the bottomline
SAN FRANCISCO:
Amazon. com Inc has stepped up lending to third-party sellers on its site who are looking to grow their business, a company executive said in an interview on Wednesday.
The e-commerce giant has doled out more than $1 billion in small loans to sellers in the past 12 months, compared with more than $1.5 billion it lent from 2011 through 2015, said Peeyush Nahar, vice president for Amazon Marketplace. Sellers have used the money to expand their inventory or discount items on Amazon, he said. (RTRS)
NEW YORK:
Scandal-ridden Wells Fargo has been ranked dead last in a survey of “Most Respected American Companies” done by the investing publication Barron’s.
San Francisco-based Wells plunged from 60 on Barron’s list to 100 , the lowest position on the publication’s list. Wells is ranked below Philip Morris, Altria and Reynolds American — the nation’s largest tobacco companies — as well as American International Group, better known as AIG, the insurance giant that required a government rescue during the financial crisis. (AP)
LOS ANGELES:
Verizon plans to lay off 15% of the combined workforce of AOL and Yahoo, once the $4.5 billion deal for Yahoo’s web assets closes, Variety has confirmed.
Given that AOL-Yahoo together have about 14,000 employees, around 2,100 jobs are set to be eliminated. The 15% layoff figure was first reported by TechCrunch, which is owned by AOL; an earlier Recode report pegged the number of layoffs at up to 1,000.
The integrated AOL-Yahoo business, housed under the newly created Oath division, will be organized around key content-based pillars: news, sports, finance, entertainment, and lifestyle. It will be led by current AOL CEO Tim Armstrong; Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer will not be part of the Oath management team. (RTRS)
DOVER:
Chemours, the former performance chemicals unit of Dupont, has been named to the Fortune 500 list of America’s largest companies less than two years after its spinoff.
Company officials said Chemours, with $5.5 billion in revenue last year, ranks 482 on the list released Wednesday by Fortune Magazine.
Chemours president and CEO Mark Vergnano said the ranking reflects the execution of the company’s transformation plan, which focuses on reducing structural costs, growing market positions, optimizing its portfolio, refocusing investments and transforming its corporate culture.
Chemours eked out a slight profit last year, reporting net income of $7 million, or 4 cents per share, compared to a loss of $90 million, or 50 cents per share, in 2015. Sales declined 6 percent to $5.4 billion. (AP)
NEW YORK:
Members of the Nordstrom family including co-presidents Blake, Peter and Erik Nordstrom are considering making an offer to buy out the 70 percent of the department store’s stock they don’t already own.
Nordstrom Inc says Thursday that the group also includes President of Stores James Nordstrom and Chairman Emeritus Bruce Nordstrom.
Nordstrom shares, which have fallen by about a third since December, rebounded over 12 percent on the news.
(AP)
LOS ANGELES:
Shares of Snap, Snapchat’s parent company, fell more than 6% Thursday after the stock officially became the mostshorted technology IPO so far this year.
Short sellers — who essentially bet that the price of a stock will fall in the future — now own as much as 28% of the shares available to be publicly traded, Bloomberg reported Thursday, citing data from Markit Group. (RTRS)
LOS ANGELES:
Pandora just bought itself a little more time: The music streaming service negotiated a brief extension of the pre-closing period for a looming $150 million investment from private equity fund KKR. This will allow the company “to explore interest expressed by a strategic investor in making a substantial minority investment in Pandora,” as it put it in a statement Thursday morning. Pandora didn’t mention the potential investor, but multiple reports point to Sirius XM.
Pandora had been under a time crunch ever since it negotiated the KKR investment a month ago; the terms of that agreement gave the company 30 days to instead find an acquirer. (RTRS)
LONDON:
British financial spreadbetting firm CMC Markets Plc reported a fall in full-year pretax profit as low levels of volatility resulted in fewer trading opportunities for its clients.
The company, which listed on the London stock market last year, said pretax profit fell 9 percent to 48.5 million pounds ($62.87 million) in the year ended March 31.
Revenue per active client fell 11 percent to 2,517 pounds, while the number of active clients rose 5 percent to 60,082. (RTRS)
FRANKFURT:
Ailing German airline Air Berlin said on Thursday it has asked the German states of NorthRhine Westphalia (NRW) and Berlin to consider possible loan guarantees amid signs of waning support from Etihad Airways, its biggest shareholder.
Abu Dhabi-owned Etihad, which has thrown Air Berlin several life lines over the years, earlier on Thursday said it had pulled out of a prospective deal to combine Air Berlin’s holiday flight business Niki with tour operator TUI Group’s own carrier TUIfly. (RTRS)
ZAGREB:
Indebted Croatian food group Agrokor has secured a 480 million euro ($538 million) loan, a government-appointed restructuring expert said on Thursday, giving a boost to his efforts to stabilise the biggest private sector employer in the Balkans.
Ante Ramljak said the money was arranged by bondholders led by Knighthead Capital Management and domestic banks, and the total included an 80 million euro loan Agrokor was granted in April. (RTRS)