As you may have heard, UBS has been going through a bit of a rough patch. Despite posting an annual profit (of 7.2 billion Swiss francs) for the first time since 2006, things just haven’t been the same since the crisis, and some are suggesting it never will be, writing that the bank “doesn’t have a chance” getting back to pre-crisis levels because “too much damage has been done.” Not helping things is the fact that there’s been very high turnover in the last couple months, which may have something to do with the fact that people have a need to get paid.

The last two months have seen a large turnover of staff and an overhaul of management at the top. In the last month alone, a new global head of securities, the co-head of fixed-income, currencies and commodities, and a top deal maker in Asia, traditionally a strong region for UBS, have all left. At the same time, the bank has announced new leadership for the crucial M&A business and new chiefs for investment banking for the Americas, Asia and Europe, among other changes. Just this week, UBS lost the head of its prime brokerage unit in Asia, as well as the co-head of its Asian industrials banking team.

UBS is struggling to pay enough to keep top talent as it works on the revamp, say headhunters and former UBS bankers, with some senior bankers not having received a bonus in several years. And while UBS paid dearly to attract a few heavy hitters, overall pay is too low to keep staff from jumping ship, they say. In February, the bank delayed by a week the announcement of bonuses while it reworked its plan to try to prevent bankers from leaving.

Not saying no one at UBS will ever get paid again but in order to account for a worst case scenario, let’s just say that. Any ideas how management can entice people not to quit/take a gig with them? As the Swiss are getting desperate, you could probably suggest just about anything and they might give it a shot. What if they could guarantee a guy pulling up to the Stamford office in a white Civic and demanding to speak to “the President” while brandishing a baseball bat at least once a week? Would that be something you’d be interested in? (That might do it for me.)

Signs Of Strain At UBS Investment Bank [WSJ]

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

Intel said that its net income for the first quarter was $3.3 billion, up 34 percent from $2.4 billion a year ago. Revenue was $12.9 billion, up 25 percent.

The record results show that a full-blown tech recovery is in high gear despite worries about the state of various regional economies. And it also shows that smartphones and tablets — two markets where Intel doesn’t have huge business — aren’t taking away sales in the core PC market.

Intel is the world’s biggest chip maker and its results are a bellwether for the PC market and the tech economy as a whole.

Earnings per share were 59 cents, compared with 43 cents a share a year earlier. Analysts had expected 46 cents a share on revenue of $11.6 billion.

“The first-quarter revenue was an all-time record for Intel fueled by double digit annual revenue growth in every major product segment and across all geographies,” Intel chief executive Paul Otellini said in a statement. “These outstanding results, combined with our guidance for the second quarter, position us to achieve greater than 20 percent annual revenue growth.”

Intel credited the strength of enterprise server and PC sales for the big improvement. Data center chip revenue was up 32 percent compared to a year ago, while PC client division revenue was up 17 percent. Intel Atom revenue was up 4 percent. Average prices for microprocessors, which are the brains of personal computers, were up compared to the previous quarter.

For the second quarter, Intel projects revenue to be flat at $12.8 billion, plus or minus $500 million. It is also targeting a gross profit margin of 61 percent. For the full year, Intel expects to spend $10.2 billion on capital spending, such as new chip factories. Uncertainties include the situation in post-quake Japan, where a market slowdown could have an effect on Intel’s business.

Intel got a boost of $496 million in revenue during the quarter from its acquisitions of Infineon Wireless and McAfee. Both deals closed during the quarter. Interestingly, even though Intel spent more than $7.6 billion in cash on McAfee, the company still has $11.5 billion in cash after today’s report. That’s what you call a cash-generation machine. Intel also benefited from an extra week in the first quarter, compared to the usual 13 weeks. Intel’s goal is to grow earnings by double digit percentages this year.

Intel’s stock price rose 5 percent in after-hours trading. Intel now has 93,500 employees, compared with 79,900 a year ago.

While the consumer markets were slow in Europe and the U.S. in the first quarter, the enterprise strength and the growth of consumer markets in emerging regions made up for that. Emering markets such as China and Brazil now have more than 2 billion consumers who could buy a PC at a cost of one or two months of income.

