COMPANY NEWS IN BRIEF

Johnson & Johnson plans to split

US pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson on Friday announced plans to break up into two listed companies, separating its consumer health arm that sells Band-Aids and Tylenol from its pharmaceutical division.

Johnson & Johnson said in a statement it will create "two global leaders that are better positioned to deliver improved health outcomes for patients and consumers through innovation."

It is the third major company to announce plans to break up its business this week after General Electric and Toshiba.

Shares in the 135-year-old company climbed more than 3.5 percent on Wall Street in pre-market trading Friday following the announcement.

Johnson & Johnson plans to complete the separation in 18-24 months, creating two publicly traded companies. CEO Alex Gorsky said the decision was made following a "comprehensive review."-Nampa/AFP

IBM and Amazon partners

International Business Machines Corp and Amazon.com Inc's Amazon Web Services said on Monday they would work together to extend the reach of a set of tools that oil companies use to manage disparate types of data.

Amazon in 2018 worked with Royal Dutch Shell to create a technology to turn data from more than a century of oil production, largely from paper records, into a standardized format for multinational oil companies to improve efficiency across their operations.

The technology is being shared industry-wide on an open-source basis, and only works in cloud computing data centres. Some oil producing countries such as Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and Russia have no Amazon data centres but require companies to store their data within the country's borders.

IBM and Amazon said they have worked together to resolve that problem. Using IBM technology called OpenShift, oil companies can use the oil-industry cloud data tools in their privately owned data centres within their countries.

"The data residency requirement is virtually 50% of the oil producing world today," said Manish Chawla, global managing director for energy, resources and manufacturing at IBM, in an interview. "This is a pretty significant part of the market."-Nampa/Reuters

Samsung's Lee visits US

Samsung Electronics vice chairman Jay Y. Lee is visiting North America in his first high-profile trip after serving jail time for bribery, with a decision imminent on the company's planned $17 billion US chip plant.

Lee left Seoul on Sunday and his trip to Canada and the United States is expected to coincide with a decision on the location of the new plant, Yonhap and other local media said. read more

A site in Texas' Williamson County, near the city of Taylor, offered the better incentives package among various sites Samsung has been considering for the new chip plant that is set to make advanced logic chips, sources previously told Reuters.

Since Samsung vice chairman Kim Kinam confirmed the chip plant plan in May, Samsung has been comparing incentives and working out who pays what in convoluted land and other agreements, while also considering the available amount of stable utilities such as water and electricity, one of the sources with knowledge of the matter said.

A winter storm in the first quarter hit Samsung's chip plant in Austin, Texas, laying bare the importance of stable utilities, as a shutdown caused by blackouts affected wafers corresponding to around US$254-339 million of damages. -Nampa/Reuters

Airbus takes off with big order

Airbus came out strongly at the Dubai Airshow on Sunday with a group order for 255 single-aisle A321 aircraft, marking the first major deal of its kind since the pandemic began.

The European plane-maker's announcement came shortly after its American rival Boeing said it would fulfil an order to convert 11 single-aisle 737s into cargo aircraft, and as the aviation industry slowly recovers from a Covid-induced downturn.

Airbus said the order came from Wizz Air, Frontier, Volaris and JetSMART all from US company Indigo Partners for a total value of more than $33 billion, according to the latest list price published by Airbus in 2018. The total cost of the order was not disclosed, but list rates are rarely applied to large deliveries.

Hungarian low-cost carrier Wizz Air will receive 102 aircraft, American Frontier Airlines will receive 91, while 39 will go to Mexico's Volaris and 23 to Chilean JetSMART.

Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury said that because the four companies fall under the same aviation-focused equity firm, it allowed for a large order and for an attractive price, adding: "It's a give and take situation."-Nampa/AFP

US$6.9bn Tesla shares sold

Tesla CEO Elon Musk sold more than US$6.9 billion worth of shares in the electric carmaker this week, according to regulatory filings released Friday.

The 50-year-old South African billionaire sold more than 5.1 million Tesla shares, of which about 4.2 million were held in a trust. His massive disposal hit Tesla's share price, which slumped 15.4 percent over the week.

Tesla last month became the latest US tech giant to hit US$1 trillion in market value. Musk's selloff came days after he created a Twitter poll in which millions voted asking whether he should sell 10 percent of his huge stake in the electric carmaker.

On Saturday, Musk tweeted: "Much is made lately of unrealized gains being a means of tax avoidance, so I propose selling 10% of my Tesla stock. Do you support this?"

In the poll, almost 58 percent of the 3.5 million votes cast were in favour of him proceeding with the sale. Tesla shares had plummeted at the Wall Street opening on Monday and have fallen further since.

The stock Musk disposed of this week was sold at a significantly lower share price than if he had sold before his tweet. -Nampa/AFP