AOL Time Warner Inc. said on Friday it agreed to sell its CD and DVD manufacturing business to a Canadian company for $1.05 billion and would use the proceeds to trim its $26 billion debt load.
Under pressure from Wall Street, AOL Time Warner AOL.N has pledged to cut its debt to $20 billion by the end of 2004 and has been pursuing a number of deals, including the sale of its sports teams and a possible joint venture between its recorded music business and Bertelsmann AG's BERT.UL BMG. With these moves in the works and expectations for stronger quarterly earnings, some on Wall Street say the tide may be turning for the world's largest media company, which has been dogged for the past two years by slowing growth in its Internet business and government probes into its accounting.
"In this market, sentiment has its impact," said Paul Kim, an analyst at investment research firm Kim & Company. "(The deal) is another step in the right direction in the turnaround for AOL Time Warner, and it is just a prelude to a potential music merger, which would be another step in the right direction." Fahnestock analyst Peter Mirsky also said the sale of the CD and DVD manufacturing business to Cinram International Inc. CRW.TO , a Toronto-based maker of those products, is a positive move.
"They have this sale, the (pending) sale of their two Atlanta sports teams, and the joint venture -- on top of earnings where people expect the numbers to go up," he added. Standard & Poor's debt analyst Heather Goodchild said the agency plans to affirm AOL Time Warner's ratings and remove the company from CreditWatch after completion of the DVD/CD sale. Currently, S&P has had a "BBB+" corporate credit rating on AOL Time Warner, which remains on CreditWatch with negative implications.
News source: Reuters
Under pressure from Wall Street, AOL Time Warner AOL.N has pledged to cut its debt to $20 billion by the end of 2004 and has been pursuing a number of deals, including the sale of its sports teams and a possible joint venture between its recorded music business and Bertelsmann AG's BERT.UL BMG. With these moves in the works and expectations for stronger quarterly earnings, some on Wall Street say the tide may be turning for the world's largest media company, which has been dogged for the past two years by slowing growth in its Internet business and government probes into its accounting.
"In this market, sentiment has its impact," said Paul Kim, an analyst at investment research firm Kim & Company. "(The deal) is another step in the right direction in the turnaround for AOL Time Warner, and it is just a prelude to a potential music merger, which would be another step in the right direction." Fahnestock analyst Peter Mirsky also said the sale of the CD and DVD manufacturing business to Cinram International Inc. CRW.TO , a Toronto-based maker of those products, is a positive move.
"They have this sale, the (pending) sale of their two Atlanta sports teams, and the joint venture -- on top of earnings where people expect the numbers to go up," he added. Standard & Poor's debt analyst Heather Goodchild said the agency plans to affirm AOL Time Warner's ratings and remove the company from CreditWatch after completion of the DVD/CD sale. Currently, S&P has had a "BBB+" corporate credit rating on AOL Time Warner, which remains on CreditWatch with negative implications.
News source: Reuters
Designed and developed in-house for use in Clié PDAs, the processor includes an ARM926 core and is capable of adjusting its operating frequency and voltage to match the task in hand, said the company. The technology, which Sony says means the processor draws less power than a conventional chip, has been dubbed DVFM (dual voltage frequency management) and, in the chip announced Thursday, can adjust the frequency between 8MHz and 123MHz.
The processor also includes 64M bits of DRAM, the Clié's graphics engine and the interfaces for the camera and MemoryStick slot, thus cutting down on the number of chips inside the PDA.
A built-in digital still camera with 310,000 pixel resolution is included in the hinge. This can take images up to VGA (640 pixels by 480 pixels) quality. Wireless support for both Bluetooth and WLAN (IEEE802.11b) is included and two small illuminated lights on the right of the display indicate when they are in use. Other networking options include an infrared and USB port.
The PDA has 96MB of memory split between a 32MB bank of SDRAM and 64MB bank of flash memory. After space has been claimed by the operating system and preinstalled software, there is a total of 38MB available to users, split as 16MB of SDRAM for applications and 22MB of flash memory for storage of multimedia files.
Installed software for the PDA, which runs on version 5.2 of Palm's operating system, includes a movie player, movie recorder, photo editor and album, digital music player supporting MP3 or ATRAC (Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding), Picsel Viewer to access Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, and the Netfront Web browser.
It measures 103mm by 86.5mm by 17.9mm and weighs 175 grams. That makes it the smallest Clié yet to be announced by Sony and only 3 grams heavier than the SJ-3 series, which are the lightest Clié PDAs available.
The internal Lithium Ion Polymer battery provides enough power for 14 days use, which Sony calculated by running the information manager program each day for 30 minutes with the backlight switched off. Battery life with the backlight switched on, which draws more power but is the way most people use their PDAs, was not available.
The PEG-UX50 will go on sale in Japan on Aug. 9 and is expected to be priced around ¥70,000 ($593). Plans for overseas sales are expected to be announced at a Sony event on Friday in the U.S. where it will outline its handheld computing strategy.
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