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(Reuters) - Xerox Corp. said it would split into two companies, one holding its legacy hardware operations and the other its business process outsourcing unit, in which activist investor Carl Icahn will get three board seats. Icahn, who first revealed a stake in Xerox in November, had said he would seek representation on the company's board as well as pursue strategic alternatives. He later raised his stake to 8.13 percent. Xerox shares rose 1.8 percent to $9.40 in premarket trading on Friday. Keep up with this story and more by subscribing now Xerox Chief Executive Ursula Burns told CNBC that Icahn had nothing to do with the initiation of the split. The company, whose shares had fallen more than 30 percent in the past 12 months, has been trying to turn itself around by focusing on software and services as businesses cut costs and a switch to mobile devices hits demand for printers. Larger rival Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. also split its computer and printer businesses from its faster-growing corporate hardware and services operations last year to adjust to the post-PC computing era. Icahn has had considerable success with getting companies to spin off their fast-growing businesses. Under pressure from the billionaire, eBay Inc. split its payments business Paypal Holdings Inc., while Manitowoc Co. Inc. separated its crane manufacturing business from its food service business. Burns, who took the helm in 2009, said on Friday her role was yet to be determined. Under Burns's leadership, Xerox took a leap into the services market in 2010 with its $6.4 billion acquisition of Affiliated Computer Services Inc. Xerox, which came into prominence with the launch of the 914 photo copier in 1959, said the leadership and names of the new companies were yet to be decided. The company said the document technology company, which will make printers and copiers, would have annual revenue of $11 billion, while the business process outsourcing company would have $7 billion in revenue. The split, expected to be complete by the end of 2016, will deliver $2.4 billion in savings over next three years across both companies. Xerox also posted fourth-quarter results, with profit rising 42.5 percent and costs and expenses falling 7.3 percent. Lazard and Goldman Sachs are advising Xerox. Tags:industrial LTE router, Industrial VPN router, Dual SIM M2M router, M2M gateway, IoT gateway |
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Thousands of protesters took to the streets of downtown Budapest, Hungary, Sunday evening to protest a proposed tax on Internet use, part of what they view as increasingly anti-democratic legislation. The demonstrators gathered in front of the Economy Ministry, their faces lit with the glow of their mobile phones. They then walked to Heroes Square, site of the city’s Hall of Art, Museum of Fine Arts and Millennium Monument. According to the English-language news site Hungary Today, the protesters shouted “Viktator,” “We want democracy” and “Europe” as they marched. “Those who use the Internet see more of the world, that’s why the government doesn’t want a free Internet,” Balazs Gulyas, a protest organizer, said Sunday. Keep up with this story and more by subscribing now The tax first came to light on Tuesday when Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government submitted to the parliament a draft of the 2015 budget, which proposed a charge of 150 forints ($0.62 or 0.49 euros) per gigabyte of data used. Protest organizers called on people to join the demonstration in a press release, describing the tax as a “direct attack on our freedom of expression rights and our right to access information,” which “risks disconnecting Hungary with global information and communication channels.” “The measure would impede equal access to the Internet—deepening the digital divide between Hungary’s lower economic groups—and limiting Internet access for cash-poor schools and universities,” organizers said. Some made their way to the headquarters of the ruling Fidesz party, where they lobbed old computer parts like monitors and keyboards at the building, despite the fact that the organizers had called for the protest to be free of violence. Two windows were broken, and six people were detained by authorities. ‘‘What the protesters did to the building was unbelievable, brutal vandalism,’’ Mate Kocsis, a spokesman for the Fidesz party, said on state radio Monday. ‘‘It’s not the first time the Fidesz headquarters was attacked, but we can hardly recall such severe damage.’’
