Tag: Amazon

Latest Headlines

New $13B Aetna bonds prime Humana buy; 再见, GE!: $5.4B deal may close Monday; PepsiCo CEO in Yum spinoff dies at 71
Appliance Park aerial
An aerial view of the mammoth GE Appliance complex.

A news summary, focused on big employers; updated 9:52 a.m.

HUMANA: Aetna sold $13 billion of new bonds yesterday to pay for its $34 billion purchase of Humana, the latest sign of growing confidence anti-trust regulators will OK the deal. Shares of both insurance giants jumped on the news, narrowing the discount at which Humana trades to the original $230 cash-and-stock offer price. That gap, around 17% at yesterday’s close, is the smallest since early April (Wall Street Journal). Humana’s stock surged 5.5% to $187.23; Aetna, up 4% to $120.05. Aetna’s CEO said recently that he expects the deal announced last July will close in the year’s second half. Humana employs about 12,500 workers in Louisville, part of its nationwide workforce of 50,000; that figure would double under the Aetna deal. More about Humana’s history.

GE: Haier Co. is expected to close on its $5.4 billion purchase of the iconic 50-year-old Appliance Park as soon as Monday. That would “sever Louisville’s half-century ties to General Electric,” The Courier Journal says, “and turn over ownership of one of the community’s flagship employers to a major Chinese appliance and consumer electronics maker” (Courier-Journal). The complex employs 6,000 making dishwashers and other home appliances. Still, GE is advertising jobs there starting at $15.51 and hour, or $32,000 a year (company website).

(Here’s how Google translates our GE news summary in simplified Chinese: 海尔股份有限公司有望尽快结束其$5.4十亿收购标志性的50岁的家电园区，截至周一。这将“切断路易斯维尔半个世纪关系到通用电气，”信使杂志说，“和社会各界的旗舰雇主之一的所有权移交给大中国家电和消费电子制造商”（信使报）。复杂的员工6000人。 GE尚广告工作开始出现在$15.51和时间，或每年$32,000.” Our headline should say: Goodbye, GE!)

Watch an inside tour of Appliance Park:

Roger Enrico
Enrico

YUM: Retired PepsiCo CEO Roger Enrico, who spun off the company’s restaurant division into what is now Yum Brands, died suddenly Wednesday while on vacation with his family in the Cayman Islands. The cause of his death wasn’t immediately known. He was 71 (The Drum). CEO from 1996-2001, Enrico was known for turning Pepsi-Cola into a pop-culture leader with groundbreaking sponsorships with Michael Jackson and Madonna in the “Choice of a New Generation” campaign (The Wall Street Journal and AdAge). Watch one of the Jackson commercials. Yum’s history in Louisville started with KFC founder Harland Sanders.

AMAZON: About 40 bike messengers employed by Amazon contractor Fleetfoot Messenger Service have been laid off, effective today, as the company rethinks the way it makes quick deliveries in its corporate hometown of Seattle. The messengers carried packages and groceries for Amazon Prime Now, a popular one- to two-hour service seen as one of Amazon’s big bets to beat brick-and-mortar retailing (Seattle Times). Geekwire said the number laid off was closer to 60, and quoted one saying: “A lot of people, including myself, are thinking, ‘Why are we going to stick around and bust our ass and put our lives on our line when they don’t give a shit?’ They just cut our jobs. A lot of us just walked out” (GeekWire). Expectations were high for the couriers — with heavier-than-normal loads, fast delivery times, careful tracking, and demands for near-perfect execution (GeekWire, earlier). Elsewhere in Amazonia, the company blows away all competitors in time spent on their mobile websites by a long shot; mobile visitors spent an average 103 minutes on Amazon vs. Target’s 20 minutes and Walmart’s 14 (Business Insider).

BROWN-FORMAN: Billy Walker, who sold the BenRiach Distillery Co. scotch whiskey business to Brown-Forman for $405 million million, has been named entrepreneur of the year in the Scotland Food & Drink Excellence Awards; the deal closed Wednesday (Herald Scotland).

CHURCHILL DOWNS: Hosting a party at the iconic racetrack runs from casual to a formal sit-down meal surrounded by historic racing décor (press release via Insider Louisville).

In other news, U.S. employers added only 38,000 workers in May, a significant slowdown in hiring that could push back a decision by the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates (New York Times). Wall Street wasn’t keen on the report; all major stock indices retreated (Google Finance) and the 11 big employers in Boulevard’s Stock Portfolio all tumbled.

Jim Brown, Muhammad Ali
Ali last year.

Finally, Louisville native and humanitarian Muhammad Ali has been hospitalized again and is being treated for a respiratory issue in Phoenix, where he lives. Ali, 74, has been battling Parkinson’s disease for years. The Associated Press said last night that his condition may be more serious than in his previous hospital stays (ESPN). His $80 million Muhammad Ali Center opened in downtown Louisville in 2005.

We like to remember him for his stunning Sonny Liston knockout punch after 104 seconds on May 25, 1965:
Embed from Getty Images

Bottom Line

Add up all of Amazon’s data and distribution centers, and you’d get 229 Humana Towers
Humana building
It’s a downtown icon.

