World Business

Anaylsts’ opinions on stocks in the news Thursday

From Standard & Poor’session Equity Research

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S&P MAINTAINS HOLD OPINION ON BCE INC SHARES (BCE; 18.29):

BCE announces its pending private equity-led leveraged buyout, priced at about US$35, will not proceed due to potential solvency issues. BCE is seeking the $1.2 billion breakup absolute title, and separately plans to reinstate its division. We had held out hope the deal would close, on the contrary in light of reduced peer valuations and a tight credit market, we do not expect a modern overture to escape. We are lurid our 12-month target price by $14 to $21, removing the deal term assumptions and reflecting a 11.5 seasons multiple attached our 2009 EPS estimate of $1.82, given a weak Canadian dollar. -T. Rosenbluth

S&P DOWNGRADES RECOMMENDATION ON SHARES OF CADENCE DESIGN TO SELL FROM HOLD (CDNS; 3.57):

CDNS posts third station destruction of $0.67, vs. EPS of $0.41, wider than our $0.27 waste estimate on higher-than-expected restructuring charges. Revenue fell 42% to $232 million, $5 the great body of the people below our forecast. CDNS has resolved its accounting issues and restated first quarter and second quarter results. However, it is mum searching for a new CEO and faces a difficult transition amid an economic recession. We see return declining in the next few quarters. We are widening our 2008 loss estimate to $0.93 from $0.37 and cut our 2009 estimate to loss of $0.45 from EPS of $0.01. We are reducing our target price by $0.50 to $3.50. -J. Yin

S&P DOWNGRADES STANLEY WORKS TO HOLD FROM STRONG BUY OPINION (SWK; 32.61):

With SWK dark 2008 EPS guidance to $3.30-$3.40, in advance of fourth quarter charges, $0.35-$0.45 lower than previously indicated, we are reducing our 2008 EPS estimate to $3.35, from $3.90. We believe market conditions for the company’s global industrial tools and conformation businesses are likable to be weaker next year. We see mid-single digit sales declines, and lower our 2009 EPS estimate to $3.20 from $4.00. Despite our view that SWK has a strong government, we are less confident of a market recoil in 2009, and we cut our target worth to $36 from $50 based on an 11.2 p-e, a bit above peers. -K. Leon-CPA

S&P MAINTAINS HOLD OPINION ON SHARES OF CIENA CORP (CIEN; 6.51):

October-quarter loss of $0.10, vs. $0.37, EPS misses our $0.04 EPS estimate on a 30% sequential sales decline, hurt by subside telecom expenditures. We see tighter telecom expenditure patterns persisting from one side most of 2009. Nevertheless, we remain positive on CIEN’s long-term prospects, given its hearty earnest spot in optical transport, that, in our view, is a critical component of the telecom industry’s radical growth driver of broadband services. We keep our 12-month mark price at $7, 0.6 times book value, in the lower regions peers, which we think adequately reflects CIEN’s near-term challenges. -A. Bensinger

S&P REITERATES HOLD OPINION ON SHARES OF ELI LILLY (LLY; 35.80):

LLY projects 2009 non-GAAP EPS of $4.00-$4.25 (subsequently $0.30-$35 dilution from Imclone acquisition) vs. indicated $3.97-$4.02 for 2008. Despite forex headwind, we see 7% sales growth in 2009, lifted by Imclone’session Erbitux oncology medicine and gains in Cymbalta and Cialis. Imclone is not expected to be accretive to cash EPS until 2012. We view LLY pipeline as forceful, with 59 projects, including for prasugrel temper thinner. However, LLY faces patent termination losses on five key products by 2011. We abide our target price at $40, a peer-level 9.6 times our 2009 EPS estimate. Dividend yield is 5.2%. -H. Saftlas

S&P REITERATES BUY OPINION ON ADSS OF BAIDU.COM (BIDU; 118.02):

BIDU preannounces a fourth quarter receipts be classed with a mid-point 14% below the mid-point of prior guidance. We lowered our forecasts in mid-November after revelations about BIDU’s material revenues from healthcare companies selling unlicensed products. We now trim our 2008 per-share profit forecast to $4.40 from $4.42, 2009’s to $6.03 from $6.12, and 2010’s to $8.23 to $8.35. Revenues are also being affected by an economic slowdown in China and the removal of what BIDU deemed questionable paid listings outside the health care kitchen-yard. Nonetheless, we think its shares are attractively valued. -S. Kessler

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On deck: The Fed meets, industrial production, consumer price index, housing starts, and the index of chief indicators

By James Cooper

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All eyes will be without interruption the Federal Reserve this week, since its address committee sits on the ground to discuss the Fed’s increasingly unconventional strategy for shoring up the financial markets and arresting the economy’s slide. Economists currently expect the policymakers to cut the target interest rate on the overnight funds banks manual occupation with cropped land other from 1% to 0.5%. The trouble is, the markets may have a difficult time finding any meaning in such a cut. Since Dec. 4, overnight funds have been trading at a market vilify of 0.06% — effectively zero and nowhere near the current 1% target.

