Tag: Yum

Latest Headlines

Humana-Aetna now in limbo after DOJ talks; Haier planning super fridge; Amazon rockets to 4th most-valuable company, and check your wallet for a $540 million jackpot

A news summary, focused on 10 big employers; updated 3:28 p.m.

HUMANA and Aetna now face an uphill battle persuading antitrust enforcers their planned $37 billion deal won’t harm competition, after high-level talks between the Justice Department and company officials yesterday ended without public word of their outcome. It isn’t clear when the agency will make a final call. Company officials have been preparing for a decision as soon as this month, according to The Wall Street Journal, which cited people familiar with the matter that the newspaper didn’t identify. But officials also disclosed June 24 that they’d extended the deadline for completing the deal until the end of the year.

Humana’s stock has been reeling since news of the negotiations suddenly emerged mid-day Thursday; shares have fallen 11% since the day before. Aetna’s stock has fallen, too, but by a far smaller 2%, reflecting what investment bank JP Morgan said yesterday is the Louisville company’s greater downside risk if the deal collapses (chart, top).

JP Morgan downgraded Humana’s stock to “neutral” from “overweight,” after the probability of a deal approval declined well below a 50/50 chance, analyst Gary Taylor said. If the deal were not to happen, Humana’s shares could fall to a range of as low as $115 to $125. At $115, Humana would have sunk to the lowest level since May 6, 2014, when shares closed at $109.79.

That grim outlook isn’t universal. Wedbush Securities analyst Sarah James told CNBC: “We’re 80 to 90% confident that the Aetna deal is going to go through,” she said (CNBC).

The developments at Humana-Aetna and two other companies also planning a merger — Anthem and Cigna, for $48 billion — “are the latest signs that federal officials are worried about consolidation among health insurers,” the WSJ says. The deals “would reshape the top of the industry, collapsing five large insurers into three giant firms, each with annual revenues of more than $100 billion” (Wall Street Journal).

BROWN FORMAN: The U.S. State Department spent $21,733 to distribute 840 fifths of Jack Daniel’s as “gratuities” Continue reading “Humana-Aetna now in limbo after DOJ talks; Haier planning super fridge; Amazon rockets to 4th most-valuable company, and check your wallet for a $540 million jackpot” →

Cops and Courts

Tenn. woman arrested on Taco Bell assault charge; employee ‘got her bell rung pretty good’

The latest crime news across the world of 48,000 restaurants.*

Crime scene tapeIn Rogersville, Tenn., a 50-year-old woman was charged with assault and disorderly conduct, and spent the night in jail, after attacking a Taco Bell employee Tuesday night because there was something wrong with her order, according to local police.

Shortly after 7 p.m., Kim Renee Long entered the restaurant and “became irate and began yelling and cussing her,” according to a police report cited by the Times-News. “It was during this time that Ms. Long struck [the victim] in the face twice with her hand and then threw the bag of food at her and continued yelling and cussing.”

Kim Long
Long

Officer Cambren Gibson told the newspaper he was “just dumbfounded that she punched out an employee over a messed-up order.” He added: “I never thought to ask the employee who got hit what was wrong [with the order] because she was so shaken up. She got her bell rung pretty good.”

Rogersville is 65 miles northeast of Knoxville.

* Yum has 43,000 KFCs, Pizza Huts and Taco Bells in nearly 140 countries; Papa John’s has 4,900 in 37 countries, and Texas Roadhouse has 485 restaurants in five countries. With that many locations, crimes inevitably will occur — with potentially serious legal consequences for the companies.

Just Tweets

Taco Bell gave Indianapolis Colts long snapper Matt Overton a virtual “cake” yesterday for his 31st birthday, hopping on a tradition he started two years ago.

And the player returned the love right back:

Here’s what Overton built for himself last year . . .

. . . and in 2014.

Latest Headlines

Yum close to finishing big corporate campus expansion in Plano; and Ford’s China vehicle sales jump 6% year-to-date

A news summary, focused on 10 big employers; updated 5:30 p.m.

spcorporateimg
Entrance to Plano corporate offices, in photo from employment site Glassdoor.

YUM‘s expansion of its Pizza Hut and KFC international corporate campus in Plano, Texas, will boost total space by 60% to 300,000 square feet, with the addition of two three-story buildings. The pizza and fried chicken chains are opening about 1,000 new locations a year, requiring more space for employees.

One of the two new buildings will house a life-sized mock up of a Pizza Hut restaurant for testing everything from diner traffic flow to consumer reaction to artwork. There will also be a new conference room for all the campus’ 450 employees, twice the capacity of the existing conference space.

