Baja Mining shares fall as Mexico project costs balloon
April 23 (Reuters) – Canadian miner Baja Mining Corp said its copper-cobalt-zinc project in Mexico overshot its budget by about 22 percent, mainly because of design changes and higher steel and fuel costs.
The company’s shares fell as much as 38 percent to a near three-year low of 56 Canadian cents on Monday on the Toronto Stock Exchange. The stock was one of the biggest percentage losers on the exchange.
“The size of the increase is fairly large and comes as a bit of a shock,” said Raymond James analyst Adam Low.
Baja said it expects spending on the Boleo project, which it owns along with a Korean consortium, to be $246 million more than the $1.14 billion estimated in 2010.
Baja, which owns 70 percent of the project, will finance close to $172 million to $175 million of the shortfall, with its Korean partners responsible for the rest.
Baja said it expects to secure funds within the next two months.
Low said Baja may have to sell as much as 20 percent of its stake in the project or opt for equity financing to bridge the gap.
Baytex to sell some Williston Basin assets to Magnum Hunter unit
April 18 (Reuters) – Baytex Energy Corp said its U.S. subsidiary has agreed to sell its non-operated interests in the Williston Basin in North Dakota to a unit of Magnum Hunter Resources for $311 million.
The assets being sold to Bakken Hunter had proved reserves of 12.4 million barrels of oil equivalent as of Dec. 31, and produce about 950 boe/d of Bakken light oil.
Baytex said the deal would lower its 2012 production by 500 barrels of oil equivalent per day (boe/d) to between 53,500 boe/d and 54,500 boe/d.
“The Assets are not a primary focus of our U.S. business unit as they are non-operated and generally have a lower average working interest than our remaining lands,” the company said in a statement.
Baytex said its exploration and development budget remains at C$400 million ($405.04 million) and it still intends to drill 20 to 25 wells in North Dakota this year.
MorningStar analyst Robert Bellinski said selling the assets is a prudent move for Baytex.
“It’s always good to prune your portfolio and make sure you’re concentrating on your best assets. Baytex does a really good job at that,” he said.
BATS strips Ratterman of chairman role
By John McCrank and Abhiram Nandakumar
(Reuters) – BATS Global Markets Inc stripped Chief Executive Joe Ratterman of the chairman’s role on Tuesday, days after the No. 3 U.S. exchange operator’s botched initial public offering.
The board, however, said it unanimously supported Ratterman as president and CEO of the company and cited better corporate governance as the reason for splitting the CEO and chairman roles.
Ratterman, a founding employee of BATS, has led the company since June 2007. He will hold the chairman’s position until a successor is found. “You can’t ignore the timing of it,” said James Angel, a professor at Georgetown University who specializes in the structure and regulation of financial markets. “It is basically a very strong signal that mistakes of this nature can’t be tolerated.”
The decision comes after a series of glitches hit the market debut of BATS on its own exchange on Friday, causing the company to take the extremely rare step of withdrawing its initial public offering of shares.
The aborted listing also threw into question BATS’ growth plans, including its bid to compete with NYSE Euronext (NYX.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and Nasdaq (NDAQ.O: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) in the listings business and expand in Brazil and Canada.
Over the weekend, disagreement emerged between Ratterman and Dave Cummings, the outspoken founder and director of BATS, over the future plans for the exchange.
Seagate sees unit shipments up by nearly a third in Q3
Jan 31 (Reuters) – Hard drive maker Seagate Technology (STX.O: Quote, Profile, Research) expects unit shipments to jump by nearly a third this quarter, even though worldwide inventories remain squeezed as its suppliers’ factories recover from last year’s floods in Thailand.
The floods in Thailand, which is the world’s No. 2 exporter of hard drives, disrupted production and pushed hard drive inventories to historic lows worldwide.
“Third quarter, we will build 60 million (units) … ship 60 million … because we’ve depleted (inventory) to historically low levels in the December quarter,” Seagate Chief Financial Officer Pat O’Malley said on the phone to Reuters.
O’Malley also said there would be a severe-to-acute shortage of cloud type drives in 2012 owing to high demand and the severity of the floods’ impact on that supply chain.
Seagate posted higher-than-expected second-quarter earnings, on strong margins, which O’Malley said would continue through the rest of year.
O’Malley said margins would remain in the 33 percent range through the March-June quarter and pricing would remain a bit benign for the remainder of the year.
Tighter shipments have forced computer manufacturers to scramble to secure supply and boosted hard drive prices 20 percent to 40 percent in recent months.
Virtual crowd control
Sunday’s HP Touchpad fire sale on eBay proved one thing – you can shout about the Cloud and internet retailing all you want, but if you can’t handle the shopper militia who will besiege your site, you’re in trouble.
News surfaced last week that HP was selling off a final batch of its ill-fated Touchpads on eBay. The heavily-discounted sale was first held in August, and people swamped online and physical stores to buy as many as they could. The brick-and-mortar stores got away with fewer bruises than their online counterparts as websites nearly froze because of demand.
When TechCrunch leaked the announcement of the intended sale – this time only on HP’s eBay store and with payment accepted only via PayPal – I wondered if things might go better.
They didn’t.
When the tablets went on sale, everyone tried to get another shot at buying the tablet that nobody wanted. Two minutes later, eBay crashed, then started crawling back to normal. Nearly all shoppers ran into error messages and “timeouts.” Most didn’t get to buy a TouchPad.
People on Twitter complained of being able to add products to carts, but not being able to pay. “My eBay touchpad experience was not a good one. Orders were reversed. No help, eBay, HP or PayPal” a shopper tweeted.
Some ploughed through and got what has been termed as the tech deal of the decade. One shopper wrote: “Got a 32GB Touchpad – eBay wasn’t bad; a lot of timeouts, but success after 48 minutes.”
Stories of intuition and hope
Infosys’ head honcho S.D. Shibulal revealed he is an INTJ type. It is hardly surprising then that Shibu, as he likes to be called, was one of the pioneers of the Global Delivery Model – corporate speak for outsourced IT services.
INTJ (short for Introvert, Intuition, Thinking and Judgment) is a rare personality type based on psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s works. INTJ personalities are self-starters, preferring to work alone without an authority looking over their shoulders and meticulously plan their activities to achieve success.
Shibulal’s thoughts on M&A and his company’s margins reflect his INTJ traits.
“M&A is like falling in love. There is no plan like falling in love!” he said at the Reuters India Investment Summit.
Considering it has only made three acquisitions over the last five years, Infosys clearly doesn’t fall in love easily.
Still, Shibu said the Indian software services behemoth “is comfortable spending 10 percent of its revenue on acquisitions.”
A garage, a beaker and a Bunsen burner
Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, one of India’s most influential businesswomen and among the world’s most powerful women, says she’s an accidental entrepreneur.
Mazumdar-Shaw has shown that modest garage start-ups can extend beyond software and hardware companies. She set up what is now India’s largest listed biotechnology company in 1978 and she encourages others to follow suit.
“Today a lot of early stage research work can be done in a garage,” she said at the Reuters India Investment Summit.
Mazumdar-Shaw reckons opportunities for bio-tech startups are huge, considering the demand for sophisticated technology like genomic based systems, diagnostics for cancer stem cells, and high-end synthetic biology. All these are usually developed in small labs across the country.
“What I find today is that there are a large number of very innovative young biotech entrepreneurs who are doing things in a very small way. CellWorks is doing very interesting work on drug design.”
Her advice to budding entrepreneurs – If you have a novel idea and are looking to set up a business, don’t think twice, just go for it.
-
Follow Abhiram
