Longview Fibre gets higher offer
Prospects of some movement on the takeover front increased for Longview Fibre Co. Thursday, as a partnership that has been pursuing the company since late last year boosted its bid.
Earlier Thursday, Longview Fibre announced it had received a revised acquisition proposal from Obsidian Finance Group and Campbell Group. The proposal lifts their bid to $28.05 a share, prior to a special distribution of cash and stock associated with Longview Fibre’s plan to convert to a real estate investment trust.
In the quarter ending March 2006, there were 51.1 shares outstanding, valuing Obsidian and Campbell’s latest bid at around $1.43 billion.
Based in Longview, the company makes packaging paper and paperboard and owns 587,000 acres of timber in the Pacific Northwest. Obsidian and Campbell’s previous bid had been $26 a share on a pre-REIT transition basis.
•Ford Motor Co. will fall short of its goal of producing 250,000 hybrid vehicles a year by 2010, Chief Executive Bill Ford says.
The company’s top executive announced the goal in September. He said then that gas-electric hybrid engines would be available in half the Ford, Lincoln and Mercury lineup by 2010.
In an e-mail message to employees Wednesday, he said the company instead would focus on other alternative fuels, according to The Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press.
•Vic Gundotra, a 15-year veteran general manager at Microsoft Corp., has left the company to join rival Google Inc. in one year.
Gundotra’s departure was first reported by Business 2.0 and confirmed by Mountain View, Calif.-based Google. A Microsoft Corp. spokesman wasn’t immediately available for comment.
The executive was at Microsoft for about 15 years, and worked as general manager for platform evangelism to get software developers to use Microsoft’s software and online offerings when creating new programs.
•Research In Motion Ltd. said Thursday it earned $129.8 million in its latest quarter as the maker of BlackBerry wireless devices and services added 680,000 users, boosting revenue by 35 percent.
The profit for RIM’s fiscal first quarter, equal to 68 cents per share, was fairly steady compared with the same period last year, when the Canadian company posted net income of $132.5 million, or 67 cents per share.