Premier Specialty Network

Youve been unemployed or just miserable with your current job. In your job search, you should seek a situation that will enhance your career and position you for success.

What you should endeavor to avoid at all costs is to transition from one gloomy situation to another.

Hiring managers work diligently to identify the right candidates for their organizations. One of the vital components of any interview is the chemistry factor or fit with the corporate culture. The hiring manager wants to ensure that the potential candidate will perform and mesh well with the company and management team.

PERTH (miningweekly.com) West African gold explorer Ampella Mining on Monday reported that it had received a number of third-party inquiries from gold miners wishing to conduct due diligence studies.

Chairperson Peter Mansell said in a statement that rather than continue with these requests on an ad hoc basis, the company has instructed its financial and legal advisers to undertake a targeted process to test whether any party was interested in putting forward a definite proposal.

With our strong balance sheet, Ampella is now very well paced to continue down its current path and in the absence of a compelling alternative, that is what we intend to do.

Having said that, we have had approaches from serious global players in the gold sector, and we concluded that we had a duty to all shareholders to properly test whether any of those parties is prepared to make an offer to acquire Ampella on terms that would be attractive to our shareholders.

Mansell noted that the company was in the midst of a rapid growth phase and did not wish its board and management team to be distracted by a number of separate approaches.

We therefore instructed our advisers to run a targeted process as quickly as possible to test the level of corporate interest. If we receive a proposal that is sufficiently attractive to recommend to shareholders, we will move forward with it. If not, we will shut down further discussions and move forward aggressively with our exploration and development.

The board of Ampella on Monday also approved a A$25.3-million exploration spend for 2012, following a A$45-million capital raising.

The current focus of the exploration programme in 2012 was to complete large regional auger and aircore programmes along the 140 km Batie West shear zone, with the aim of identifying the next generation of new gold targets.

Ampella would also continue with a number of separate drill programmes associated with the feasibility study of the Batie West project.

On the 3.1-million ounce Konkera gold resource, Ampella was currently undertaking a significant drill programme. In-fill drilling was also under way to upgrade the remaining shallow inferred resource to indicated resource within the outlined pit shells.

TOKYO, Apr 01, 2012 (BUSINESS WIRE) –
Advantest Corporation

/quotes/zigman/1498444/quotes/nls/ate ATE
+0.64%

, today announces the
successful completion of integration activities relating to its
acquisition of Verigy Ltd. in July 2011. Operating as a wholly-owned
subsidiary until today, all legal entities of the former ATE company
have now been assimilated into the Advantest structure, enabling the
global organization to move forward under a unified Advantest brand,
with a singular mission to serve customers with products and services
that set the standard for the industry.

The new, fully-integrated corporate structure now boasts the
semiconductor test industry’s most comprehensive set of test solutions
for both memory and SOC device development and production, as well as
the highest caliber of global application, field and sales engineering
services. With financial strength and R&D centers worldwide– Japan,
U.S., Europe and China — to enable a rapid rate of innovation, Advantest
is fully committed to continuing its long history of delivering products
and technology that anticipate and outpace the market.

Furthermore, with sales and service operations in 18 countries and
production facilities in Japan, Malaysia, South Korea, the U.S., Taiwan
and China, Advantest is now better able to meet demands locally, and
across its diverse, global customer base.

Today also marks the launch of Advantest’s new ACT2014 program, a set of
mid-term management goals for the company targeted at increased sales
and operating margins, and a combined tester and handler market share of
50% or more. The entire Advantest Group will work as one to meet these
mid-term goals by 2014. ACT2014 is designed to increase the company’s
competitiveness in the tester market with expanded tester-related
businesses including device interface products and services, and a reach
into new businesses, including nanotechnology, RF measurement
instruments, terahertz spectroscopic imaging analysis systems, MEMS
relay and healthcare applications. Through these efforts Advantest
expects to achieve long-term growth and stability.

About Advantest Corporation

A world-class technology company, Advantest is the leading producer of
automatic test equipment (ATE) for the semiconductor industry and a
premier manufacturer of measuring instruments used in the design and
production of electronic instruments and systems. Its leading-edge
systems and products are integrated into the most advanced semiconductor
production lines in the world. The company also focuses on R&D for
emerging markets that benefit from advancements in nanotech and
terahertz technologies, and has recently introduced multi-vision
metrology scanning electron microscopes essential to photomask
manufacturing, as well as a groundbreaking 3D imaging and analysis tool.
Founded in Tokyo in 1954, Advantest established its first subsidiary in
1982, in the USA, and now has subsidiaries worldwide. More information
is available at
www.advantest.com .