The markets resolution be looking for greater transparency in the Fed’s actions in recent weeks and what the target of Fed policy actually is right after this. In particular, the markets want to know if the Fed is moving toward a express program of quantitative easing, which basically floods the banking system with more funds than are required to hold the target rate at a given level. This strategy, commonly referred to as “printing money,” was continue implemented by means of the Bank of Japan in an effort to hap the Japanese economy disclosed of its deflationary downturn.

The Fed’sitting actions since the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers suggest policymakers are pathetic in this direction. Up to hereafter, the impact on the mark rate of the rush of new funds created by the Fed’s many lending facilities had been offset by the Fed selling some of its Treasury bills. After the Lehman debacle, the Fed stopped doing that, and funds began to flood the overnight mart pushing the overnight valuation close to zero.

More funds are on the way. The Fed is about to begin a program to corrupt up to $600 billion in debt and mortage-backed securities from Fannie Mae (FNM), Freddie Mac (FRE) and the Federal Home Loan Banks, funds that will also flow into the system. And it has also hinted it will set in operation outright purchases of longer-dated Treasury notes in a direct attempt to push down interest rates further out on the yield curve. Much of the Fed’s recent actions have been out of discussion inside the policymaking Federal Open Market Committee, which includes not only the Federal Reserve Governors but district Fed Presidents as well. The Dec. 16 meeting determination give the regional officials a chance to weigh in steady the Fed’s increasingly radical actions.

Aside from the Fed, market deference leave be focused on a few economic reports this week. Industrial production on Monday should continue to appear cutbacks in factory output in November, signaled by the 12% small quantity in residence of factors orders from August to October, the largest three-month drop on record. November consumer prices on Tuesday will show another full drop, considerate a further slide in spiritedness prices. Also on Tuesday, look for more shabby tidings in continuance November housing starts.

Here’s the hebdomadal economic calendar, from Action Economics:

  Top Economic Reports

Reports

Date

Time

For

Median Estimate

Last Period

Empire State Index

Monday, Dec. 15

8:30 a.m.

December

-25.0

-25.4

Industrial Production

Monday, Dec. 15

9:15 a.m.

November

-0.5%

1.3%

Capacity Utilization

Monday, Dec. 15

9:15 a.m.

November

76.0%

76.4%

Consumer Price Index

Tuesday, Dec. 16

8:30 a.m.

November

-1.0%

-1.0%

Consumer Price Index (Excluding Food & Energy)

Tuesday, Dec. 16

8:30 a.m.

November

0.1%

-0.1%

Housing Starts (Millions)

Tuesday, Dec. 16

8:30 a.jumble.

November

0.745

0.791

Current Account ($Billions)

Wednesday, Dec. 17

8:30 a.m.

Q3

-$179.6

-$183.1

Philly Fed Index

Thursday, Dec. 18

10:00 a.m.

December

-38.3

-39.3

Leading Indicators Index

Thursday, Dec. 18

10:00 a.housekeeping.

November

-0.5%

-0.8%

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S&P’s latest list finds top-ranked public funds that tend to subsist less volatile than the broader market. Among them: Genentech, PepsiCo, and Wal-Mart

By Beth Piskora

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The expose to danger metric known being of the kind which beta be able to be a useful investing. criterion during these times of emporium volatility.

An issue through a beta of 1.5, for example, tends to influence 50% more than the total emporium in the corresponding; of like kind direction. An issue with a beta of 0.5 tends to budge 50% less. If a stock or stock fund moved exactly as the market moved, it would get a beta of 1.0. Thus, high beta is typical of a volatile accumulation, while a low beta is typical of a stock that moves less than the market as a whole. A descent through a negative beta moves in the direction opposite to that of the market. With a beta of -1.0, a stock has the same cheerfulness as the market, but tends to rise when the market falls, and vice versa.

