H-P stock takes 13% hit

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H-P stock takes 13% hit

Coming off the biggest quarterly loss in Hewlett-Packard’s history, CEO Meg Whitman on Wednesday braced investors for even more trouble ahead. Those challenges will be compounded by a feeble economy that Whitman expects to weaken even more during the next year.

HP said the internal and economic turmoil will cause its earnings to fall by more than 10 percent next year, a decline that hadn’t been anticipated by analysts who follow one of the world’s largest — and most dysfunctional — technology companies.

Investors evidently didn’t like what they heard. HP’s stock plunged 13 percent, shoving the company’s shares to their lowest level in nearly a decade.

Metro jobless rates fall

Unemployment rates fell in nearly 90 percent of large U.S. metro areas in August, mainly because more people gave up looking for work.

The Labor Department said Wednesday that unemployment rates dropped in 329 large cities, the most in four months. Rates rose in 24 cities and were unchanged in 19.

The figures are not adjusted for seasonal variations. The rate in the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre area fell on that basis but was up two-tenths of a percentage point when seasonally adjusted.

Drug firms reveamp deal

Bristol-Myers Squibb and France’s Sanofi are revamping their longtime partnership marketing some of their best-selling medications, blood thinner Plavix and blood pressure drugs Avapro and Avalide.

All three drugs got generic competition in the U.S. in the spring. The billions of dollars in annual sales they had generated for years is quickly shrinking.

Bristol-Myers will keep selling Plavix in the U.S. through December 2019.

Airline union gets boost

A federal appeals court has ruled against American Airlines, which tried to block a union election among nearly 10,000 employees.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans overturned a district court judge’s ruling in American’s favor. The appeals court said Wednesday that the judge didn’t have grounds to invalidate a federal panel’s decision to schedule an election among American’s passenger-service agents.