Intel also had its best launch ever with the debut of its Sandy Bridge chip, which combined a microprocessor and graphics in the same chip. There was a flaw in the Cougar Point chip set that accompanied Sandy Bridge, but Intel said it recovered from that flaw more quickly than it anticipated.

[picture credit: world2do]

Tags: chips, microprocessors

Companies: Intel

People: Paul Otellini

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Intel said its net income for the first quarter was $3.3 billion, up 34 percent from $2.4 billion a year ago. Revenue was $12.9 billion, up 25 percent.

The record results show that a full-blown tech recovery is in high gear despite worries about the state of various regional economies. They also show that smartphones and tablets — two markets in which Intel doesn’t have huge business — aren’t taking away sales from the core PC market.

Intel is the world’s biggest chip maker and its results are a bellwether for the PC market and the tech economy as a whole.

Earnings per share were 59 cents, compared with 43 cents a share a year earlier. Analysts had expected 46 cents a share on revenue of $11.6 billion.

“The first-quarter revenue was an all-time record for Intel fueled by double digit annual revenue growth in every major product segment and across all geographies,” Intel chief executive Paul Otellini said in a statement. “These outstanding results, combined with our guidance for the second quarter, position us to achieve greater than 20 percent annual revenue growth.”

Intel credited the strength of enterprise server and PC sales for the big improvement. Data center chip revenue was up 32 percent compared to a year ago, while PC client division revenue was up 17 percent. Intel Atom revenue was up 4 percent. Average prices for microprocessors, which are the brains of personal computers, were up compared to the previous quarter.

For the second quarter, Intel projects revenue to be flat at $12.8 billion, plus or minus $500 million. It is also targeting a gross profit margin of 61 percent. For the full year, Intel expects to spend $10.2 billion on capital spending, such as new chip factories. Uncertainties include the situation in post-quake Japan, where a market slowdown could have an effect on Intel’s business.

Intel got a boost of $496 million in revenue during the quarter from its acquisitions of Infineon Wireless and McAfee. Both deals closed during the quarter. Interestingly, even though Intel spent more than $7.6 billion in cash on McAfee, the company still has $11.5 billion in cash after today’s report. That’s what you call a cash-generation machine. Intel also benefited from an extra week in the first quarter, compared to the usual 13 weeks. Intel’s goal is to grow earnings by double digit percentages this year.

Intel’s stock price rose 5 percent in after-hours trading. Intel now has 93,500 employees, compared with 79,900 a year ago.

While the consumer markets were slow in Europe and the U.S. in the first quarter, the enterprise strength and the growth of consumer markets in emerging regions made up for that. Emerging markets such as China and Brazil now have more than 2 billion consumers who could buy a PC at a cost of one or two months of income.

Intel also had its best launch ever with the debut of its Sandy Bridge chip, which combined a microprocessor and graphics in the same chip. There was a flaw in the Cougar Point chip set that accompanied Sandy Bridge, but Intel said it recovered from that flaw more quickly than it anticipated.

[picture credit: world2do]

Tags: chips, microprocessors

Companies: Intel

People: Paul Otellini

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) this afternoon said its head of enterprise business sales and marketing, Thomas Hogan, is leaving the company May 31st to “pursue other interests” after five years with HP.

Hogan was credited in a press release with leading a “multiyear sales and marketing transformation that has accelerated sales hiring, built a world-class sales university and launched the Instant-On Enterprise strategy for business and governments.” Hogan was also credited with vastly expanding HP’s software portfolio.

Hogan will be replaced by the current managing director for HP’s Europe, Middle East and Africa operations, Jan Zadak, a former Compaq veteran.

HP shares are down 19 cents, or half a point, at $39.56.

Article courtesy of Tech Trader Daily

Interesting piece this morning by Bloomberg’s Allessandra Migliaccio and Flavia Rotondi about the Italian town of Montalto di Castro, situated on Italy’s west coast, about 70 miles from Rome. The town’s mayor is pushing hard for solar energy and against nukes.

The town’s nuclear reactor by the sea has been inoperative since a 20-year ban went into effect, and Mayor Salvatore Carai is organizing protests and staging Europe’s largest “photovoltaic park,” Migliaccio and Rotondi write, in order to draw attention to the promise of solar and the dangers of nukes.

The article quotes an anti-nuclear organizer who fears Montalto is “at the top of the list” to get a new reactor if the country moves ahead with a plan to end the moratorium on nuke construction, and there are risks people would abandon the area out of fear of leaks, the organizer says.