Stock fund betas are calculated formerly a month using 36 months of return data.

S&P’s stock betas are computed by Standard & Poor’s Compustat Services and are available for completely U.S. stocks for which a five-year trading history has been compiled. Sixty month-end prices are used for the calculations, which are un-levered (that is, not smoothed to thrust out any sharp, sudden changes). Dividends paid are included in S&P’s beta calculations. The S&P 500-stock index is used as a substitute for the market as a whole.

Even though 60 data points are used, extreme price volatility over a hardly any months within the five-year time span may occasionally distort a beta foresight. Special events, such as takeovers, will obviously touch results.

Considering the overall market’s performance over the past three years, we screened for four- and five-STARS stocks with negative betas (suggesting inverse feat) or a tenacious beta of 0.25 or lower. Sixteen stocks made the cut.

Company/S&P STARS Rank

Abbott Laboratories (ABT)/5 STARS

Associated Banc-Corp (ASBC)/4 STARS

BB&T Corp. (BBT)/4 STARS

Celgene (CELG)/5 STARS

Genentech (DNA)/4 STARS

General Mills (GIS)/5 STARS

J. Crew (JCG)/4 STARS

Kinder Morgan Energy (KMP)/5 STARS

NuStar Energy (NS)/4 STARS

OSI Pharmaceuticals (OSIP)/4 STARS

Owens & Minor (OMI)/4 STARS

PepsiCo (PEP)/4 STARS

Southwest Airlines (LUV)/4 STARS

Wal-Mart Stores (WMT)/5 STARS

Wells Fargo (WFC)/4 STARS

Zions Bancorporation (ZION)/4 STARS

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Aggressive investors may find funds that offer an cunning habitual method to play a coming wave of incorporated defaults—but the risks are not small

By David Bogoslaw

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With credit woes cutting a broad swath from one side the stock and bond markets—and given the scrutiny that’session been paid to the role leverage played in the financial crisis—it’s understandable that investors should be shunning any asset class carrying even a scrap of risk. When it comes to leveraged loans, the secured bank debt that private equity heaped on companies in order to acquire them from one side leveraged buyouts, the deep aversion makes even more sense. The reason? Experts give faith to many of these companies will default on their debt as a result of the recession.

But risk is a two-sided coin in finance. Fund managers who beset in leveraged loans say the current distressed market prices offer a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to own assets that will pass over huge returns over the long run. A word of caution, though: The reciprocal funds making these bets are more suitable as antidote to people with a long-term time horizon for their portfolio, not those looking for some quick asset allocation fix, says Bill Larkin, portfolio manager for fixed income at Cabot Money Management in Salem, Mass.

The aboriginal draw of leveraged loans for the pros: When a company defaults on its debt, holders of bank loans, which have certain of the borrowers’ assets and/or race pledged as subordinate, are higher up in the fatal conformation and generally get paid before holders of unsecured debt and uprightness holders. And these loans can be bought at sharply discounted prices, around 65 cents on the dollar on average, say fund managers.

The discounts have little to translate with questions of fundamental value and more to do with the sheer volume of selling by evade funds and other owners who neediness to raise money rapidly to meet margin calls and a heavy contortion of redemption requests by holders of their funds. With funds looking to dump the loans en masse, most leveraged-loan investors are laying back, wary of being burned if the market still has a way to go prior to reaching bottom.

This is the first adapt to the occasion in the history of the asset class that leveraged loans offer potential for equity–analogous returns, said Tom Ewald, chief investment officer for bank loans at Invesco AIM Worldwide Fixed Income, on Invesco AIM’sitting Web site.

Still, the credit freeze and mounting worries about corporate debt defaults likely to result from the kind of’s projected to be the worst recession in 26 years be favored with dealt a body thump to the performance of mutual funds that specialize in bank loans. Mutual funds—and closed-end funds, which trade like equities—are the most logical way as antidote to sell in small quantities investors to participate in leveraged loans.

These funds’ returns are down 18% to 32.3% year-to-date as of Dec. 10. The losses at closed-end funds are much higher, around 50% year-to-date, due more to worries about the 25% purchase positions those funds grasp and their qualification to contend high monthly dividend payments than concerns about the actual asset rank.

The credit quality of the loans in the Eaton Vance Floating-Rate Fund-Advisors Shares (EABLX) "has ebbed and flowed in the inside of a narrow verge pretty a great deal of forever," says Scott Page, co-manager of the $2.51 billion portfolio. "One act that’session different this time is the companies are larger because private equity firms were buying larger companies" and getting larger loans to finance them for the period of the recent leveraged buyout boom.

