Company news in brief

Investec buys stake in South African school firm

Investec Asset Management, a subsidiary of Investec, has bought in a firm that runs private colleges in South Africa, it said on Thursday, tapping into a fast-paced expansion in education businesses.

Rising incomes among the continent’s vast population have created a pool of customers willing to pay for better schooling for their children. That in turn is driving a fast-paced expansion in education businesses.

Investec Asset Management said it had bought shares in Richfield Holdings, but did not disclose the size of the stake or cost of the deal.

Richfield founder and chief executive officer, Jay Ramnundlall said the tie-up with Investec Asset Management would enable the firm to expand further. Founded 28 years ago, Richfield has more than 40 campuses in South Africa.

Investec Asset Management has US$143 billion in assets.

Its parent company is planning to spin-off and float the asset management unit on the London Stock Exchange with a secondary listing in Johannesburg.

Curro Holdings is South Africa’s largest private education group, with schools across the country and Namibia. It is followed by Advtech, which has been expanding in Africa, where rising incomes have created a pool of customers willing to pay for private education.

-Nampa/Reuters

De Beers eyes tech markets for synthetic diamonds future

Anglo American unit De Beers is going after lucrative, but elusive high-tech markets in quantum computing, as it aims to expand its lab-grown diamond business beyond drilling and cutting.

Element Six, De Beers’ synthetic diamond arm, is building a US$94 million factory in Portland, Oregon, an expansion that comes as scientists from Moscow to London push to develop diamonds for futuristic applications.

Researchers have long chased the synthetic ‘holy grail’ of diamond semiconductors, without commercial success.

Resilient to extreme temperatures with super-conductive properties, diamonds can withstand conditions that silicon cannot, but roadblocks around cost and production have thwarted developers.

Now coming of age after decades of experiments, technology called chemical vapor deposition, or CVD, offers a path to higher-quality, lower-cost production of synthetic diamonds and that opens the door to potential new computing markets.

Diamonds created by CVD anchor Element Six’s fast-growing business for advanced laser, thermal and water applications, said CEO Walter Huhn.

-Nampa/Reuters

Amazon to open Manchester office

Amazon.com is opening its first office in Manchester, northern England, and expanding two other centers to house 1,000 new R&D roles in what it said was a major new investment in British innovation.

The US online retail giant will create 600 new corporate and development jobs in Manchester, take on an additional 250 people at its development center in Edinburgh, and add 180 roles in Cambridge, eastern England, it said on Thursday.

Amazon’s UK country manager Doug Gurr said Britain was taking a leading role in the company’s global innovation.

“These are Silicon Valley jobs in Britain, and further cement our long-term commitment to the UK,” he said.

The new engineers will work on technology including personalised shopping recommendations, machine learning, Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa, AWS (Amazon Web Services) and its drone delivery project Prime Air, it said.

-Nmapa/Reuters

Colgate halts Venezuela detergent plant

US consumer goods maker Colgate-Palmolive Co has halted production at its detergent and dish soap plant in Venezuela because it lacked cardboard boxes to ship products, a union leader said on Thursday.

The plant in the city of Valencia stopped operations on Monday, union representative Carlos Rodriguez said in a telephone interview. Its cardboard provider, Ireland’s Smurfit Kappa , halted production in Venezuela last month after government authorities took over its local unit.

Smurfit Kappa was one of the few remaining shipping materials manufacturers in the OPEC nation. Colgate is attempting to import cardboard from neighboring Colombia, Rodriguez said.

Rodriguez said the lack of cardboard prompted the company to push up vacations for the plant’s 77 workers. He said a Colgate toothpaste plant was still operating, but had enough cardboard stock to cover only one more month of production.

“If (the toothpaste plant) does not get the cardboard, its operations will also be suspended,” Rodriguez said.

-Nampa/Reuters

Pricing boost helps Marlboro maker’s quarterly results

Philip Morris International, maker of Marlboro cigarettes, maintained its full-year guidance on Thursday after higher pricing helped it to report better than expected quarterly sales and profit.

Shares of the company rose 4.7% in New York, although the unchanged outlook signals weakness in the current fourth quarter.

“With full year guidance unchanged you will expect a give back,” Jefferies analysts said in a note.

“Nonetheless, optically a 12% beat always looks good and it should support today.”

Sales were helped by market share gains and pricing increases, the company said.

Philip Morris is pinning its hopes for the future on its IQOS device, which heats tobacco instead of burning it, thereby producing a vapor instead of smoke. It says this is less dangerous than smoking.

-Nampa/Reuters