That’s one amazing measure of how big the retailer’s gotten since it was founded in Seattle 22 years ago.

And it’s still growing. Amazon just announced plans for two more giant distribution centers, both in Edwardsville, Ill. It already has two in the Louisville area employing a combined 6,000 workers, in Shepherdsville and Jeffersonville.

Worldwide, Amazon has 123 centers, including more than 50 in the U.S. alone. At the end of last year, it leased 118 million square feet of distribution and data centers, and owned another 6.8 million square feet. That’s equivalent to:

  • Football fields: 2,105
  • Humana Towers: 229
  • Empire State Buildings: 44
  • Apple headquarters “spaceships”: 43
  • Pentagons: 18 (it’s the world’s biggest office building)

The Jeffersonville center is one of only six in the U.S. open to tours. They last an hour; age restriction: 6 and up. How to schedule one.

Related: More Amazon company facts. Here’s the center in the U.K.’s Hemel Hempstead:
Embed from Getty Images

Latest Headlines

Haier in home fix-up show deal; and Taco Bell franchise owner gives Fla. ‘coma’ guy $2.5K
Tebow Home Free
Tebow (left) and Holmes host show where Haier is now a sponsor.

A news summary, focused on big employers; updated 10:32 a.m.

GE: Haier has signed on as a sponsor for the second season of the reality TV-game show Home Free, where contestants compete to win a home outfitted with Haier appliances. Co-hosts are Tim Tebow, the Heisman Trophy winner, and Mike Holmes, the series’s creator and professional contractor. On the Fox Network show, nine couples compete to renovate a dilapidated home each week, facing elimination until the winners are awarded their dream home. The series starts June 16 (press release). China-based Haier’s pending $5.4 billion purchase of the 6,000-employee Appliance Park in Louisville is expected to close this summer.

Michael Booth Taco Bell coma man
Booth in hospital with tacos.

TACO BELL: The Florida man who became an Internet sensation after waking from a 42-day coma in April and immediately asking for Taco Bell as his first meal is now closer to paying his medical bills, too: The franchise owner whose restaurant supplied the 8½ crunchy tacos last month presented Jake Booth with an oversized check for $2,500 at his Bonita Springs home, plus $250 in gift certificates for more tacos; Booth’s request led to untold millions of dollars in free publicity for Taco Bell. “We wanted to meet one of our greatest fans,” said Carlos Silva, chief operating officer of Prometheus Franchise Restaurant Holding; the Clearwater, Fla.-based company owns Taco Bell franchises throughout Southwest Florida. The money will go toward a Wake the Jake Go Fund Me campaign to raise $50,000 to help Booth pay medical bills (Naples Daily News). Watch the video. Booth’s story caught fire when someone posted a photo of him on Reddit. “Taco Bell’s marketing team have a slam dunk with this one,” said one poster.

AMAZON‘s latest round of distribution center openings is set for Edwardsville, Ill., where it plans two centers with more than 1,000 full-time jobs total. The company said today that one center will specialize in handling big-screen TVs, sports equipment or kayaks and the other will handle smaller items, including books, toys and electronics; no opening date was given for the centers (press release). Rumors had circulated last month that Amazon was headed for the area (Belleville News-Democrat). Edwardsville has 25,000 residents and is 27 miles northeast of St. Louis (Census facts). Today’s news follows Amazon’s announcement just a week ago that it would open a second distribution center in Joliet, Ill., with 2,000 jobs on top of the 1,500 already at the existing center; Joliet is an hour south of Chicago (press release).

In other news, University of Louisville has given baseball coach Dan McDonnell a $325,000 raise, to a base salary of $1 million a year, to discourage other schools from trying to poach him (Courier-Journal). U.S. stocks were modestly lower an hour into trading as Wall Street digested fresh ADP payroll data, watched an OPEC meeting, and waited for tomorrow’s May employment report from the Labor Department (Google Finance). The Boulevard Stock Portfolio of 11 big employers was mixed.

Just Tweets

Amazon and Domino’s were on the same promotional page for National Best Friend’s day.

Not so much at Pizza Hut . . .

. . . or Papa John’s:

Latest Headlines

B-F closes $405M BenRiach deal; Bezos says Amazon isn’t gunning for UPS — but he wants ‘better prices’; and Taco’s new Chalupa is one of ‘grossest fast food items ever offered’
BenRiach Distillery
The distillery is in the Highlands of northern Scotland.

A news summary, focused on big employers; updated 3:47 p.m.

BROWN-FORMAN said today it had completed its previously announced acquisition of Scotland’s BenRiach Distillery Co. for £281 million ($405 million). The deal includes three BenRiach labels and brings Brown-Forman back into the single-malt scotch whisky business. “The GlenDronach, BenRiach, and Glenglassaugh single-malt brands are among the finest single malts in the world,” CEO Paul Varga said in a statement. The purchase includes three distilleries, a bottling plant, and the headquarters in Edinburgh. BenRiach was founded in 1826 — 44 years before Brown-Forman was launched (press release). Today’s announcement follows a published report two weeks ago that the Louisville spirits and wine company is considering selling its Finlandia vodka business amid a broader effort to focus on whiskey. Brown-Forman’s Louisville operations.

