TOP STORIES
Orange County ended 2009 with 48,900 jobs lost in December from a year earlier, part of a continuing improvement from the worst of the recession. The county’s unemployment rate was 9.1% last month, down from 9.6% in November and up from 6.6% a year earlier, according to the state Employment Development Department. The county saw a 3.3% drop in nonfarm employment in December from a year earlier. The nearly 49,000 jobs lost in December is historically large for the county but marks a pullback from the high of 72,600 annual job losses hit in April, when the recession was in full swing. From November to December, the county actually added 600 jobs for a total of 1.4 million workers.
Fisker Automotive, a maker of hybrid gas-electric cars, has raised $115.3 million in funding led by existing backer Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers and joined by A123 Systems Inc. as well as Ace Investment. The Irvine car maker previously raised more than $160 million from Kleiner Perkins, Eco-Drive (Capital) Partners, Palo Alto Investors and Al Ghaffara Investment Co. Funding was necessary for Fisker to access a $528.7 million Energy Department loan that will, in part, help speed completion of the Fisker Karma, the company’s first plug-in hybrid.
TECHNOLOGY
Lake Forest’s Western Digital Corp., a maker of disk drives for computers and consumer electronics, reported results for the December quarter that blew away analysts’ expectations. For the three months through Jan. 1, the company reported profits of $429 million, up 246% from a year earlier and beating analysts’ expected $307 million. It recorded revenue of $2.6 billion, up 44% and beating analysts’ expectation of $2.4 billion. The company ended the quarter with $2.4 billion in cash and short-term assets.
Irvine’s Netlist Inc., a maker of specialized memory products for computers that’s in the midst of reworking its business, said last week it landed two patents for an invention that helps improve the performance of servers in big data centers. The patents are a vital piece of Netlist’s new strategy of making memory boards with specialized controller chips that help manage other memory boards within servers.
Costa Mesa-based networking electronics maker Emulex Corp. reported better-than-expected results for the recently ended quarter and offered an outlook for the current one that topped what Wall Street had been expecting. For the three months through Dec. 27, Emulex reported an adjusted profit of $14.3 million, down 22% from a year earlier but topping the $13 million expected on average by analysts. Sales were $108.3 million. For the current quarter, Emulex forecast an adjusted profit of $12.7 million to $14.3 million and sales of $100 million to $103 million.
HEALTHCARE
Edwards Lifesciences Corp., an Irvine heart valve maker, said last week that a German court upheld the validity of a patent it holds for less-invasive heart valves, defeating a lawsuit by Irvine’s CoreValve Inc., part of Minnesota-based Medtronic Inc.
REAL ESTATE
Chipmaker Conexant Systems Inc. is selling 25 acres of land next to its Newport Beach headquarters to Santa Ana-based developer City Ventures LLC for $26.1 million. The land is on Jamboree Road near the Irvine city line. Conexant said proceeds from the sale, expected to close in March, would be used for general purposes, including paying down debt. Conexant believes that about 17 acres of the land currently zoned for light industrial use could be sold and redeveloped as homes, shops and other uses. In other Conexant news, the company reported an adjusted profit of $10 million and sales of $61.8 million for the three months through Jan. 1, beating analysts’ expectations. The chipmaker also upped its outlook for the current quarter.
The county’s median home price ended 2009 at $435,000, a 9.6% increase from where home prices here stood a year earlier. The median price of an OC home increased $2,750 from November to December, according to San Diego-based MDA DataQuick, a unit of Canada’s MacDonald Dettwiler and Associ-ates Ltd. OC’s median home price is still about 33% below its highest point of $645,000, which was seen in June 2007. December sales in OC totaled 2,885 homes. That’s an increase of about 14% from November and is up nearly 12% from a year earlier.
OTHER NEWS
Glen Bell Jr., a fast food pioneer and founder of Irvine-based Taco Bell Corp., died at the age of 86 at his home in Rancho Santa Fe.
The bankrupt parent company of the Orange County Register filed a revised reorganization plan that turns over all of the company to lenders and offers added concessions to unsecured creditors. The latest plan is a result of a compromise by major lenders of Irvine-based Freedom Communications Inc. and its smaller unsecured creditors, who had been seeking to submit their own rival reorganization plan. The new plan calls for turning over 100% of the company to secured lenders, leaving the founding Hoiles family and two private equity firms with no stakes.