On the other hand, a farmer from the town recalls the boom-town days when the plant was built, and casts doubt on the electrical generation capability of solar.

Article courtesy of Tech Trader Daily

Today’s funding announcements include a learning management system, private car sales and marketing investments:

Instructure brings in $8M for online education system: The developer of Canvas, a cloud-based learning management system used by more than 30 educational institutions as an alternative to Blackboard, has raised a second round of funding from OpenView Venture Partners, EPIC Ventures, TomorrowVentures and Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, peHUB reports. Infrastructure was founded in 2008 at Brigham Young University.

CarLotz raises $525K for car sales: The Richmond, Virginia-based company has raised equity funding in its first round, according to a filing with the SEC. Co-founded by three alumni of Harvard Business School, the company was started this year and plans to improve the process of used car sales by owner.

MarketShare raises $32M for marketing analytics: The Los Angeles-based company has raised funding from Elevation Partners to help businesses determine the most effective media mix for marketing investments. The company plans to use part of the money to fuel strategic acquisitions and expansion into Asia-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Television ad company INVIDI completes $49M round: The developer of addressable advertising solutions has completed its fourth round of funding with participation from DIRECTV. The New York-based company raised the first $23M of its fourth round from Google and several other investors last May. The company’s Avatar software, which allows TV advertisers to deliver targeted messages to households during commercials, will be inside DIRECTV DVR digital set-top boxes starting in 2011.

Companies: CarLotz, directv, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Elevation Partners, Epic Ventures, Google, Instructure, Invidi, MarketShare, OpenView Venture Partners, TomorrowVentures

People: Tim Draper

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Bank Of America Earnings Miss Expectations, Profit Drops (BAC)
The bank reported net income of $2.0 billion, or $0.17 per diluted share, for the first quarter of 2011, compared with $3.2 billion, or $0.28 per diluted share, in the year-ago period and a net loss of $1.2 billion, or $0.16 per diluted share, in the fourth quarter of 2010.

Banks Near Deal With SEC (WSJ)
U.S. securities regulators are in talks with several major Wall Street banks to settle fraud allegations related to mortgage-bond deals that helped unleash the financial crisis, according to people familiar with the matter. The expected settlements, some of which could be reached as soon as next week, collectively mark the biggest attempt by enforcement agencies to hold Wall Street accountable for its role in the subprime mortgage bust. The settlements are expected to vary significantly among banks—but few, if any, are expected to surpass the $550 million penalty that Goldman Sachs paid last year to settle allegations that it misled investors in a mortgage-bond investment called Abacus 2007-AC1.

True Scale Of Glencore’s Trading Empire Unveiled (FT)
Glencore disclosed that it controls 45 percent of the third-party lead market, 38 percent in alumina, and between 30 and 20 percent for aluminium, cobalt and thermal coal. It has a smaller market share for nickel, ferrochrome, oil and grains. The sheer dominance of raw materials trading is set to play into Glencore’s favor as it pushes for a 15-20 percent stake sale worth $9 – $11 billion in London and Hong Kong.

Moody’s Cuts Ireland By Two Notches (Reuters)
Moody’s cut Ireland’s sovereign rating by two notches, to BAA3 from BAA1, to the verge of junk status on Friday and kept its outlook on negative.

Greece To Unveil Austerity Measures To Meet Deficit Goals (Bloomberg)
The government’s medium term-fiscal policy plan will detail more than 22 billion euros ($31.9 billion) of deficit-reduction measures through 2014, most of them in spending cuts, according to Finance Minister George Papaconstantinou. The government is also expected to unveil plans to raise 15 billion euros by 2013 through state-asset sales.

Deutsche Expands Nordic Focus as Bank Lands Biggest Merger Deal (Bloomberg)
Deutsche Bank which won 2011’s biggest Scandinavian corporate-finance deal when it led DuPont Co.’s bid for Danisco A/S, is boosting its Nordic unit as the pace of mergers in the region tops that of Europe and the U.S. “The Nordic market is playing a more important role relative to the rest of Europe,” said Jan Olsson, head of Deutsche Bank’s Nordic investment banking division, in an interview in Stockholm. Deutsche Bank set up a four-person currency team in Stockholm last year. The company also started offering corporate finance services at its Oslo branch, which until 2010 only provided banking to the country’s shipping industry.