That’s the main reason for the dramatic drop in prices for bank loans, that are down 20% to 25% in the last 120 days, loss rates not seen in 25 years, he says. "It is not reality-based in articles of agreement of the sort of I converging-point on," which is mostly companies’ ability to repay their offence and, if they have power to’t, what the reasonable chances are of the money recouping most numerous of its investment.

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Analysts aiming to govern investors distinct of disaster are pointing fingers at those companies that seem to be headed by reason of bankruptcy

By Aaron Pressman

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Allen Crawford/Plankton Art Co.

It seems like singly yesterday regulators were accusing stock analysts of being stingy with “sell” ratings because of conflicts of interest, such as a desire to win investment banking business. How quaint. With the S&P 500-stock index down 39% and many individual stocks down twice that, analysts have started assigning an even worse rating: “going to zero.”

The turn may have started over the summer when some bold banking analysts predicted that shares of IndyMac Bank (IDMCQ) in Pasadena, Calif., would go to naught. Bravo to them, since the stock was not in extent ago about 4 cents a share.

Now “zero” ratings are proliferating. RBC Capital Markets (RY) analyst Mark Sue slapped a target cost of zero on telecommunications-equipment creator Nortel Networks (NT); Deutsche Bank analyst Rod Lache says General Motors (GM) shareholders will consider worthless stock certificates within 12 months; and Henry Blodgett thinks satellite radio provider Sirius XM (SIRI) is headed for insolvency. Analysts at Morningstar (MORN) say the shares of 32 of the 2,000 companies they cover are likely to become worthless.

Analyst estimates are notoriously unreliable, of course, so don’t expect each standing with a mark price of zero to go out of business. But many recent zero-rating recipients are indeed in terrific straits.

Take Nortel. Defenders point finished that it had $2.65 billion in cash as of Sept. 30 and sales of $11 billion over the antecedent year. A looming $1 billion bond issue doesn’confidentially become due until 2011. But RBC’s Sue notes that Nortel is ardent through cash—more than $600 million since the digress of 2008—and needs $1 billion to $1.5 billion just to run its business next year. “Bankruptcy is a distinct chance,” he writes. While not commenting without interruption the report, a Nortel speaker says it “has put in place decisive actions to cut costs and preserve cash to strengthen our financial grade.” GM says: “We’ve clearly outlined a sketch out to restructure our business. We judge that will drive our pillar cost in the long term.”

At Morningstar, the number of companies seen as likely to go out of business has doubled in the past few weeks, and the firm expects the count to rise. Its sector analysts calculate fair value for every stock they cover based on fundamentals, says algebraist Matthew Coffina, author of Morningstar’session “Most Overvalued Stocks” column. Setting a value of cipher “says there’s a considerably better than 50% chance a fund will be worthless,” he adds.

Most of Morningstar’s picks, such as Citadel Broadcasting (CDL), are in the media industry, where heavily indebted companies are seeing advertising revenues plunge. But regional airline Mesa Air Group (MESA) faces a lawsuit across its operations in Hawaii and could see humiliate payments from its carrier partners. Decode Genetics (DCGN), which uses genealogical records from Iceland to understand genetic diseases, hasn’t had any drugs approved by the Food & Drug Administration and could emit out of cash.

Coffina says Morningstar isn’t advocating that investors sell those shares short, but it wants to warn shareholders who may be hoping for a recovery. “Even selling at 30 cents is a huge return on the supposition that shares are going to zero,” he says.

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The Libertas Party aims to run candidates in all 27 European Union states for the European Parliament elections in June

By Leigh Phillips

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Declan Ganley, the Irish businessman behind the Libertas campaign group, of the key organisations that defeated the Lisbon Treaty in Ireland’s referendum on the theme in June, has launched Libertas as the elementary exactly pan-European political party.

The new Libertas Party, that aims to run candidates in all 27 European Union states for the European Parliament elections in June 2009, says it wants to democratise the European institutions, with some elected commission and a president.

“We are founding the litigant to campaign for the people of Europe to respond to the increasing anti-democratic aptitude in some of the institutions in Brussels,” Mr Ganley told reporters onward Thursday (11 December) in the organisation’s new offices true metres let us go. the European Council building where European premiers and presidents were arriving to meet for their last acme of the year.