Note: All information supplied in this release is correct at the time of
publication, but is subject to change.

SOURCE: Advantest Corporation

Advantest
Satsuki Tsuruta, 11-81-3-3214-7500

Copyright Business Wire 2012

/quotes/zigman/1498444/quotes/nls/ate

Add to portfolio

ATE

Advantest Corp. ADS

US

: U.S.: NYSE

$
14.25

+0.09
+0.64%

Volume: 800.00
April 20, 2012 1:34p

P/E RatioN/A
Dividend YieldN/A

Market Cap$2.84 billion
Rev. per Employee$469,464

If all goes according to plan, Panera Bread could be setting up camp in Baton Rouge.

Franchise owner Tom Krings said he’s working on ironing out details on a land lease for property on Corporate Boulevard near Towne Center.

Panera Bread defines itself as a bakery-cafe, offering a variety of sandwiches, salads, soups, pastries and baked breads.

Krings said he couldn’t offer a projected opening or construction date, but he hopes to sort out the lease logistics within the next two or three weeks.

He said a free-standing Panera Bread location usually takes about 120 days to construct.

This will be the second Panera location in Louisiana. The first is being constructed in Metairie starting next week.

“We’re looking forward to getting into the Louisiana market,” Krings said.

A Louisiana location wasn’t previously possible because store locations must be built near a fresh dough facility, Krings said. But the facility built in Houston in 2012 opened up an opportunity.

According to Panera Bread’s website, the chain has

1,541 locations.

____

Contact Emily Herrington at eherrington@lsureveille.com

Quartix, one of today?s leading suppliers of vehicle tracking systems, has won the Barclays Corporate prize in this year?s Cambridge News Business Excellence Awards.

Telecom Italia SpA (TIT) is rising to the
top of the global corporate bond market as the loss-making phone
operator cuts debt amid renewed demand for Italian assets.

Bonds of Italy’s biggest phone operator returned 2.9
percent in March, the most of the 50 biggest issuers in Bank of
America Merrill Lynch’s Global Broad Market Corporate amp; High-
Yield Index (GI00). The rally drove the average yield on Milan-based
Telecom Italia debt down by 53 basis points to 5.09 percent.

The performance marks a turnaround from November, when
Italian securities were roiled by speculation the country was
becoming engulfed in Europe’s sovereign debt crisis. Telecom
Italia, which posted a bigger-than-expected 2011 net loss of 4.7
billion euros ($6.3 billion), cut its shareholder dividend for
the first time in four years and is relying on expansion in
emerging markets to bolster its ability to pay debt.

“This company is committed to cutting debt and it’s
willing to make sacrifices to do so,” said Mark Chapman, an
analyst at CreditSights Inc. in London, who has an
“outperform” rating on Telecom Italia’s bonds. “They’ve been
able to stick to their debt reduction plans that most people in
the market believed were impossible to reach.”

The phone company’s adjusted net debt will fall to 27.5
billion euros this year from 30.4 billion euros in 2011, it said
in February. Telecom Italia reduced net debt to 2.5 times
earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization
last year from 2.8 times in 2010.

Leverage Targets

The ratio should fall to below 2.5 times in 2013 and the
company targets a cut to less than two times in 2014, according
to Chapman.

Bond investors have taken notice. The dollar value of
Telecom Italia’s bonds denominated in euros, pounds and dollars
rose by $1 billion to $29 billion in March, according to the
Bank of America Merrill Lynch index.

The yield on the company’s 1 billion euros of 7 percent
notes due 2017 tumbled 83 basis points, or 0.83 percentage
point, to 4.31 percent in March, Bloomberg Bond Trader prices
show. That compares with a four basis-point drop to 4.12 percent
in the broad Bank of America Merrill Lynch index, which tracks
12,302 notes issued by borrowers from America Movil SAB in
Mexico to Brussels-based phone operator Belgacom SA. (BELG)

The yield on Telecom Italia’s 2017 bonds fell to within 352
basis points of those on similar-maturity German government debt
from a 642 basis-point spread at the end of 2011, according to
data compiled by Bloomberg. The price of the notes has climbed
12 percent to 111.35 cents on the euro.

Spread Tightening

Telecom Italia “still has room to go as far as future
spread tightening or opportunistic ability to pick up something
from the yield,” Scott Kimball, a money manager in Miami at
Taplin Canida amp; Habacht LLC, which manages $7 billion, said in a
March 28 interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Inside Track.”

Company officials weren’t immediately available to comment.
The Italian phone operator has 25.5 billion euros of bonds
outstanding, with 1.8 billion euros due this year, according to
data compiled by Bloomberg.

