Reported by Star-Bulletin staff & wire
Monday, May 26, 1997
BASEL, Switzerland -- Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche Holdings said today it was taking over the medical companies Boehringer-Mannheim of Germany and DePuy of the United States in an $11 billion deal. Roche snaps up two medical companies
The combined group, to be called Roche Boehringer Mannheim Diagnostics, will be a world leader in medical equipment for diagnosis, with products that also include artificial limbs and AIDS drugs.
The company will have an annual sales potential of $3.5 billion and a work force of 13,500 people in diagnostics, Roche said. Roche said the final price of its deal was subject to negotiation. The takeover requires approval by regulators.
OKLAHOMA CITY -- Union members returned to work today at a General Motors Corp. assembly plant, ending a strike that had idled 3,500 employees for seven weeks. Seven-week strike against GM ends
Maintenance workers of United Auto Workers Local 1999 prepared the plant for production shifts tomorrow, when most union members will be back. The local yesterday overwhelmingly decided to return to work pending a vote on a tentative contract reached by union and GM negotiators one day earlier.
The focus may now shift to 5,900 members of the UAW Local 594 still on strike over staffing levels at a GM truck assembly plant in Pontiac, Mich.
TOKYO -- Most of Japan's long-term credit banks and major trust banks announced today that they returned to the black in the last business year, posting modest profits. Most major Japanese banks
return to blackBut Katsuhito Sasajima, an analyst at Nikko Research Centre, said some leading banks were still struggling and the gap between strong and weak banks is widening as they dispose of problem loans -- the legacy of aggressive lending in the 1980s "bubble" era.
On Friday, most of Japan's leading commercial banks announced sturdy profits, helped by low interest rates. Today, all but two of the next 10 biggest announced profits for the fiscal year ended March 31.