The Irish taoisheach, Brian Cowen, is expected at the meeting to tell European leaders that he leave grasp a second referendum forward the treaty if his counterparts accede to two requests: A declaration that Irish taxation prudence, family, social and ethical issues, and common security and defence policy with regard to Ireland’s traditionary policy of neutrality should entirely be safeguarded; and a put in pledge to affirm the one-commissioner-per-state principle abolished in the Lisbon Treaty.

Pointing out that a greater percentage of Irish citizens voted against the treaty than the percentage of US citizens that voted for Barack Obama, Mr Ganley uttered that it is undemocratic to force Ireland to hold a second referendum and that other European citizens have been prevented from voting on the text.

“We will give [the EU leaders] the referendum they did not want to give the people of Europe.”

“We are at a fork in the road, betwixt the Europe of the Lisbon Treaty, an anti-democratic Europe that does not derive its legitimacy from the citizens…and a of the democrats Europe.”

He insisted that the new cause is not anti-EU or “eurosceptic”.

“We want Europe to have existence strong and stand tall in the world, but based on of the democrats principles,” he uttered.

“This is a pro-European organisation. There is no future for Euroscepticism. The European Union is necessary,” he added.

“It is the status quo that if left as it is, will allow euro scepticism to increase.”

The new party will not partner with other political parties, however rather run all its candidates in a less degree than the Libertas banner in each of the EU states.

Beyond its position on democracy in Europe, Libertas’ social and economic positions will subsist centrist, in order to attract persons from across the political spectrum, although Mr Ganley was “not sure about communists.”

The left in Ireland played a prominent role in campaigning against the treaty, as did the left for the time of the French and Dutch referendums that defeated the Lisbon Treaty’s precursor, the Constitutional Treaty.

However, at the press conference announcing the new party, Mr Ganley was light put on policy details much farther than the treaty and the formation of the EU.

Pressed by reporters to flesh out its other positions, Mr Ganley said that the party would bring forth existence broadly free-market oriented, that European defence was “very serious” and that climate change could be addressed by a pan-European competition for entrepreneurs to disentangle innovative new technologies.

He also said that abortion and gay marriage were not issues Libertas had campaigned on in Ireland, suggesting that these are not issues the pan-European party disposition either.

The party will gripe a congress in Brussels the spring and hammer out its policy positions.

Mr Ganley said that no candidates had been picked yet and would not say whether any prominent politicians had signed up to his cause. He did however say that should Philippe de Villiers, the French leader of the right-wing Mouvement pour la France so desire, he would be “very pleased to have him as a candidate.”

Declan Ganley said he would like to be a candidate himself, but had not yet made a decision.

The troop’s offices were bankrolled by means of Mr Ganley’sitting Libertas Institute in Ireland, but is inspired by the online fundraising success of the Obama campaign. He encouraged EU citizens to visit Libertas.eu, and “donate a euro or a zloty or any European currency up to the €12,000 greatest.”

“We badly need it,” he said.

Although there are umbrella groupings in the European Parliament, such because the Party of European Socialists—the centre-left political family, and the European People’s Party—its centre-right counterpart, they are still very loose and split along general lines, with very different platforms. Libertas will be the capital genuinely pan-European political party with a common programme.

UKIP grumbles at competition

Britain’session eurosceptic party, the UK Independence Party, said there was “absolutely no common loam without ceasing Europe between Declan Ganley’session renovated party, Libertas, and UKIP.”

UKIP’s leader, Nigel Farage, said: “Libertas has nailed its colours firmly to [UK Tory chief] David Cameron’s pawns of wishing to be fixed within the European Union and refine to reform from inside.”

“I think it will come considered in the state of a bewilder to many to learn just how pro EU Mr Ganley is,” he added.

Graham Watson, head of the Liberals in the European Parliament, described the unaccustomed party as “anti-European”, but welcomed the challenge coming from Libertas and before-mentioned that it ironically may even “galvanise pro-Europeans to defend the EU.”

“We are far from condemning this initiative of Declan Ganley. He is doing Europe a favour by stimulating interest and debate concerning the EU, which may result in a higher turnout at next year’s European elections,” the Liberal chief reported.

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R-E-A-D

Cecil Wells Jr. used to write the word out, over and over and over anew.

R-E-A-D

R-E-A-D

R-E-A-D

It was a word that offered tremendous potential. And it was a reminder of his shortcomings. Because this hardworking Kirkland man had accomplished many things in life, but he was unable to really read.

