Company News : GM’s first Saturn plant switching to Chevys

General Motors Corp. announced Thursday that its plant in Spring Hill, Tenn., which has built Saturn models for nearly 17 years, will be building a new brand.

The brand’s birthplace rolled out its last models for the Saturn brand this week as the plant gets ready to reconfigure its production lines to build new GM vehicles.

GM executives and union officials who met with employees at the plant said the product will be a Chevrolet crossover vehicle, according to people familiar with the meeting who requested anonymity because the automaker hasn’t yet officially announced its plans.

Troy Clarke, GM’s North American president, and Tim Lee, GM vice president for manufacturing and labor relations, attended the meeting along with Cal Rapson, vice president of the United Auto Workers union.

Designed to compete with low-cost Japanese imports, GM launched the Saturn brand at its plant in the small Tennessee town of Spring Hill in 1990.

Close to 2,400 of the plant’s nearly 4,700 workers are being laid off for about 18 months while the plant is remodeled.

GM has promised to bring the workers back once the facility is equipped to produce other GM vehicles.

“Apple Inc., the company that popularized selling songs online for 99 cents apiece, now hopes to buoy interest in albums, giving customers credit for purchases of full albums from which they have bought individual tracks.

Apple introduced the “Complete My Album” feature Thursday on its iTunes Store. It now gives a full credit of 99 cents for every track the user previously purchased and applies it toward the purchase of the complete album.

For instance, most albums on iTunes cost $9.99 so a customer who already bought three tracks can download the rest of the album for $7.02.

Previously, users who bought singles and later opted to buy the album had to pay the full price of the album and ended up with duplicates of those songs.

“The deadline approached Thursday for Halliburton Co. shareholders to swap their shares for those of KBR Inc. as the two companies got closer to their anticipated breakup.

Halliburton set midnight Thursday as the deadline for the exchange offer, but it noted the period could be extended.

The split of Halliburton, the oil-field services giant, and KBR, a U.S. military contractor and engineering/construction outfit, began in November when KBR held an initial public offering that netted about $500 million.