Verizon says 10,400 U.S. managers have accepted a voluntary buyout offered as the company seeks to trim costs to invest more into its push into the next-generation network known as 5G. That’s about 7 percent of its global workforce.
Verizon offered the buyouts to 44,000 employees earlier this year. The staffers taking the buyouts are mainly U.S.-based management staffers, excluding its Oath media business and staffers in some customer facing roles.
The New York company is in the midst of a cost-cutting program to save $10 billion over four years to help it invest in 5G technology. Those accepting the buyout will get up to 60 weeks of salary, bonus and benefits, depending on length of service.
Investors buy Travelport in $4.4 billion purchase
A pair of buyout firms is planning to take the travel software company Travelport private in a deal worth about $4.4 billion.
Travelport Worldwide Ltd. said Monday that affiliates of Siris Capital Group LLC and Evergreen Coast Capital Corp. will pay $15.75 for each of its shares.
The Langley, U.K., tech company can seek offers from other buyers through Jan. 23, 2019.
The proposed deal is expected to close in the first half of 2019. It still needs approval from shareholders and regulators.
Chinese claim Apple infringed on Qualcomm
A two-year legal battle between Apple and its chip supplier, Qualcomm, reached a new level of contention Monday when Qualcomm said a Chinese court had ordered Apple to stop selling older iPhone models in China.
The court ruling is the latest turn in the two companies’ fight over Apple’s use of Qualcomm technology in iPhones. But Apple and Qualcomm disagreed on the impact the decision will have on iPhone sales in China.
Qualcomm said a Chinese court ruled Nov. 30 that Apple had infringed on two Qualcomm patents and issued a preliminary injunction that bars Apple from selling the iPhone 6S, the iPhone 6S Plus, the iPhone 7, the iPhone 7 Plus, the iPhone 8, the iPhone 8 Plus and the iPhone X in China. The ruling did not apply to Apple’s three newest iPhones: the XS, the XS Max and the XR.
Apple said in a statement, however, that it continued to sell all iPhone models in China.
“Qualcomm’s effort to ban our products is another desperate move by a company whose illegal practices are under investigation by regulators around the world,” an Apple spokesman, Josh Rosenstock, said.
Apple continued to sell four of the seven iPhone models affected by the ruling – the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus and the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus – on its Chinese website, as well as its newer models.
Google privacy lapse shuts down Plus
Google is still having trouble protecting the personal information on its Plus service, prodding the company to accelerate its plans to shut down a little-used social network created to compete against Facebook.
A privacy flaw that inadvertently exposed the names, email addresses, ages and other personal information of 52.5 million Google Plus users last month convinced Google to close the service in April instead of August, as previously announced. Google revealed the new closure date and its latest privacy lapse in a Monday blog post .
It’s the second time in two months that Google has disclosed the existence of a problem that enabled unauthorized access to Plus profiles. In October, the company acknowledged finding a privacy flaw affecting 500,000 Plus users that it waited more than six months to disclose.