Hungary’s Economy Ministry anticipated the tax would bring in 20 billion forints ($82.5 million) per year, though experts predicted the amount could be significantly higher, according to The Associated Press. Orban’s government issued a statement Sunday, while protesters were still in the streets, announcing that it would amend its proposal, capping the tax at 700 forints ($2.87) per month. In addition, the tax would be paid by Internet providers rather than individual subscribers. But Gulyas said that if the government did not fully withdraw the bill within 48 hours, protests would continue Tuesday. The Facebook page of the protest organizers, titled “100,000 against the Internet tax,” continues to be active, with more than 215,000 likes as of Monday morning. The protest organizers say the proposed tax “follows a wave of alarming anti-democratic measures by Orban that is pushing Hungary even further adrift from Europe.” The prime minister, who was reelected this past April to a second term, has previously instituted a tax on advertisement revenue for all nonpublic media outlets, as well as taxes on the energy, banking and telecommunications industries to “plug budget holes and reduce the deficit to below the EU’s 3 percent of gross domestic product limit,” according to Bloomberg Businessweek. The Internet tax would be a “double tax on us, as I have already paid a sky-high VAT when I bought the gadgets, computer and router,” Attila Sos, who came to the protest, told Reuters. “This is a good occasion for a lot of people to come here to show that they are discontent with the government’s tax and economic policies. This was only the icing on the cake.” Tags:, Overhead Line Monitoring, Distribution Power Line Monitoring, Grid Analytics System, overhead Line sensor, grid fault detection |
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Now the wait—and the guessing game—begins. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments Wednesday morning on King v. Burwell, the case challenging the power of the federal government to pay tax credits to low- and middle-income families under the Affordable Care Act. The core issue is now well known. The law states that tax credits can be paid to qualified applicants for insurance from “an exchange established by a state.” Do those words mean that tax credits cannot be paid in exchanges organized by the federal government for the states? No, say the plaintiffs; read the law. Yes, says the government; the law makes clear that the federal government is acting for the states not instead of them, and the law would make no sense under any other interpretation. Keep up with this story and more by subscribing now The court will meet in conference on Friday, March 6, at which time a preliminary vote on the case may be taken. After that vote, opinion writing will begin. The decision will be announced, probably in late June. Between now and then, negotiations among the justices on opinions may well occur. Meanwhile, those who heard or read the arguments will parse the questions of the justices for hints on a final vote. The oral arguments largely repeated positions already presented in briefs by the parties and in dozens of amicus briefs by outside parties. But several aspects of the oral arguments are noteworthy. The first was the prominence of an issue not even raised in the written briefs: Do the plaintiffs have standing to challenge the law? Before plaintiff’s attorney, Michael Carvin, had spoken five words, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg interrupted him. Do the plaintiffs have anything at stake in this case? In an inconclusive exchange with Carvin, she suggested that some or all of them do not. Later, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, acting not as advocate for the government but in his role as adviser to the court, asserted that the question boils down to whether all four of the plaintiffs had enough income in 2014 so that they would not have been eligible to tax credits. If so, the case would be moot. The justices will have to decide whether the matter of standing can be raised at this point and, if so, whether evidence regarding actual income can be introduced and by whom. This technical issue is important. If the plaintiffs are found to lack standing or if the matter is in doubt, this issue could excuse the justices from deciding the substantive issue at this time. The second striking element came from Justice Anthony Kennedy. He invoked the Court’s decision three years ago in the first case on the Affordable Care Act. In that decision, the Court found that requiring states to expand Medicaid was an excessive and unconstitutional use of federal power to force state action. Under that doctrine, Justice Kennedy asked, would it not also be excessive and unconstitutional if the federal government threatened the states with the chaotic results that would ensue if tax credits cannot be paid through federally managed exchanges? In that event, the states would be confronted with a choice between setting up exchanges themselves, or seeing their insurance markets collapse. In the manner of old-style Kremlinologists, Supreme Court observers will study what the justices said or didn’t say in order to infer their position: They will note that Chief Justice Roberts was uncustomarily silent. He asked no substantive questions of either the plaintiffs or the government. Whether this Clarence Thomas–like silence signals that he has made up his mind, that he is preserving his options or nothing at all is quite unclear. The outcome of the case may hinge on the answer to that question. Justices Alito and Scalia signaled that they found persuasive the plaintiff’s position that tax credits could not be paid in exchanges organized by the federal government. In response to the assertion by Solicitor General Verrilli that under such an interpretation the rest of the law would make no sense, Justice Scalia archly observed that senseless laws were not unusual and that if the results of the plaintiff’s interpretation were as bad as the government claimed, then Congress could change the law or the states could set up exchanges. Alito said that the Court could delay the effect of a ruling to give them time to do just that. The four liberal justices each indicated that they thought that the plaintiffs’ argument would make a mockery of the clear purpose of the Affordable Care Act and would lead to absurd internal contradictions in the law. The wait—and the guessing game—begins. Hints gleaned from oral arguments are notoriously unreliable and (let’s face it) pointless. So, in full awareness that such guesses are close to fatuous, here is mine: The government prevails, 6 to 3. The four liberals, Breyer, Ginsburg, Kagan, Sotomayor, will be joined in concurring opinions by Kennedy and Roberts. Alito, Scalia and Thomas will dissent emphatically and, if Justice Scalia writes the dissent, acerbically. Henry J. Aaron who is Senior Fellow, Economic Studies, and The Bruce and Virginia MacLaury Chair at the Brookings Institution, attended the Supreme Court's King v. Burwell oral arguments on March 4. This article first appeared on the Brookings Institution website. Brookings |