Dow Chemical Company (DOW) is planning to sell more non-core assets in 2010 to pay off debt from its $16.5 billion acquisition of rival Rohm and Haas in April of this year. It is planning further debt reductions of about $12 billion. Dow stated that it plans to lighten its debt load and achieve its financial targets ahead of schedule. The Rohm and Haas acquisition is proving to be positive for Dow, which is expected to consolidate higher-margin and higher-growth specialty businesses and reduce volatility in earnings and cash flow, going forward. Dow is aiming to nearly double margins and quadruple earnings per share while reducing debt in the coming years. The company has predicted earnings of $4 to $4.50 per share in 2012 (up from last year’s $1.82) to be achieved through a mix of growth synergies as well as restructuring and cost synergies. ...

Diversified chemical company Dow Chemical Company (DOW) has signed an agreement to sell its non-core Powder Coatings Business to Akzo Nobel N.V. (AKZOY), a leading producer of paints and coatings, based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. The transaction is expected to close by the second quarter of 2010, subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approvals.  Dow plans to use the proceeds from the transaction to repay debt, consistent with the company's de-leveraging plan. Dow plans to raise about $3.5 billion by divesting its non-core assets. For the Chemicals group Akzo Nobel, the deal will bring upgraded technological expertise and significant synergy potential for the Powder Coatings business, as well as enhance the company's position in the U.S.  The powder coatings activities were purchased by Dow earlier this year as part of its acquisition of Rohm & Haas. ...

Amsterdam and Peroff have a new white paper discussing the case of opposition leader Dr. Chee Soon Juan in Singapore. The introduction of the executive summary of the report is below, followed by a link for downloading the full paper.

Introduction

This White Paper documents the repression of political freedoms in Singapore. It reviews how the Government of Singapore, under the leadership of the People's Action Party (PAP), has monopolized the state's apparatus to its own benefit. The result has been the denial of democratic rights and freedoms and the muzzling of domestic and international media.

The case of Dr Chee Soon Juan is examined in detail. Being the leader of one of Singapore's most important opposition parties - the Singapore Democratic Party (SDP)

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As a follow up to my post on "Blackstone Group: A High Beta Play on Recovery", news came out yesterday that Kodak (EK) is gonna raise $700 Mil through a series of transactions, including $400 Mil from secured debt issued to private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR). In exchange for funding, KKR gets two seats on EK's board. In my previous post I talked about how private equity fills a big need during hard times like the current recession (is it still?), and these firms are gonna make tons of money out of it. The EK capital raising is just one of many deals to come. Banks are reluctant to lend, the government is head over heels in deficit so companies which need funds to reorganize and shore up balance sheets turn to private equity. Many ...

DrStockPick.com Stock Report!

Friday September 11, 2009

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Motorola, Inc.(NYSE: MOT) ’s Home and Networks Mobility business today revealed its next generation encoding platform. This high-performance video processing platform supports both MPEG-4 and MPEG-2 standard-definition (SD) and high-definition (HD) encoding and transcoding and has been designed to meet future processing demands of both 1080P/50Hz and 1080P/60Hz resolutions using the MPEG-4 format.

Ditech Networks (NASDAQ:DITC), a global leader in mobile voice processing applications, today announced it has entered into a strategic relationship with SimulScribe, in which Ditech Networks will be the exclusive global marketing and sales partner for SimulScribe’s voice-to-text (VTT) applications to service providers

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DrStockPick.com Stock Report!

Thursday September 10, 2009

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Dimension 3D Printing, a brand of Stratasys Inc. (NASDAQ: SSYS), today announced the launch of its sixth annual “Extreme Redesign: The Ultimate 3D Printing Challenge.” The contest challenges computer-aided-design (CAD) students worldwide to submit their most creative, useful and innovative Extreme Redesigns - whether an entirely original concept, a new perspective on an everyday product or a fresh vision for a famous piece of art, animation or architecture.

Unico, Incorporated (OTCBB: UNCO), a natural resource company in the precious metals mining sector, has filed a Current Report on Form 8-K regarding an anticipated reduction on the

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DrStockPick.com Stock Report!

Tuesday August 18, 2009

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Rimini Street, Inc., the leading third-party maintenance and support provider for enterprise software, including Oracle Corporation’s (NASDAQ:ORCL) Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards software and SAP AG (NYSE:SAP) software, today announced the global expansion of its proven tax and regulatory update service. Tax and regulatory updates from Rimini Street, already used and trusted by hundreds of clients around the world to accurately process billions of dollars of transactions, are a key component of Rimini Street’s award-winning, third-party support program. With this expanded coverage, Rimini Street will provide mission-critical tax and regulatory updates for more than one hundred countries across all of its supported SAP

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An interesting piece in Asia Times Online highlights the recent efforts on behalf of Dean Peroff and Robert Amsterdam to gain observer status for the Singapore Democratic Party, led by dissident Dr. Chee Soon Juan, from the Liberal International.  With the pressures of the economic crisis stirring protests in many countries, the authoritarian rulers of Singapore have clamped down even further on the population with the passage of the Public Order Act (POA), allowing virtually any arrest for any public demonstration.

The SDP's nomination was championed by Dean Peroff, from the international law firm Amsterdam & Peroff. In passing the unanimous motion, Peroff maintained that Singapore's political order was authoritarian, autocratic, run by a one-man system and that SDP's new observer status to Liberal International ...

While industry experts are still pondering if the recent flurry of successful initial public offerings indicates a broader recovery, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts on Monday agreed to sell shares of its private-equity companies through Fidelity Investments.

Under terms of the agreement, Fidelity's retail customers will get access to the IPO shares. Until now, such offerings mostly went to institutions and wealthy investors. Again with private equity firms looking to expand their reach, KKR will not only get a distribution channel but also exclusive access to the Boston-based mutual fund giant's clients.

As financial markets have been murky over the last few years, KKR has not taken any of its portfolio companies public since the IPO of Sealy (ZZ) in 2006. While it still considers buying out the Amsterdam-listed KKR Private Equity Investors LP in order to go public, that IPO has also been on hold for at

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If inflation doesn’t get us, incompetent government action will. This is the view of one of our favourite common sense Economist, Willem Buiter, professor of European Political Economy at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Buiter warns that the “the next big crisis … will be a crisis of state ‘overreach’ and of government failure” and that “stultifying state capitalism, initiative-numbing over-regulation and overambitious social engineering may well be the defining features of the next socio-economic system to fail.” We’ll drink to that.

What follows is the conclusion of the Den Uyl lecture Buiter gave in Amsterdam on 15 December 2008 (emphasis added). Print it out and stick it to the door of your fridge. It’s one of the best accounts we’ve read of the brave new world will be ushered in by the recent financial

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