Word: firm
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When a French pharmaceutical firm announced last week that it was suspending distribution of an abortion pill because of worldwide boycott threats by right-to-life forces, the action touched off an international furor. Prochoice advocates promptly labeled the ban on the pill, called RU 486, a blow to women's rights. More than 1,000 physicians attending a meeting in Rio de Janeiro signed petitions urging that the company, Roussel Uclaf, reinstate the pill. The outcry apparently worked. By week's end, under an unprecedented order from French Minister of Health Claude Evin, the drug company, which is partly...
Brazil's foreign creditors usually demand payments in a hard currency, such as U.S. dollars. But Philips, the giant Dutch electronics firm, had a different idea. The company cashed in $4 million worth of Brazilian loans for 1.5 billion Brazilian cruzados to buy a tangible asset: soccer star Romario Farias. The 22-year-old player, who led Brazil's team to a silver medal in the Olympics, has signed a three-year, $900,000 contract to play for PSV Eindhoven, a Dutch team sponsored by Philips. Frustrated Brazilian fans are wondering: Will their country try to solve its debt crisis...
...higher interest rates were on the way. Now analysts are more confident that the economy stands a chance of avoiding those perils without going into a sharp downturn. "There is no reason for worry in this GNP result," said Allen Sinai, chief economist of the Boston Co. investment firm. "Growth of just under 3% is pretty good. This is more like a soft landing than a recession...
Takeover wars have raged on and off for decades, but corporate America has never seen anything quite like the battle for RJR Nabisco. The combatants are brandishing tens of billions of dollars and mobilizing squadrons of bankers and lawyers on a scale previously unimagined. On one side is the firm of Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts, until now the undisputed master of the leveraged buyout. On the other is an alliance between a group of RJR Nabisco executives and Shearson Lehman Hutton, an old-line investment firm determined to break KKR's dominance of the hottest, most lucrative business on Wall Street...
...time leveraged buyout is one of the cleverest financial gimmicks of all time. An investor group, which often includes some of the target company's top managers, borrows billions to take the firm private by buying its stock from the shareholders. The company's own assets are used as security for the financing. After the deal is completed, the new owners usually try to bring their debt down to a manageable level -- and pick up enormous profits along the way -- by selling off parts of the company piecemeal. In the case of RJR Nabisco, the total market value of popular...