JPMorgan Bankers Who Doubted Madoff In 2007 Are Named (NYT)
Those executives are John J. Hogan, the bank’s chief risk officer for investment banking; Matthew E. Zames, who oversees several important bank trading operations; and Carlos M. Hernandez, the head of global equities at the bank’s investment banking unit.

Mexican Economy Shrugs Off Narco War (CNBC)
“The buzz that has surrounded the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China) and other fast-growing emerging economies in recent years has largely passed Mexico by, and arguably for good reason” said Rafael De La Fuente, an economist at UBS in a research note. Despite the drug war, Mexico’s economy took off last year with growth of 5.5 percent and UBS is predicting 2011 growth will hit 4.8 percent.

JPMorgan Pushes Microchip Card In Race With Wells Fargo (Bloomberg)
JPMorgan will first offer the card exclusively to affluent customers. Clients with a JPMorgan Palladium credit card, which has a $595 annual fee, will receive a chip card by June, the company said. “Initially, we are targeting the technology to our highest-spend clients,” Porter said. “Months after that we will issue the card to Chase-branded products.”

Adidas Debuts World’s Lightest Basketball Shoe to Tackle Nike (Bloomberg)
Adidas introduced the AdiZero Crazy Light shoe in New York yesterday. It has a weight of 9.8 ounces and is more than 15 percent lighter than any competing model, including Nike’s LeBron Air Max 8 V/2.

Luxury Spending By Rich To Rise; Value Sought (Reuters)
Spending by rich Americans on luxury goods is set to grow by $26.6 billion in 2011, with the number of affluent families planning to spend more almost doubling in the past three years, a poll found on Friday.

Firms Tip Scales Back In Favor Of Stocks (WSJ)
Companies such as Expedia are increasingly resorting to spinoffs, share buybacks and other financial engineering to boost market value, often to the detriment of bondholders. And in a switch, holders of investment-grade bonds are more at risk than those holding high-yield securities, because the safer bonds typically provide fewer protections against such shareholder-friendly actions.

Raj’s High Wires (NYP)
Just weeks before his trial on insider-trading charges, Galleon Group founder Raj Rajaratnam wired a whopping $15 million to a hedge fund launched by a former employee and key defense witness, prosecutors told the jury yesterday. Rajaratnam’s investments account for $25 million of a total $35 million in Spottail’s assets under management, prosecutors showed. Rajaratnam, who faces a maximum sentence of 25 years, first invested in Spottail in September, giving Schutte $10 million. Then, on Jan. 4, two months before Rajaratnam was scheduled to go on trial in Manhattan federal court, his family wired an additional $15 million to Spottail, prosecutors said.

World’s Oldest Man Dies In Montana (Reuters)
A 114-year-old retired railroad worker reputed to be the world’s oldest living man died of natural causes on Thursday in the farming community of Great Falls, Montana. Walter Breuning, who had lived in a local nursing home since 1980, was declared oldest man on July 18, 2009, by the Guinness Book of World Records. He retired from the railroad at age 66 and attributed his longevity to restricting daily meals to breakfast and lunch and to downing an aspirin a day.

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

Currensee, a social network for foreign exchange traders, today announced it has secured a third round of funding for $4 million. The new funding will be used to expand the sales team in Europe and develop more management tools as well as make investing easier.

Currensee considers itself a social network for traders to share and collaborate around daily trading activities. The company has a host of trading tools to help make informed trade decisions, including RSS feeds, instant messaging and Facebook widgets as well as a trader leader-board – which ranks based on performance.

The company recently launched what it calls the “Trade Leaders Investment Program,” which allows anyone to follow and automatically copy investments from top traders in the network. A valuable program if the company wants to move outside of educated and professional traders to a broader market, which may be the case as more than $3 billion in volume has been traded through the program, according to the company.

Almost a year ago, the company appeared to be experiencing rapid growth with more than 1 million traders and 5,000 members in just 6 months. Since then, the company has close to 3 million trades, which would put it on pace since the launch. However, the total member count is just 8,000, which may explain the new investment program and expanding sales team.

StockTwits appears to be the company’s closest competition, offering a social community, or network, of investors and traders with the ability to follow, exchange ideas and plan their next trade.