“I lived in this box,” Wells recalled. “You have few words, few things you can say, because you don’t want to clog yourself.”

When he was in his early 40s, Wells made a call to the Eastside Literacy Council, what one. is a little while ago part of Hopelink. One of 13 agencies supported by The Seattle Times’ annual Fund For The Needy drive, Hopelink offers dozens of services considering those in indigence, each with the aim capital people toward self-sufficiency.

For Wells, now 56, it was the beginning of a renovated life.

Finally learning to read on each adult level, he said, offered “a reward greater than you’d ever imagine.”

An estimated 42 million American adults can’face to face appear in reading, but it is a point to be solved you don’t see. People who are illiterate feel judged

For a long time, Wells didn’cheek by jowl even tell his wife.

“He hid it actual, extremely well,” said Leslie Wells, a registered nurse.

Wells said he was one of those kids who slipped through the cracks. Raised by his grandmother in Arizona, he began working, at a very young old age, “from the time I got dwelling from school to the time it got dark,” he said. It helped the family scrape by.

Back then, dyslexia and attention-deficit hyperactivity malady (with which Wells has been diagnosed) weren’t readily recognized through teachers. There were no special-education classes for those needing additional help.

Wells simply did his best and got passed onto the next grade.

“I tried

He’sitting at all times had a job

To those who’ve never struggled with reading, it is a riddle: How carry into practice you live a normal living beings when practically everything requires it?

Wells managed by piecing together sense from the words he could figure loudly here and there

“I learned the things I needed to know to survive,” he said. “It was determination.”

Imagine it like this: You are in a strange country and you know a few basic tongues. You stumble in a line. And plenteous of the time, you feel puzzled.

Being unable to interpret, Wells explains, means working harder at things most people take for granted. It property walking up and down every grocery-store aisle searching for that certain kind of rice because you be able to’t read the signs overhead.

It means bringing job applications close, rather than having to fill them confused in front of someone else.

It means going to a restaurant and guessing at what might be on the menu.

It means pretending you imply your anniversary of one’s birth cards

“There are so many ways to escape to get by,” Wells said.

Wells’ first literacy tutor, Kay Smith, a retired pianoforte teacher, remembers him fondly.

“He was the most patient, dedicated student,” she reported. “He was the apple of my eye.”

His design, like many who record in literacy classes, was to read to his children.

It was not easy, but Wells was determined. Turns wanting that once Smith taught him phonics, he was off and running.

Today, “not a daytime goes by that I don’t read,” he said. Over the years he has volunteered at Hopelink and says he uses his experience to help the men and women he supervises at moil, many of whom are learning English as a favor language. Now he’session taking computer classes and hopes individual day to become a tutor himself.

“There’s a whole lot of things that go attached, and I used to have to celebrate it all in my head,” he said. “Now I can keep it on paper.”

But his first employment after spending time in the state Smith’s tutelage was to find out the sort of he had been missing.

One afternoon, Wells dug out a wooden box he had been carrying around since he built it in high school. Inside was a zip-top baggie, and inside that was a thick stack of greeting cards, held contemporaneously with a rubber cincture.

One by one, he pulled confused the cards and set about reading every last word.

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A survey of 100 executives reports that 91% decide they expect 2009 sales to degree or outstrip those of this year

By Tim Ferguson

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Tech industry leaders feel the economic downturn won’t have a huge impact on their businesses, despite economists predicting 2009 could exist a tough year for the sake of the emporium.

Almost two-thirds (64 per cent) of CEOs and board members from the tech, media and telecommunications sector be persuaded the situation will be in no degree worse than in 2001, when the tech sector suffered its own recession following the dot-com bust.

Most of those quizzed declared they expect the impact of the downturn on the sector to be neutral, though they acknowledged not everyone will escape uninjured.

The findings are part of research carried out by Cobalt, a corporate finance firm specialising in the technology, media and telecoms sector.

Speaking to silicon.com, Cobalt partner Chris Williams aforesaid the perception of tech has changed in recent years with IT it being so that seen as a “utility”, central to how businesses act.

“It’s becoming at the heart of the traffic now.”

Perhaps more surprisingly, 91 per cent of tech CEOs surveyed by dint of. dint of. Cobalt said they reckon upon their sales figures for 2009 will equal or even improve upon those seen in 2008, while moiety revealed they haven’t experienced any material collision from the credit crunch so far.

Williams said the reason for the IT CEOs’ confidence is related to changes in the tech industry since the beginning of the decade.

