- Tech Mahindra won the auction for a controlling stake in Satyam Computer Services, the disgraced Indian outsourcing group. Tech Mahindra, which is partly owned by British telecommunications group BT, will pay $353m for a 31 per cent state in Satyam, which is still reeling from an accounting scandal that has made its former chairman the target of criminal investigations.
- Seagate scrapped its dividend payments and raised $430m in a secured bond issue as it tried to weather the steep downturn in the diskdrive business. The latest evidence of collapsing profit margins wiped nearly 5 per cent off its share price, even as the company gained market share.
- Amazon began re-ranking books that were affected by this weekend’s bug that caused thousands of titles, many of them gay and lesbian themed titles, to mysteriously disappear from the site’s ranking system.
- Ebay is reportedly preparing to buy a controlling stake in Gmarket, the South Korean auction site. Ebay operates a version of its auction site in South Korea, but in recent years Gmarket has emerged as its main local competitor. The deal, which has been rumoured for months, will give eBay the dominant position in the country’s auctions business.
- Car battery maker A123 Systems raised $69m, with $15m of that coming from General Electric. The new funding will allow A123 to scale up production of its lithium-ion batteries as more car companies begin incorporating them into hybrid and electric cars. GE, which had already but $55m into A123, received a board seat in exchange for its latest investment and now controls about 10 per cent of the company .
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