Time to sell assets amid push beyond magazines

Time Inc. is planning to sell some magazines or other properties as the struggling publisher tries to push ahead with a digital strategy and move past months of talks with potential acquirers.

The owner of Sports Illustrated and People will look to offload “relatively smaller” titles in its portfolio and other “non-core” assets, Chief Executive Officer Rich Battista said Wednesday on a conference call. He didn’t name the assets.

Battista added that Time is open to joint ventures with other companies and interested in an outside investor who could provide capital “for a particular opportunity.” Windows is faring better than its maligned predecessor, but the software’s growth is still stunted by a shift away from personal computers.

Windows 10 is now running on a half-billion devices nearly two years after its release, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella disclosed Wednesday.

That figure is up from 400 million eight months ago, but far short of Microsoft’s goal of putting Windows 10 on 1 billion devices by 2018. The Redmond, Washington, company had already acknowledged it won’t reach that goal in time. Installations outside the U.S. will begin next year, the company said.

The glass tiles were unveiled by Tesla last fall just before the company merged with solar panel maker SolarCity Corp. They’re designed to look like a traditional roof, with options that replicate slate or terracotta tiles. The solar tiles contain photovoltaic cells that are invisible from the street.

Tesla said the solar tiles cost $42 per square foot to install, making them far more costly than slate, which costs around $17 per square foot, or asphalt, which costs around $5. But homes would only need between 30 and 40 percent of their roof tiles to be solar; the rest would be Tesla’s cheaper non-solar tiles which would blend in with the solar ones. to publish results of the investigation it commissioned into its scandal over cars rigged to cheat on diesel emissions tests, saying it could expose the company to legal risks.

Hans Dieter Poetsch told shareholders at the company’s annual meeting Wednesday that VW had given U.S. law firm Jones Day complete independence, and that its findings were handed over and included in the guilty plea agreed to with U.S. authorities.

Poetsch told shareholders in the northern Germany city of Hannover that the investigation was “one of the most comprehensive in German business history,” involving interviews with hundreds of witnesses.

He said he understood why some shareholders would “want still more transparency,” but disclosing more of the Jones Day probe would expose the company to “unacceptable legal risks.”