Jeff Bezos
Bezos

AMAZON CEO Jeff Bezos told a high-profile technology conference last night that the retail giant isn’t aiming to compete head-on with UPS and other shippers it now partners with. Instead, Amazon wants to pick up the slack when delivery services can’t handle the final stretch. He cited India and the U.K. as examples. “We have had to take over a lot of the last-mile delivery in the U.K. over the last several years,” he told the Code Conference, in wide-ranging remarks. “The Royal Mail ran out of capacity at peak” (Bloomberg). Bezos did, however, hint at another motivation: wrangling better terms on delivery contracts. “Better prices on transportation would be acceptable to us,” he deadpanned (Recode). The Amazon founder was “equally comic, candid, and clever as he offered his views on artificial intelligence, data privacy, free speech, leadership, streaming video, and aerospace” (Fortune).

Elsewhere, Amazon is hiring more than 1,000 workers for its new 855,000 square-foot distribution center opening this summer outside San Antonio; the company already has six other Texas centers, including another one in the San Antonio area (Houston Chronicle). Amazon has five centers in Kentucky, including two in the Louisville area employing 6,000. And with more than 20,000 workers, UPS is Louisville’s biggest private employer.

TACO BELL‘s newest menu offering — a Chalupa with a fried chicken shell — is one of the “grossest fast food items ever offered” (New York Daily News). How it’s made (BuzzFeed). Also, the company has started construction on a restaurant in Nitro, West Virginia (WSAZ).

Ford logoFORD recalled 1.9 million vehicles with certain Takata passenger-side frontal airbag inflators after Takata said the inflators were defective. The vehicles affected are 2007-2010 Ford Edge; 2006-2011 Ford Fusion; 2005-2011 Ford Mustang; 2007-2011 Ford Ranger; 2007-2010 Lincoln MKX, and 2006-2011 Lincoln MKZ, Zephyr and Mercury Milan (Reuters and press release); all about Takata’s airbag scandal. Separately, Ford said total U.S. vehicle sales in May declined 6% from a year ago, to 235,997. That was despite F-Series pickup sales posting a 9% gain, and van sales hitting their best May since 1978 (press release). Ford shares closed down 2.9% at $13.10.

KINDRED said it completed a deal where it’s buying four leased hospitals in Indianapolis, Houston, Denver and Colorado Springs, Colo., and selling two in Cleveland, one owned and another leased. The Louisville hospital and nursing home giant said it paid about $800,000 cash and additional cash consideration to Select Medical Holdings Corp. as part of the deal (press release). Separately, Kindred said it’s closing its Bashford Manor area nursing and rehabilitation center, where 153 employees care for 110 residents (Courier-Journal).

PAPA JOHN’S will be one of the first U.S. restaurant brands to enter Tunisia; it’s the second African country after Egypt to have one of the pizza chain’s franchises. The country in North Africa only recently opened its borders to franchising (Meat & Poultry). More about Tunisia.

GE is scaling back plans for a factory that will build big gas-powered engines in Welland, Ontario; the factory is now in Waukesha, Wisc. The company will create just 150 jobs at the new site, down from 350 at Waukesha, when it first announced the move in September. GE is taking advantage of tax incentives (CBC).

TEXAS ROADHOUSE got only a so-so review in Augusta, Ga., partly because of the restaurant’s signature item: steak. “My first bite of the filet seemed pleasantly salty, but as I went on, the meat was overwhelmed with salt — I couldn’t even finish it,” the reviewer said. “It was tender, but not the most tender filet I’ve ever had. And while I ordered it medium, it was more of a medium rare” (August Chronicle). The restaurant chain tweeted a recommended topping on Sunday:

In other news, the embattled Cahoots bar on Baxter Avenue in the Highlands is closing (Business First). Brawls had been a problem, leading a customer to post a truly gross review, complete with photo! “Blood on the men’s room sink,” wrote John R. “From one of the (many) fights I’ve witnessed at this place. Disgusting” (Yelp).

Bottom Line

Tantalum?! Amazon document is an inside peek at newest compliance woes for top brass

Amazon has just filed its annual “conflict” minerals report with the Securities and Exchange Commission on a detailed — and we mean detailed — survey of suppliers who might unwittingly work with armed groups committing war crimes in the Congo region.

Gold
Yes, it’s gold.

The scores of companies supply commodities for making Amazon’s Kindle e-readers and Fire tablets. Last year’s survey literally ran from A (Aida Chemical Industries Co. in Japan) to Z (Zijin Mining Group Co. Ltd. Gold Refinery in China) in nearly 60 countries on all seven continents. The minerals are gold, tin, tungsten, and tantalum. The bottom line:

“While, for 2015, we identified no suppliers that were sourcing minerals through a supply chain that benefitted armed groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo region, some of the suppliers for our Kindle/Fire products are still working to determine country of origin and facility information, and other suppliers are still investigating whether the facilities they identified were used to process the gold, tin, tungsten, or tantalum in our Kindle/Fire products.”

Related: SEC conflict reports explainer.