Company offers $25 billion for Guidant

Indianapolis Boston Scientific Corp. offered to pay about $25 billion for rival medical device maker Guidant Corp. on Monday, topping by more than $3 billion what Johnson & Johnson agreed to pay for Guidant last month.

Guidant shares climbed nearly 10 percent in early trading on news of the brewing bidding war.

Boston Scientific, which makes heart devices, offered in a letter to Guidant’s chairman to pay a combination of cash and stock worth about $72 per Guidant share. It said that is nearly 14 percent above Friday’s value of J&J’s revised cash-and-stock deal for Guidant.

Boston Scientific Chairman Pete Nicholas said the company was interested in adding Guidant’s pacemaker and defibrillator products.

“This transaction provides a unique opportunity to advance our strategy to further diversify and to expand the growth markets we serve,” he said. “Combining the resources of two of the earliest pioneers in the field of interventional medicine promises a continuation of the prolific innovation that has enabled major advances in the treatment of so many diseases.”

Boston Scientific indicated it was prepared to sell Guidant’s stent business to satisfy regulators but wanted to retain some shared rights in Guidant’s drug-eluting stent program, which has not yet brought a product to market. Boston Scientific has one of the best-selling drug-eluting stents on the market in Taxus, which competes with the Cypher stent made by J&J’s Cordis Corp. unit. Stents are metal-mesh devices surgically inserted to keep coronary arteries propped open after surgery to clear blockages.

“We are prepared to divest them. We think that will address any competition concerns,” Paul LaViolette, chief operating officer of Natick, Mass.-based Boston Scientific, said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press.

Xbox 360 released next year in Asian countries

Seattle Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox 360 videogame console will come out in several Asian countries early next year, months after it is released in Japan, the software maker said Monday.

In a statement, Redmond-based Microsoft said the second version of its Xbox console will be available Feb. 24 in Korea, and March 2 in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan.

The Xbox 360 is due out Saturday in Japan — a key test for the company, since the first Xbox failed to gain a foothold there against Sony Corp.’s PlayStation 2.

Xbox 360 was released Nov. 22 in North America and Dec. 2 in Europe.

Private companies key to tsunami effort

Jakarta, Indonesia The head of the reconstruction effort in Aceh said on Monday that support from private companies is key to rebuilding the Indonesian province hardest hit by the December tsunami.

Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, the head of Aceh’s official Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Agency, cited a recent coffee-purchase agreement between Aceh Coffee and Starbucks Corp. as the kind of private-sector activity the area needs.

“What I believe in is entrepreneurship,” he told reporters. “That’s why I was very happy that Aceh Coffee is already in agreement with Starbucks.”

But Sanja Gould, a spokeswoman at Starbucks’ Seattle headquarters, said later on Monday that the company has no supply contracts with Aceh Coffee. She said, however, that Starbucks has been buying coffee from Aceh and other Indonesian provinces for years.

The Dec. 26 tsunami killed or left missing 216,000 people in 12 countries. Aceh, which was closest to the epicenter of the 9.0 magnitude quake that spawned the killer waves, was hardest hit.

Indonesia is the fourth-largest coffee-bean producer in the world, but lower-quality robusta beans comprise 90 percent of the country’s crop. Aceh’s fertile soil produces about 40 percent of Indonesia’s premium arabica coffee beans.