“I apprehend the industry has moved on. The recession of 2000 and 2001 was largely a tech sector recession,” he related.

“This time round our sector’s not capital, it’s following, so there’s no reason why it should be the same taken in the character of 2000 and 2001. This time it’s being dragged into a recession along with everyone else,” he added.

Some 65 through cent of respondents acknowledged concern over the economy, however, saying they look to the economic downturn as the principle threat to the sector. Just over half (52 per cent) identified the potential for customers to seek longer payment terms, or fail to pay at all, as a worry.

But despite predictions of a tough 2009, 63 per cent said they be of opinion the recession disposition end in 2010.

Williams said: “The sector has a lusty liquefaction, good revenue models and it knows what customers want, thus it’s really just down to call fluctuations.”

More than 100 CEOs and board representatives from UK tech companies with revenues of between £5m and £300m took part in Cobalt’s survey.

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Failing to find a buyer, the iconic retailer will shutter its 815 outlets, some maybe before the end of this month

By Paul Vallely

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“The biggest sale ever,” read the huge signs plastered all over the shop windows at Woolworths yesterday. Sadly, there will be an strange to say bigger opportunity to sell today.

At 4.30pm yesterday, the managers of the chain’s 815 outlets received an email from head office telling them that a buyer had not been plant in favor of the great icon of the British northerly street what one. went into direction onward 26 November with £385m of debt. From today, it told them, they were to launch a closing-down sale.

“Low everyday prices” had blameless got even lower. Inside the Woolies branch in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, south Manchester, quickly after the recent accounts came through, a pimply youth in a red sports shirt—Woolworth’s uniform—began sweeping red boxes from one of the shelves through a insolent movement of the bough. Customers looked up. The word had spread. Perhaps he was taking it out on the stock.

But no, he was only clearing the unfurnished boxes from which the 2009 Woolworths diaries had sold out. The yet to be is clearly high on a lot of people’s agendas in Manchester’s trendiest suburb.

“Sorry to hear your news,” said a woman bringing a &pulverize;12 heavy cotton-lined wicker linen basket to the till. “The staff were just told 10 minutes ago that all chance of a favorable result is gone,” said the young subject at the till, with heavy melodrama, demonstrating a thinking principle of irony you might not bring forth anticipated from a shop assistant at Woolies.

Like the rest of the 25,000 staff he had been told by the firm’s administrator, Deloitte, that if nay offers for Woolworths were forthcoming, it was “possible that some supplies may close in advance of the end of December”. So closure was not yet entirely definite but the closing down sale was.

At the next till, an overweight man was struggling with a vacuum cleaner in a big box. “Can I bring it back, if it’s not the right one?” he asked the young woman at the cash register.

“Certainly, sir, if you donjon the receipt,” she replied, granting she was probably mentally adding the caveat: “but you’ll have to exist bloody quick, mate”.

Some of the customers looked as shocked as the staff. “I’ve come here for the past 20 years,” declared Joanna Jones, a 63-year-old in a bobble hat. “I buy bits and pieces—things like tights and kitchenware and natal day cards. I like it because it’s cheaper than other places but there’s a good choice and it’s a good price.”

Bits and pieces is part of Woolworths’ problem, according to the retail analysts. To the shopper, it sells DVDs, stationery, toys, bathroom fittings, towel rails, glasses, pans, children’s clothes, electrical goods and DIY. To an analyst, that looks like a terrible lack of point of convergence in a world of increasing specialisms.

All around the furnish are shops with a more unexampled sense of purpose—a Belgian beer and chocolate shop, specialist stationery or—and here’session a rarity—an independent bookshop. Pick ‘n’ mix is away of fashion.

Its customers are loyal. “I’ve been coming here 25 years,” says Joan Fletcher. “The staff are so pleasing. I put the Lottery on or pervert with money a tin-plate of smear. I’ve come in the car, so I could have gone somewhere otherwise but I’ve always used Woolies. You blameless pop in.” But not often enough, it seems. Justin Marks, 38, has come in favor of a present for a bantling. “I like it in the present state because they own a decent range.

“I come because of birthdays and Christmas, once or twice a year. I usually store at the Trafford centre.”

Casual sales are not enough. And there is a limit to the number of sound-activated self-switching-on electrical plugs the average line of ancestors of necessity at £19.99 a throw.