The Boston-based company, founded in 2008, previously secured a second round of funding for $8.8 million from from North Bridge Venture Partners, Egan-Managed Capital and Vernon & Park Capital. All three venture capital firms participated in this latest round.

Tags: currency, foreign exchange, foreign exchange traders, trading

Companies: Currensee, Egan Managed Capital, north bridge venture partners, Vernon & Park Capital

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

KupiVIP, Russia’s first online shopping club with more than 7 million members, has raised $55 million in a record funding.

KupiVIP hosts up to 20 private online flash sales every day, much like the Western rival Gilt Groupe. It sells heavily discounted fashion and home goods from 1,200 luxury brands. The deal shows that social shopping is a trend that is remaking e-commerce around the globe.

The third round of funding is a record for a Russian e-commerce business and will help the company offer white label e-commerce services to international brands.

New investors include Balderton Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners and Russia Partners. Existing investors Accel Partners and Mangrove Capital Partners did not invest in the new round.

Dharmash Mistry, a partner at Balderton Capital, said Russia is the second-largest internet market in Europe and will soon overtake Germany thanks to its 35-percent year-over-year growth.

KupiVIP was launched in October 2008 and has 750 employees. Its prices are typically reduced 70 percent for its members. But the company has also launched its “private e-commerce services” for other retailers such as Quiksilver and TSUM (Russia’s leading luxury retailer).

The Moscow-based company was founded by 28-year-old Oskar Hartmann, a German-born entrepreneur. The company previously raised $20 million in January 2010 from Accel and Mangrove. Revenue in 2010 grew 600 percent. Hartmann says the company is only beginning to scratch the surface. More than 200,000 customers log in each day, and the company delivers millions of packages a year.

Tags: fashion, online social club, social shopping

Companies: Accel Partners, balderton capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, KupiVIP, Mangrove Capital Partners, Russia Partners

People: dharmash mistry, Oskar Hartmann

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Last week we reported that the Forbes 2011 Midas List of the top 100 tech investors included only two women.

What may have escaped notice is that only two investors based in Europe made it onto the list: Antoine Papiernik of Sofinnova Partners (No. 36) and Danny Rimer of Index Ventures (No. 59).

The Midas List ranks top venture capitalists according to their leadership within a firm or sector, the firm’s overall standing in the venture capital industry and an analysis of the firm’s disclosed M&A’s and IPO exits. Based on Forbes’ analysis, Europe appears to be the stepchild of the venture capital world.

I tracked down Papiernik and Rimer and asked them about investing in Europe. According to Business Insider, Europe has the smallest stockpile of venture capital funds in the world. While the US has $77 billion in “dry powder” (funds available for investment) as of April 2011, VC funds focused on Europe have $28 billion, while Asia and the rest of the world is sitting on $51 billion.

Danny Rimer started Index Ventures’ London office and has been involved in European success stories like MySql, Last.Fm and Skype. He pointed out that the Forbes list is very US-centric in that it doesn’t include many Asian investors either. He says “It’s like the world series of baseball”, i.e. global in title, but not in reality.

Papiernik, who specializes in Life Sciences and whose fund has been involved in 3 billion dollars in company exits in the past two years, agrees that venture capital is still seen as a US business. “LPs (limited partners, who provide the money to VC funds) traditionally tend to look in their back mirrors”, he says, and European venture capital is not what they see there. Rimer told me that “Europe is not considered to be a hotbed of innovation and good liquidity results” and that his fund has made a good business out of that perception.

Rimer highlights a trend in European tech companies like music subscription service Spotify or multiplayer game portal Gameforge, which have the potential to go global and are even being cloned in the U.S. He would like to see more European IPOs and European companies buying local startups. Papiernik notes that big pharma is closing down a lot of research labs in Europe so many more qualified people are available to start companies.

Given that the European VC market probably has considerable room to grow, it’s surprising that more U.S. venture firms are not looking to expand in that direction. “In life sciences there is more of a level playing field worldwide. Big pharma doesn’t care where a company is,” concludes Papiernik. Sounds like good business to me.

Tags: Europe, Midas List, Venture Capital

Companies: Forbes, Gameforge, spotify

People: Antoine Papiernik, Danny Rimer

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals