Televisa Alliance on Univision Bid Suffers Blow
Mexican media company Grupo Televisa SA last night was left scrambling to fund an offer for Spanish-language broadcaster Univision Communications Inc. after two of its biggest partners dropped from a bidding group in a dispute over price, people familiar with the matter said, the Wall Street Journal reports. The withdrawal of private-equity firms Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. and Blackstone Group threatened to send an already-tepid auction for Univision into further disarray, while potentially depriving Televisa of the asset it has coveted for years. The confusion around the Televisa bid may leave just one suitor — a group of private-equity funds together with investor Haim Saban — for what has been trumpeted as one of the hottest media properties available. Univision is now pushing the Televisa-led group to submit by today an offer for the media conglomerate of television and cable networks, radio stations and music and Internet properties, a person familiar with the matter said. The deadline potentially sets the stage for a dramatic showdown between Televisa and Univision, longtime business partners that have also become antagonistic rivals.
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Future of C-17 Line Still Up in the Air
Despite clearing a key congressional test, efforts to extend the production of Boeing Co.’s C-17 military cargo jet and save the biggest private employer in Long Beach still face a cloudy future, the Los Angeles Times reports. A defense appropriations bill approved by the House on Tuesday night includes $798 million to purchase three additional C-17s for the Air Force. Production of the plane, which is built at a Long Beach plant employing 5,500 workers, is scheduled to end in 2008 with delivery of the last of 180 aircraft ordered by the Pentagon. Even if funding for additional C-17s passes the Senate, Boeing executives said the new order would be insufficient to justify keeping the plant open. Saving the C-17 has become a priority for California’s congressional delegation in the wake of the closing of the state’s last commercial airplane plant last month. The C-17 is now the last major airplane factory left in Southern California, once a bastion of commercial and military aircraft production. Making aircraft and aircraft components now employs about 40,000 people in the Southland , down about three-quarters from the Reagan era.
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Study: Big One May Hit as Soon as Today
With more than 300 years of stress building on the San Andreas Fault, Los Angeles is long overdue for the “Big One,” according to new research published this month in the journal Nature, the Los Angeles Daily News reports. The research by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography is among the most detailed yet and confirms a USC study that found pent-up stress along the southern end of the fault means it could rupture at any moment. “All this data suggests that the fault is ready for the next big earthquake – but exactly when the triggering will happen and when the earthquake will occur we cannot tell,” said Yuri Fialko, an associate professor at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at Scripps. “It could be tomorrow or it could be 10 years or more from now.” Fialko’s research, using satellite and other data tracking, found the risk of a large earthquake – magnitude 7.0 or greater – may be increasing faster than researchers had previously believed on a 100-mile stretch of the fault southeast of San Bernardino. That section last erupted in 1690.
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Mango Importer Expands Business by Buying Oxnard Plant
A young Ventura company that claims to be the country’s biggest importer of fresh mangos has acquired longtime strawberry grower Cal Sun Produce’s big Oxnard cooling plant, gaining vital facilities and a foothold in the ice cream business, the Ventura County Star reports. Freska Produce International LLC, which imports some 8 million 10-pound boxes of mangos annually from Peru, Ecuador, Brazil and Mexico, bought the 43,500-square-foot plant at Fifth Street and Mountain View Road for a price that was in “the mid-seven figures,” said co-owner Gary Clevenger. Freska has leased space at the plant since 2004, but bought it this month to gain control of refrigeration space for its fruit. Fresh mangos must be kept at 48 degrees, but cooling facilities in Oxnard are becoming increasingly scarce. Besides guaranteeing Freska year-around mango cooling space, the Oxnard plant comes with a business bonus: freezing 12 million pounds of strawberries annually for ice cream makers.
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Foes of Airport EIR Mull Options
Leaders of the neighborhood advocacy group LBHUSH2 on Wednesday expressed bitter disappointment over the City Council’s decision Tuesday to ratify an environmental impact report on terminal improvements at Long Beach Airport, the Long Beach Press Telegram reports. A group leader stopped short of saying it is contemplating legal action, saying the group is mulling the next steps to battle the EIR decision and one that set the maximum size for terminal renovations at nearly 98,000 square feet. The council still has to make the final decision on whether the project should be built and how it will be financed, a decision that will likely be made after three new council members and a new mayor take office.
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