LITTLE ROCK — QUOTE OF THE DAY
"This incident this week is not something we would have wanted, but every time things don't go as they're supposed to we learn lessons and we improve as a result of it."
Phil Fisher, plant spokesman for Entergy Arkansas Inc.'s Arkansas Nuclear One Article, 1D
Facebooks sells Microsoft 1.6% stake
SAN FRANCISCO - Rapidly rising Internet star Facebook Inc. has sold a 1.6 percent stake to Microsoft Corp. for $240 million, spurning a competing offer from online search leader Google Inc.
The deal announced Wednesday after several weeks of negotiation values Palo Alto, Calif.-based Facebook at $15 billion - less than four years after Mark Zuckerberg started the online social-networking site in his Harvard University dorm room.
Microsoft also will sell Internet ads for Facebook as the site expands outside the United States, broadening an existing marketing relationship that began last year.
Zuckerberg, 23, has indicated he would like to hold off on an initial public offering for at least two more years. In the meantime, Facebook hopes to become an advertising magnet by substantially increasing its current audience of nearly 50 million active users, who connect with friends on the site through messaging, photo-sharing and other tools.
The Facebook investment represents a coup for Microsoft because it provides the world's largest software maker with a toehold on one of the Internet's hottest platforms. In its fiscal year ending in June, Microsoft's online ad revenue rose 21 percent to $1.84 billion. Over the same period, Google's ad revenue totaled $13.3 billion.
Although News Corp.'s MySpace.com remains the largest social network, Facebook has been growing at a far more rapid clip during the past year. Facebook attracted 30.6 million U.S. visitors during September compared with 68.4 million at MySpace.
Merrill Lynch posts steep 3rd-quarter loss
NEW YORK - Merrill Lynch & Co. on Wednesday took a $7.9 billion writedown because of the summer's credit crisis, a bigger-than-expected amount that raised the specter of more trouble ahead from risky home loans.
The world's largest brokerage was caught off guard by its bad bets, leading to its first loss in six years. Merrill Lynch's quarterly performance was the worst by far of the Wall Street firms.
Last week Standard & Poor's downgraded more than $45 billion worth of securities backed by risky mortgages - some of which were made as recently as the first half of this year.
O'Neal said the company continues to face uncertainty as global investors shy away from risky investments.
The broker reported a loss after paying preferred dividends of $2.31 billion, or $2.82 per share, compared to a profit of $3 billion, or $3.50 per share, a year earlier. Revenue, after factoring in some of its losses, fell 94 percent to $577 million from $9.83 billion a year earlier.
Results missed Wall Street expectations for a loss of 45 cents per share on $3.25 billion of revenue, according to analysts polled by Thomson Financial.
Shares in Merrill fell $3.90, or 5.8 percent, to close at $63.22 Tuesday.
Bank of America to eliminate 3,000 jobs
CHARLOTTE, N.C. - Bank of America Corp. said Wednesday it will eliminate 3,000 jobs, an announcement that came less than a week after the nation's second-largest bank reported a huge drop in earnings for the third quarter.
The cuts will affect less than 2 percent of the company's staff. Most of them will be from Bank of America's investment banking unit, the company said.
Bank of America said last week that its profit fell 32 percent in the third quarter as trading losses and write-downs on a wide variety of loans offset solid revenue growth in most businesses.
Net income declined to $3.7 billion, or 82 cents per share, from $5.42 billion, or $1.18 per share, a year ago, and revenue fell 12 percent to $16.3 billion.
Charlotte-based Bank of America also said Wednesday that it is launching a strategic review of its investment banking business.
Gene Taylor, head of Global Corporate and Investment Banking, will retire at the end of this year and be replaced by Brian Moynihan, who ran the company's Global Wealth and Investment Management business.
TJX credit breach likely to hit 94 million
BOSTON - At least 94 million Visa and MasterCard accounts potentially were exposed to fraud in a data breach at TJX Cos., nearly double the previous estimate by the discount retailer. The figure was included in court filings this week that cited officials from the credit card associations.
The filings in a bank case against TJX indicated that fraudrelated losses involving Visa cards alone range from $68 million to $83 million, spread across 13 countries. One filing warned that the total will rise as thieves continue to use data from compromised cards.
"You know, these are going to be sold off for a period of time in the future, so it's going to continue for some time out there," Joseph Majka, Visa USA's vice president of investigations and fraud management, said in court documents unsealed late Tuesday.
Depositions of security officials at Visa and MasterCard Inc. suggest the breach, which began in mid-2005 before being discovered in late 2006, was far bigger than TJX has indicated.
Even before the latest numbers, independent organizations that track data breaches had called the case the largest ever.
Framingham, Mass.-based TJX, the owner of 2,500 stores including T.J. Maxx and Marshalls, has said about three-quarters of the cards had either expired by the time of the theft, or had masked data in the magnetic strip, meaning the information was stored as asterisks rather than numbers.
A Visa spokesman declined further comment Wednesday.
Spokesmen for MasterCard and TJX also declined immediate comment.
Bid to take Cablevision private rejected
BETHPAGE, N.Y. - Shareholders of Cablevision Systems Corp. rejected on Wednesday a $10.6 billion bid by the company's controlling shareholders, the Dolan family, to take the New York-area cable TV provider private.
The deal had faced opposition from large shareholders, proxy advisory firms and Wall Street analysts who said the company, which owns Madison Square Garden, Radio City Music Hall and the New York Knicks, should have a higher value than the $36.26 per share the Dolans had agreed to pay.
Cablevision Chief Executive Officer James Dolan announced the results of the vote at a special meeting of shareholders at the company's headquarters on New York's Long Island. The company didn't immediately release an exact count of the votes cast.
The defeat leaves Cablevision to continue as a stand-alone public company, a prospect that Dolan had acknowledged last week was a possibility after Cablevision's largest outside shareholder, fund manager ClearBridge Advisors, said it would vote against the deal.
Business, Pages 30 on 10/25/2007