Maytag shares rise after buyout offer
Des Moines, Iowa Shares of Maytag Corp. rose Tuesday after the appliance maker said it will review a $1.28 billion buyout offer from two private equity firms and a rival Chinese manufacturer, a month after Maytag agreed to be acquired by an investor group that wants to take the company private.
Shares of Maytag rose 83 cents, or 5.4 percent, to close at $16.06 Tuesday on the New York Stock Exchange.
Maytag agreed a month ago to be acquired by Ripplewood Holdings, a New York investment firm. But in a statement late Monday, Maytag said it had received a preliminary bid from another group — Bain Capital, Blackstone Group and Haier America — of $16 per share, $2 more per share than the offer from Ripplewood.
“We continue to support the Ripplewood transaction; however, we also believe that it is incumbent on us to pursue the possibility of achieving a higher price for our stockholders,” Maytag’s lead director, Howard Clark, said in the statement.
Google not planning to compete with PayPal
San Francisco Google Inc. CEO Eric Schmidt on Tuesday denied recent media and analyst reports that the online search engine leader is gearing up to compete directly with eBay Inc.’s pioneering PayPal service, although he acknowledged some kind of electronic payment product is in the works.
Although he declined to provide any details about the project, Schmidt made it clear it won’t trespass on PayPal’s turf.
“We do not intend to offer a person-to-person, stored-value payments system,” Schmidt said during an interview with the Associated Press.
That description fits PayPal, a six-year-old service that creates “digital cash” by accepting credit card payments from its users and then delivering the payments to a designated recipient. The recipient then can either get real cash or leave all or part of the balance in a PayPal account for future transactions.
As e-commerce has blossomed, PayPal has thrived, growing from 24 test users in 1999 to 72 million accountholders through March. Looking to profit from the fees that PayPal collects from completing online transactions, San Jose-based eBay bought the service for $1.3 billion in 2002.
Winn-Dixie to cut 326 stores, 22,000 jobs
Jacksonville, Fla. Supermarket chain Winn-Dixie said Tuesday it will cease operations in four Southern states, close 326 of its 913 stores and cut 22,000 jobs under its proposed bankruptcy reorganization plan.
The company said it will stop operating in Tennessee, Virginia and the Carolinas, and trim operations in its five remaining states, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. The cuts amount to 35 percent of its stores and 28 percent of its current work force of 78,000.
The company said it will try to find buyers for the closing stores and ask the new owners to retain as many employees as possible.
In a statement, Winn-Dixie also said it will try to sell six dairy plants, its pizza plant in Montgomery, Ala., and its Chek Beverage/Deep South Products plant in Fitzgerald, Ga..