Greg Creed
Creed

Yum CEO Greg Creed and four other top corporate executives are getting new offices above the conference center, too. The five executives now divide their time between Plano, which is 20 miles north of Dallas, and  Louisville, a move in February that raised questions about Yum’s commitment to Louisville. Yum said it was more practical for the top brass to work closer to the company’s two biggest and fast-growing divisions. The corporate campus expansion was disclosed at the time (Dallas Morning News).

The Pizza Hut Division has about 14,000 restaurants in 90 countries and territories outside China. KFC has about 15,000 in 120 countries and territories, also excluding China.

The China Division, based in Shanghai, has about 7,200 restaurants, mostly Pizza Huts and KFCs. Under pressure from an activist investor, Yum is in the process of spinning off the China Division, a process it expects to complete by the end of October.

Pizza Hut and Yum’s international business have been based in Plano since Yum was spun off from PepsiCo in 1997. KFC’s U.S. division remains in Louisville, where the company employs 1,000 workers. Yum’s third division, Taco Bell, is based in southern California’s Irvine. More about Yum in Louisville.

FORD said it sold 577,097 vehicles in China during the year’s first half, a 6% increase from a year ago. Demand for Ford and Lincoln SUVs sales was strong, with combined sales of the Ford EcoSport, Kuga, Edge, Everest and Explorer and Lincoln MKC, MKX and Navigator surpassing 150,000 vehicles, 27% more than a year ago (press release). Ford’s stock closed this afternoon at $12.75, up 1.4% to $12.74.

Last week, Ford said total U.S. sales grew 5% during the year’s first six months, its best first-half performance since 2006. The automaker employs nearly 10,000 workers at truck and auto factories in Louisville.

AMAZON‘s first Prime Day 24-hour sale last year didn’t go off without a hitch. “The company hyped price-breaks on everything from beard growth rubs to nail clippers for large animals, as well as the much-mocked 55-gallon bottle of lube for over $1,000,” says Time magazine. “The overwhelming verdict for the vast majority of Prime Day deals last year was: they kinda sucked.” What to do different for this year’s Prime Day, next Tuesday? Time offers five suggestions (Time). Also, Amazon plans to hire another 1,000 employees in the U.K. at its London head office, research and development centres in Cambridge and Edinburgh and new warehouses in Manchester and Leicestershire — all on top of 2,500 jobs it announced earlier this year (The Telegraph).

In other news, Courier-Journal parent Gannett Co. said it would report second-quarter financial results July 27, followed by a 10 a.m. ET conference call with Wall Street analysts (press release).

The A-list

Stars are just like us! They eat KFC and Taco Bell, according to professional booty Kardashian

Realty TV star and newly cast MILF Kim Kardashian orders extra-crispy chicken wings with a biscuit at KFC, while “just lets loose and gets both a soft and hard beef taco” at Taco Bell, according to Australia’s News.

“Fast food is def one of my guilty pleasures,” Kardashian wrote on her website, pointing out she’s on the Atkins diet but still has cravings. “I go very rarely, but OMG I love it so much when I decide to indulge.”

And yet! Kardashian, 35, and all of 5’3″ tall, has lost 7 lbs. in the last two weeks, and she’s not stopping there, says E Online. She’s aiming to lose even more in order to get down to at least 120 lbs.

She was fit enough to appear in singer Fergie‘s new barely-safe-for-work “M.I.L.F 4” video, an appearance that sparked a controversy over her too-tiny-to-believe waist. “It’s called ‘styling,'” Kardashian harrumphed on Instagram, “not Photoshop.”

Related: Gorge on all the latest Kardashian news., and more of Us magazine’s stars are just like us.

Media and Marketing

Forget about extra-crispy Col. Sanders; here comes another DC Comics’ superhero version — a bucketful of them

Produced with KFC itself, the newest comic in the series is “The Crisis of Infinite Colonels,” wherein the KFC founder we know must defeat the evil Col. Sunder from Earth-3.

Harland Sanders
Sanders

“To pull it off, he teams up with a whole host of Colonels from across the DC multiverse, like Bizarro Colonel, Steampunk Colonel, and the one and only Col. Arla Sanders from Earth-11,” says The Verge.

The comic echoes the current KFC campaign of multiple Sanders’ impersonators, including the most recent: professional tanner and actor George Hamilton.

Last October, DC and KFC teamed up for “Kentucky Fried Chicken Presents: The Colonel of Two Worlds.” Based in the Los Angeles area’s Burbank, the 82-year-old publisher is best known for its Superman, Batman and other characters.

Sanders launched his iconic Kentucky Fried Chicken chain in 1930 from his roadside restaurant in Corbin, Ky., during the Great Depression. He died in 1980 at 90 years old. Read more about KFC and corporate parent Yum.