Reported by Star-Bulletin staff & wire
Monday, November 30, 1998
Isle spending up for 1st day of holidays
Customers paying for their purchases by check spent 1.2 percent more in Hawaii retail stores Friday than they did last year on the Friday after Thanksgiving, last year's traditional kick-off of the Christmas shopping season.Several areas in the West did better than Hawaii, according to Tele-Check Services, a national check-approval business. Friday's spending was up 10.5 percent in Denver, 5.3 percent in Arizona and 3.7 percent in California. Nationally, check purchases, which TeleCheck says make up one-third of retail spending, were up 4.4 percent.
Source: Exxon deal will cut many jobs
NEW YORK -- Exxon Corp.'s potential purchase of Mobil Corp. could result in the firing of 10 percent of the combined work force of 123,000, or about 12,000 people, a person familiar with the talks said. Both boards are expected to vote on the deal tomorrow.
Medtronic buying Arterial Vascular
MINNEAPOLIS -- Med-tronic Inc., one of the world's largest medical device makers, is buying Arterial Vascular Engineering Inc., the leader in manufacturing coronary stents, for about $3.7 billion in stock.
In other news . . .
News Corp. and MCI Worldcom Inc. will sell broadcast licenses and other assets to EchoStar Communications Corp. in exchange for a 37 percent stake in the satellite broadcaster . . . Rhone-Poulenc SA and Hoechst AG, France's and Germany's biggest drugmakers, agreed to pool their drug, seed and pesticide units into a jointly controlled company called Aventis, creating the world's No. 2 drugmaker behind Merck & Co., sources said . . . Universal Pictures Chairman Casey Silver, whose division produced such duds as "Meet Joe Black" and "Babe: Pig in the City," was forced to resign today . . . Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. said it expects to go public in the next year or two.
See expanded coverage in today's Honolulu Star-Bulletin.
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