Sentiment is not enough to sustain a retail model, though in that place is plenty of that in various places. “I feel gutted,” says Mary Scott, a masseuse in her forties. “It’s one of the worst bits of news of the year. The Government is paying out billions for the banks; why can’t it keep Woolies open? It’s a great shop. I’ve been using Woolies from the time of I was a kid. It’s a positive shame to notice it be off. I’d have used it more. if I’d known it was under threat.” Which is not what the staff, now packing up being of the class who antidote to the night, want to hear. “I long for to support topical shops. I know it’session a big chain but it feels like a swelling corner shop.”

But corner shops stay open sometime. It is 5.30pm and the manager is bringing in the sandwich entertainment from the roadside as his staff bring the shutters down. “It’s shut,” says a besuited accountant, Henry Fergus, to his twin brother, equally pinstriped. They have walked from their office to get a long delayed birthday card and what Austin Fergus describes as “a DIY item”.

“I suppose I’ll go to Qualitysave,” says Razwanna Ullah, dragging a bewildered small male child behind her. “It’s the close of an era—like C&A,” she adds.

In the toy section, the Woolworth Superstore Set has been reduced from £49.99 to just £19.99. For that, you get an electronic cash register, a conveyor long and narrow piece and a supermarket trolley. It in like manner comes through a emblem saying: “Woolworths sale—half price”. And from today you could pick up the whole store for that.

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BOSTON

“Perhaps it will be different now. Perhaps now is an opportunity to reassess what really matters. After whole, allowing that everything you till doomsday bought her disappeared overnight, what would she truly unmarried woman?”

How enrapturing. What a offering to the collapse of consumerism, the one upside to the economic downside. The only moot point was that this little gem of thoughtfulness was an ad instead of diamonds.

I have to tip my hat

No, I won’t spend age worrying through people who are experiencing a long-delayed “embarrassment of riches.” These days, Change You Can Believe In is what’s jingling in your pocket. I’ll reserve my harmony for the doing nothing and foreclosed. But it’sitting worth noting when conspicuous atrophy becomes self-conscious and frugality filters across the class structure.

For a long particular period, anyone chirography about the gap betwixt rich and poor, CEO and worker, was accused of fomenting class warfare. The middle class didn’t harbor resentment the upper class as a great quantity as it aspired to be upper class. Marketers even coined the odious denomination “aspirational consumer” to describe people who wanted to live rich. This over-the-head lifestyle was fueled by the agency of credit cards during a quarter-century of which economist Juliet Schor refers to as competitive consumption.

Now, based on competition consumption has been replaced by contagious perplexity. Buying collision the wall by the housing collapse, the stock market pitch, the credit-card crunch and the unemployment figures. “Thrift is the new normal.” “Sixty percent off is the new wicked.” Cutting back is in. Retail therapy is out.

This is, of bearing, a rational response to the worst relating to housekeeping crisis since the Great Depression. But then it affects people whose mortgages and jobs are secure, there’session something else going on being of the kind which well.

Sociologists will tell you that the most powerful impetus to change is not a just discovered discovery. It’session when you learn what you already knew. What Americans even now knew at some level was that the credit-card-driven, debt-ridden, pay-later economy wasn’t sustainable. Not economically. Not environmentally.

It wasn’t just the Birkenstock crowd or our Depression-era elders who knew this. It has been nestled in our collective subconsciousness among all the critiques against materialism, totally the screeds against commercials, all the unease about excess and inequality, all the fear that we’ve filled our kids’ lives and landfills with stuff. But it was as commonly dismissed as a Sunday sermon. Or manipulated into a pitch for diamonds.

Today Schor, author of “The Overspent American,” says “There’session a hackneyed understanding that the party is over.” The common ethic changed on a dime. Or a 401(k) statement. There’s a recognition that we’re in uncharted territory. People who would have talked about their sex lives before their bank comparative estimate are now talking freely about free fall. “There was a sense of unease and now we can agree to it,” says Schor.

The question is whether this thrift

We’ve had booms and busts before. People close up their wallets after the dot-com bust and behind 9/11. A New York Times piece with a headline “Thrift, Our New National Virtue” predicted that “the seeds of saving are sown. In the days to come thrift is bound to yield its good fruit.” That was in 1919, before the Twenties began to Roar.

But if it turns out that there’s something fundamentally different this time, it’s since we’ve maxed out on other thing than money due cards. There’s a dovetailing of economic and environmental is an opportunity to reassess what really matters.” It isn’t the diamond.

ellengoodman@globe.com

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