LITTLE ROCK — Will sell Netto stores, says Wal-Mart’s Asda
Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s Asda Group Ltd. unit offered to sell 24 percent of the Netto U.K. discount supermarkets it’s planning to buy to resolve local competition questions, Britain’s Office of Fair Trading said.
The antitrust regulator is considering Asda’s proposal to dispose of 47 Netto outlets, from a total 194 it’s acquiring, to alleviate concerns that competition could be “substantially reduced” in one in four of the areas where both Asda and Netto have stores, the office said Thursday in a statement.
Asda said in May that it plans to buy Netto’s U.K.
stores from A.P. Moeller-Maersk A/S’s Dansk Supermarked unit for $1.2 billion. The acquisition doesn’t raise concerns at a national level because Netto’s share of the U.K.
grocery market is less than 1 percent, the Office of Fair Trading said.
The 47 stores are “at the high end” of the number the company was planning to sell, Leeds, England-based Asda said in a prepared statement.
Mercy Health to start new records system
St. Joseph’s Mercy Health Center in Hot Springs on Sunday will join several others facilities in the Sisters of Mercy Health System in launching an electronic healthrecord system.
It ultimately will allow patients’ lab results, medical histories and other information to be available across all Mercy facilities.
Sisters of Mercy has spent about $450 million in four states on the project.
St. Joseph’s Mercy said in a release that the system will improve safety, and physicians will be able to instantly view records from a patient’s visits to Mercy clinics.
About 2.6 percent of U.S. hospitals have comparable electronic records, the release said.
St. Edward Mercy Medical Center in Fort Smith and St. Joseph’s clinics also will launch the system over the weekend.
Mercy Medical Center in Rogers already is using the system.
Arkansas Index drops
as 13 stocks slump
The Arkansas Index, a price-weighted index that tracks the largest public companies based in the state, dropped 1.74 to 175.71 Thursday.
“U.S. stocks moved lower for the second-straight day as an improvement in leading indicators and better home-sales data failed to offset the unexpected increase in jobless claims,” said John Blackwell, senior vice president and managing director of equity trading at Stephens Inc. in Little Rock. “The Arkansas Index fell as 13 stocks declined and four advanced.” The index was developed by Bloomberg News and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette with a base value of 100 as of Dec. 30, 1997.
Business, Pages 27 on 09/24/2010