Travel to Baghdad Could Boost Profit at Airline With L.A. Ties
WALL STREET WEST
Deal Parade
Yahoo Inc.’s $1.6 billion cash-and-stock acquisition of paid search provider Overture Services Inc., announced last week, could turn out to be a bad deal for Overture’s local employees at its Pasadena headquarters.
The chief executives of both companies told Reuters last week that it is still too early to talk about job cuts, or whether to shutter AltaVista, the Internet portal that Overture just acquired.
But Overture Chief Executive Ted Meisel acknowledged that headcount reductions were among the possible cost savings that could emerge from the deal. He said it was too early to say precisely what those would be.
Sunnyvale-based Yahoo has 3,600 employees. Overture has 1,000 employees spread among its offices in Pasadena, New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Palo Alto, with an overseas headquarters in Ireland and offices in seven other countries.
One possible scenario: some of the jobs now in Pasadena may migrate up north.
Kate Berry
Name Game
Digital Coast Partners, LLC, a Santa Monica investment bank, has changed its name to Montgomery & Co. to better reflect its expansion into other industries such as health care, defense and homeland security.
The company recently opened a San Francisco office that will be headed by George Montgomery, a former managing director at JP Morgan Chase & Co., who has expertise in health care. He is not related to the firm’s founder and chief executive, James Montgomery.
In an effort to beef up its heath care team, the company has hired Keith Marshall, a former vice president at JP Morgan, and David Horn, a former vice president at Morgan Stanley, to focus on emerging growth companies in life sciences.
In addition, the company announced that it served as an advisor to Internet Pictures Corp., of San Ramon in amending its current licensing and business operations agreement with eBay Inc.
Montgomery & Co. also served as an advisor on the recent sale of San Diego based GERS Inc., a retail software firm, to private equity investor Symphony Technology Group of Palo Alto.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Kate Berry
Telecom Debate
Forget about a telecommunications recovery this year at least if El Segundo market researcher iSuppli Corp. has anything to say about it.
In a recent report, iSuppli analyst Steve Rago wrote that network spending by telecom companies could fall another 11 percent this year and next. That’s on top of a 24 percent falloff in 2001 and a 27 percent decline in 2002.
The reason for the continued slump: Technology companies are focusing on coming up with products that work with existing networks instead of making gear that requires upgrading.
That appeals to telecom executives concerned about profits.
The iSuppli report contradicts predictions made a few weeks ago by Newport Beach’s Roth Capital Partners LLC, which said telecom spending was finally on the way back.
Either way, everyone seems to be predicting that this is the final stretch of telecom’s extended contraction.
Orange County and its many chip companies have a big stake in the telecom business.
Irvine’s Broadcom Corp., Newport Beach’s Mindspeed Technologies Inc. and a host of startups are banking telecom carriers will start buying networking gear with their chips inside.
Telecom is of particular interest to Mindspeed, which makes chips for routers, switches and other networking devices.
The chipmaker recently started trading as a public company after Newport Beach-based Conexant Systems Inc. spun it off to its shareholders.
Orange County Business Journal
