that Consist Software Solutions, a Brazilian software firm that supplies applications to large and medium-sized companies throughout Latin America, had agreed to standardise all of its products to run on IBM technology. Mills did not reveal the length of the contract but said the arrangement was far larger than similar deals with technology partners such as this, which typically run to "tens of millions" of dollars.
In a separate report on the same interview, the paper notes that IBM's Steve Mills has said that rival firm Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems does not raise any significant antitrust issues and is likely to close soon in spite of objections raised in Brussels. Critics of the deal have claimed that Sun's MySQL database is an important rival to Oracle's own core database business. But IBM software chief Steve Mills says that MySQL posed little direct challenge to database products from groups such as IBM and Oracle.
The paper also says that Google has warned about a plague of online scams that take advantage of its brand to trick unsuspecting web users, and opened a lawsuit against alleged perpetrators of these scams. The schemes involve "thousands" of websites that claim to offer kits showing users how to make money by working from home on Google, according to a legal action filed in federal court in Utah. Although they are told they will have to pay only a nominal fee, "people who sign up for these offers have their credit cards charged with substantial recurring monthly fees" and receive little or nothing in return, the filing said. The case was brought against Pacific WebWorks, a Nevada-based company, and 50 unnamed defendants who Google said had worked with the company to carry out the scams.
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