Athenahealth for sale as CEO steps down
The co-founder and CEO of athenahealth is stepping down and the medical software company is exploring a potential sale. It is already weighing a buyout offer from a frustrated shareholder.
The resignation of Jonathan Bush is effective immediately. Athenahealth Inc. said Wednesday that Chairman Jeff Immelt, the former leader of General Electric Co., will become executive chairman. Chief Financial Officer Marc Levine will take on more responsibilities while the company searches for its next CEO.
Athenahealth makes medical records, revenue cycle and care coordination products and delivers most of its offerings through cloud-based software.
Bush’s departure and the athenahealth board’s decision to consider a new path also comes a month after prominent investor Elliott Management Corp. said it had grown frustrated with the company’s performance, and made a bid of about $6.5 billion to take the company private.
Covenant outlook boosts stock price
Shares of Covenant Transport rose Wednesday after the Chattanooga-based trucking firm said it expects better-than-expected earnings this spring.
Covenant stock nearly 3 percent after the company boosted its earnings outlook for the second quarter to between 45 and 53 cents per share, up from 8 cents a share a year ago. Analysts surveyed by Yahoo Finance had predicted second quarter profits for Covenant between 38 cents and 47 cents per share.
“The truckload freight environment has been favorable during the second quarter to date, leading to operating results that are exceeding our expectations,” Covenant CEO David Parker said, noting that freight revenue jumped 20.9 percent over last year’s results this spring.
Covenant’s managed freight revenue jumped 61.1 percent over a year ago in the past two months.
Facebook to fund news programs
Facebook says it will fund original news shows created by such news organizations as ABC, CNN and Mic.
The move comes as Facebook plans to kill off its “trending” news section to make way for what it considers “trustworthy” and “informative” news. Despite efforts to clamp down, the company continues to grapple with fake news and misinformation, not to mention plain old “click bait” on its users’ news feeds.
Campbell Brown, Facebook’s head of news partnerships, says the shows will be original and exclusive to Facebook, rather than adapting TV programs from elsewhere for a Facebook audience. The shows will appear in Facebook’s Watch video section.
Brown declined to say how much Facebook is paying for the shows. They will be available in the U.S. this summer.
Productivity up only 0.4 percent
U.S. productivity grew at an annual rate of just 0.4 percent in the first quarter, even weaker than initially estimated, while labor costs rose at a bit faster pace.
The Labor Department said Wednesday that the January-March productivity increase was revised down from the 0.7 percent gain initially estimated a month ago. Labor costs rose 2.9 percent, up from an initial estimate of a 2.7 percent gain in the first quarter. The rise in productivity was only marginally better than the 0.3 percent increase in the fourth quarter but below the 2.6 percent third quarter increase.
Productivity, a key factor determining how fast the economy can grow and how much living standards can increase, has been anemic throughout the economic recovery. It increased just 1.3 percent for all of 2017.
Economists are uncertain why productivity has been so anemic during the current nine-year expansion. For the past seven decades from 1947 through 2017, productivity has turned in average annual gains of 2.1 percent. But between 2007 through 2017, growth has slowed to about half that pace with average annual gains of just 1.2 percent. In 2016, productivity failed to grow at all, marking the poorest performance in 35 years.
CFPB advisory board dissolved by Mulvaney
The head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau dissolved a group of outside experts that acts as a sounding board for the watchdog agency on economic and financial issues as well as policy.
Bureau officials told the 25 members of the Consumer Advisory Board on Wednesday that they will be replaced and the board will be reconstituted, according to two of board members who were on a morning conference call. An email to board members on behalf of Acting Director Mick Mulvaney confirmed the actions.
“Everyone on the board has been fired,” said Judith Fox, a professor of consumer law at Notre Dame Law School who sat on the board for three years.
The law that created the CFPB mandates that bureau officials meet with the advisory board at least twice a year. But the meetings have repeatedly been cancelled under Mulvaney, who has steered the bureau in a more industry-friendly direction since taking charge late last year.
The advisory board, under the Obama administration, acted as a group of experts bureau officials could talk with about economic issues, trends in the industry or the bureau’s proposed regulations.
Google owners reject diversity pay proposal
Shareholders of Google parent Alphabet Inc. on Wednesday rejected several proposals aimed at linking executive pay to diversity goals, being more open about lobbying, narrowing the gender-pay gap, and weakening the grip founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have on company voting stock.
The rejection was not a surprise given the company had declared itself opposed to the proposals – in many cases because it said it is addressing the broader issues in other ways.
But the proposals reflected the increasing concern about the search giant’s huge influence on technology and its impact on society. Some Google employees came out in favor of the diversity proposal.
The proposal was backed by social investor Zevin Asset Management, which pushed it at 12 publicly traded technology firms this year. Zevin said its proposal was challenged by eBay, excluded from Apple’s shareholder meeting by financial regulators, and withdrawn from Amazon on a technicality.
Intel, Microsoft and IBM, however, have established some kind of link between pay and the achievement of diversity goals.