Guidant name will be phased out

Boston Scientific Corp. has decided to phase out its newly acquired Guidant brand, a name synonymous with potentially lifesaving defibrillators and pacemakers but also burdened by recent bad publicity over safety-related product recalls.

Now that Boston Scientific has completed its $27 billion acquisition of Guidant Corp., the Massachusetts company will drop Guidant’s name from its newly enlarged line of medical devices rather than retain both brands side-by-side, the Boston Scientific executive in charge of the brand process said in an interview Thursday.

“There is a lot of equity in the Guidant brand, and we want to transfer it respectfully over time,” Paul Donovan, senior vice president of corporate communications, said at a heart specialists’ conference in Boston where the company was beginning the yearslong phase-out of Guidant’s name. “Our opportunity is to transition the good equity in the Guidant brand, and our challenge is to repair the damaged parts of the Guidant brand.”

•Shares of Burger King’s parent company rose nearly 6 percent above their initial public offering price by Thursday afternoon in their first day of trading.

“It’s a historic day for Burger King,” CEO John Chidsey said. “We’ve been waiting 52 years for this day. It’s an honor for us to finally be public.”

Burger King Holdings Inc. sold 25 million shares of common stock at $17 each in its IPO that was completed late Wednesday. The shares represent about 19 percent of the company’s total, putting its overall value at about $2.25 billion.

But that still leaves the nation’s second biggest hamburger chain far behind its two biggest rivals — McDonald’s Corp., which has a market value of about $43 billion, and Wendy’s, which is worth about $7 billion.

Its shares rose 50 cents to close at $17.50 on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol BKC. They traded as high as $18.15 earlier in the day.

•Security software maker Symantec Corp. accused Microsoft Corp. in a federal lawsuit Thursday of misappropriating its intellectual property and breach of contract.

The lawsuit seeks an injunction to stop Microsoft from selling the next version of its Windows operating system, due out to consumers next year, until the technology is removed. It was filed in U.S. District Court in Seattle.

The dispute is over a technology that allows operating systems to handle large amounts of data.