Telecom Italia is benefiting as a proxy for Italian
government securities, which have soared since the European
Central Bank flooded banks with more than $1 trillion of cheap
loans to contain the credit crisis.

Prime Minister Mario Monti’s plans to implement 20 billion
euros of austerity measures to balance the budget next year,
coupled with ECB lending, convinced investors to return to
Italy. The yield on Italy’s 10-year bonds has fallen 2.08
percentage points this year to 5.03 percent at 8:36 am in
London.

‘Lot of Credibility’

“Monti’s got a lot of credibility,” said Patrick McCullagh, the head of European credit research at Schroder
Investment Management Ltd. in London, which oversees $63 billion
of bonds. “The question about Telecom Italia bond spreads is
clearly tied up with the sovereign and that’s outside the
company’s hands.”

It’s taking advantage of the demand by seeking to extend
the maturity on 4 billion euros of loans by three years, people
with knowledge of the situation said last month. The people
declined to be identified because the deal is private.

Telecom Italia proposed on March 29 to cut its ordinary
dividend by 26 percent to 4.3 cents per share as part of efforts
to reduce debt and maintain its Baa2 rating at Moody’s Investors
Service and equivalent BBB grade at Standard amp; Poor’s. The
company previously forecast annual dividend growth of 15 percent
through 2013.

Dividend Cuts

Telecom Italia and other former phone monopolies in Europe,
such as Spain’s Telefonica SA (TEF), are suffering in their home
markets because of weak economies amid the sovereign debt
crisis. Telefonica and Telekom Austria AG (TKA) cut dividends in
December while France Telecom SA (FTE) did the same on Feb. 22.

“While the dividend cuts are credit positive, they do not
completely offset companies’ difficulties in deleveraging or in
sustaining cash flow through organic growth,” Carlos Winzer, an
analyst at Moody’s in Madrid, wrote in a March 20 report.

Moody’s cut its outlook on Telecom Italia to “negative”
in September, citing the “effects on consumer spending from
slow economic growth and government austerity measures.”

When Franco Bernabe became chief executive officer in 2007
he announced plans to cut debt, which almost equaled the phone
operator’s market value.

Goodwill Writedown

The Italian company’s 2011 net loss was caused by a 7.3
billion-euro writedown of goodwill related partly to its merger
with Olivetti SpA in 1999, Telecom Italia said in its 2011
earnings statement on March 29. Excluding writedowns, net income
was 2.6 billion euros, a 19 percent decline from 2010.

Revenue increased 8.7 percent to 30 billion euros, boosted
by growth in its Latin American businesses that included the
expansion of its Tim Participacoes SA (TCSL4) unit in Rio de Janeiro to
beat billionaire Carlos Slim’s America Movil to be Brazil’s
second-largest wireless operator. Telecom Italia also has a 22.7
percent stake in Telecom Argentina SA, the country’s No.2 phone
company.

The cost to insure Telecom Italia’s debt using credit-
default swaps has dropped 31 percent this year to 335 basis
points, according to CMA, which is owned by CME Group Inc. and
compiles prices quoted by dealers in the privately negotiated
market.

That compares with a 28 percent decline in contracts on
France Telecom and a 16 percent drop for Telefonica. A fall in
the price of the swaps indicates an improvement in perceptions
of creditworthiness.

“The market is very positive on Telecom Italia’s debt
reduction plan,” said Alexander Wisch, an analyst at Samp;P
Capital IQ Equity Research in London who has a “hold”
recommendation on the stock. “It’s partly based on progress in
Brazil and Argentina where the outlook is very good.”

To contact the reporter on this story:
Katie Linsell in London at
klinsell@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Paul Armstrong at
parmstrong10@bloomberg.net

Menlo Park, CA (PRWEB) April 02, 2012

Vivecoach, a leading corporate wellness challenge company, announced today that the company has changed its name to RallyOn. The new name better reflects the company’s exclusive focus on bringing teaming and persistent engagement to corporate wellness through online social gaming.

“Changing our name to RallyOn allows us to reinforce our mission to bring social gaming and teaming to corporate wellness with a customizable solution that can be used to engage all employees, from a company’s call-center or production workers to their executive leadership,” says Doug Keare, RallyOn CEO and co-founder.

The RallyOn solution features a web and mobile challenge platform that delivers an unlimited variety of activity-based challenges. Challenges focus on a range of activities from exercise and weight-loss to nutrition and green or community-focused activities. RallyOn partners with companies to understand their corporate objectives and helps design the best challenges and campaigns to ensure long-term success. An advanced analytics and scoring engine provides companies with detailed real-time reports.

