QUOTE OF THE DAY
“The weakness we saw in the very early part of this year is going to abate and we’ll see better growth.”
Joshua Shapiro, Maria Fiorini Ramirez Inc. chief U.S. economist Article, 1D
Fort Smith’s K-Mac buys 21 Taco Bells
Fort Smith-based K-Mac Holdings Corp., one of the nation’s largest franchise restaurant businesses, has acquired 21 Taco Bell restaurants in Oklahoma.
K-Mac purchased the restaurants from Ricksim Inc., a franchisee that operates Taco Bell restaurants around Oklahoma City, according to a release Tuesday. The acquisition gives K-Mac 56 restaurants in Oklahoma. The terms of the deal were not released.
K-Mac also operates KFC and Golden Corral restaurants and with the new acquisition runs 281 establishments across the three brands, in Arkansas, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas.
Brentwood Associates, a Los Angeles-based private equity firm with over $850 million under management, owns K-Mac. Brentwood Associates first invested in KMac in 2011.
U.S. approves poultry from South Korea
South Korea has been approved to export poultry products to the U.S.
The U.S. Agriculture Department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service issued a final ruling last week that added South Korea to the list of countries eligible to export poultry to the U.S.
“[The agency] has reviewed Korea’s poultry laws, regulations, and inspection system, as implemented, and has determined that they are equivalent to the Poultry Products Inspection Act,” according to documents filed with the service.
The approval came after 16 months of inspection, which began in November 2012.
The U.S. accepts imports of slaughtered poultry/parts only if they are considered wholesome, fit for human consumption, contain no dyes, chemicals or preservatives, and the country’s inspection program is equivalent to the one in the U.S.
Import of poultry that originated in South Korea is effective May 27.
At trial, Samsung points finger at Google
SAN JOSE, Calif. - An attorney for Samsung on Tuesday denied the company had stolen technology from Apple, saying the South Korean tech giant’s mobile devices contain Android software packages designed entirely by Google engineers.
Samsung attorney Peter Quinn told jurors in his opening statement at the patent infringement trial that Apple is a great company but doesn’t own everything, and its claims are unfounded.
The finger-pointing took place in U.S. District Court in San Jose, where Apple and Samsung are accusing each other of stealing ideas.
If Apple prevails, the cost to Samsung could top $2 billion. Apple’s costs, if it loses the litigation, were expected to be about $6 million. The trial marks the latest round in a long-running, worldwide series of lawsuits between the two tech giants over mobile devices.
Quinn told jurors that Apple’s gripe is with Android, a Google-developed smartphone operating system that now makes up about 70 percent of the global market.
“Not one of the accused features on this phone was designed, much less copied, by anyone at Samsung,” Quinn said. “The accused features on this phone were developed independently by some of the software engineers at Google, up the road in Mountain View.”
Apple’s lawyer Harold McElhinny had anticipated the tactic.
“Don’t be misled by that,” he said in his opening statement. “This case is not about Google. It is Samsung that has made the decision to copy these features; it is Samsung, not Google, that chooses to put these features into their phones, and it is Samsung that has made the decision to keep on infringing on Apple’s patents.”
Eurozone jobless rate remains at 11.9%
PARIS - The eurozone labor market remains in the doldrums, official data showed Tuesday, as unemployment in Italy rose to a record level.
The unemployment rate in the 18-nation currency bloc stood at 11.9 percent in February, unchanged from January’s revised figure and flat since October, according to a report by Eurostat, the Luxembourg-based statistics agency of the European Union.
About 25.9 million people remained without work across the 28-nation European Union, Eurostat estimated.
There was one bright spot in the data: Eurostat said the number of unemployed fell by 65,000 from January. While that was an encouraging sign, it did not affect the unemployment rate for the eurozone. But for the European Union overall, the joblessness rate slipped to 10.6 percent in February from 10.7 percent in January.
The latest data showed the unemployment rates in Greece and Spain at their highest level in decades, at 27.5 percent and 25.6 percent, respectively.
Business, Pages 28 on 04/02/2014