“Human resources and benefits administrators often don’t have the resources to individually engage employees in wellness, but they can rally wellness champions to create challenges, assemble teams and compete their way to being healthy,” added RallyOn Chief Marketing Officer and co-founder Jennifer Gill Roberts, “We know that team-based challenges bring people together and inspire them to rally one another across geographies and product lines in order to achieve a common goal. RallyOn drives that process.”

About RallyOn

RallyOn brings the power of social gaming to employee wellness programs to help organizations build healthier, more productive cultures through team-based, tailored wellness challenges. Launched in 2010 in Menlo Park, California, RallyOn has deployed workplace wellness programs to corporations and institutions around the world. Today, RallyOns health and wellness programs average more than 70% employee engagement. More information about RallyOn is available at http://www.rallyon.com.

HARRISBURG — A package of business tax reforms that targets a much-maligned loophole while reducing the corporate net income tax rate heads before a House panel today.

The legislation, introduced by the House Republican policy chairman, Rep. Dave Reed, would change the corporate tax code in ways business groups say would give Pennsylvania a more competitive environment. It also attempts to close the so-called Delaware loophole, which allows companies operating in the commonwealth to reduce their Pennsylvania taxes through transactions with shell companies in other states.

We think companies that are headquartered should pay the Pennsylvania corporate net income tax rate, but we also think the rate should be dramatically lower, said Rep. Eugene DePasquale, D-York, a sponsor of the legislation.

The Delaware loophole has long been a target of legislators who say Pennsylvania is losing out on taxes from corporations that do business here but avoid taxes through royalties and similar payments to affiliated holding companies in states, like Delaware, that do not tax such income. A company exploiting the loophole claims such payments as income tax deductions in Pennsylvania.

The new legislation proposes to prevent this practice by requiring income tax deductions for intangible expenses, like the use of trademarks, to be directly related to a valid business purpose. A company requesting such a deduction would have to be prepared to substantiate it, said Todd Brysiak, executive director of the House Majority Policy Committee.

Not everyone believes the plan would close the loophole. Rep. Phyllis Mundy, the ranking Democrat on the House Finance Committee, has said companies would have little difficulty finding a reason to claim a transaction was conducted for a legitimate business purpose. In a report agreeing with that conclusion, the left-leaning Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center advocated instead for the state to require corporations to report the total economic activity of any parent company and subsidiaries to determine how much money is owed to Pennsylvania.

Businesses reject that approach, known as combined reporting, as too burdensome.

In addition to targeting the loophole, the legislation would change corporate taxes in ways designed to improve the states economic climate. It would gradually lower the corporate net income tax rate from 9.99 percent, counted as the highest uniform rate in the country by the Washington, DC-based Tax Foundation, until it reached 6.99 percent in 2019.

Advocates say the change would end a disincentive for corporations to locate in Pennsylvania.

Mr. Brysiak said the changes would spur economic growth.

If youre creating a better business environment in the commonwealth for more job creators to come, youre also bolstering opportunities for more Pennsylvanians to become employed and for the economy to grow, he said.

While business representatives said they do not support companies improperly avoiding taxes, some, like David Taylor, executive director of the Pennsylvania Manufacturers Association, believe the Department of Revenue already has the authority to pursue evaders.

The cost of insuring against default
on European sovereign and corporate debt fell, according to BNP
Paribas SA.

The Markit iTraxx SovX Western Europe Index of credit-
default swaps on 15 governments fell 7.5 basis points to 262.5
at 8:39 am in London, the lowest in almost two weeks. A
decline signals improvement in perceptions of credit quality.

Contracts on the Markit iTraxx Crossover Index of 50
companies with mostly high-yield credit ratings dropped 10.5
basis points to 601.5. The Markit iTraxx Europe Index of 125
companies with investment-grade ratings fell 2.75 basis points
to 122.25 basis points.

The Markit iTraxx Financial Index linked to senior debt of
25 banks and insurers fell four basis points to 216 and the
subordinated index declined 4.5 to 355.5.

A basis point on a credit-default swap protecting 10
million euros ($13.3 million) of debt from default for five
years is equivalent to 1,000 euros a year. Swaps pay the buyer
face value in exchange for the underlying securities or the cash
equivalent should a borrower fail to adhere to its debt
agreements.

To contact the reporter on this story:
Abigail Moses in London at
Amoses5@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Paul Armstrong at
Parmstrong10@bloomberg.net

• LinkedIn
• Google +1

• COMMENTS

• Print

Nun Who Nudges Corporate Titans to Speak in Doylestown

One of the issues Sister Nora and her order are concerned about is corporate responsibility with regard to fracking, a controversial technique used in natural gas drilling.