Lou Gutheil

High in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, in the quiet community of Lenoir, North Carolina sits a sprawling facility shrouded in mystery.  Lenoir used to be home to the most well-known scions of furniture manufacturing in the United States, but those factories and jobs have all been moved to China.  The most notable […]

“There’s nothing more important to us at Bloomberg than communicating openly and honestly about our company.” ~ Dan Doctoroff, President and CEO of Bloomberg LP, 13 May 2013. Whether it started a month ago or  whether it has “taken place in the newsroom for decades,” it is now a matter of public record.   Not […]

Mobile content provider Mobile Streams (LSE:MOS) continues to turn in stellar performance as demand for its apps, games, music, videos and eBooks increases around the globe.  The company that operates through the cleverly named storefront appitalism® has watched it share price rise from the 4.0 range, where it hovered for several years until September 2010, […]

Just one day after announcing a 300% increase in pre-tax profits and optimism that 2013 will be a better year operationally, Lonmin’s share price (LSE:LMI) took a hit when the company announced yet another labor-related problem at its Marikana mine.  Employees showed up for work, but refused to enter the shafts. Marikana had to suspend […]

The world’s third-largest platinum miner, Lonmin (LSE:LMI), announced its six-month results this morning.  The news was a far cry from the year-end results they published on 09 November 2012.  The thing that stood out the most last November was Chairman Roger Phillimore’s statement that “The publication of today’s results closes a painful chapter in Lonmin’s […]

How bold does a CEO have to be to say, “Our performance in the quarter reflects the results of the management action we have taken,” when the performance  was a net loss of $345 million? I’d say he’d have to be even bolder to make that statement especially when the company made a net profit […]

Sony Corporation (NYSE:SNE) has turned in lackluster performance over the five years since 2008, failing to find the right combination of product and operating vitality necessary to pull it out of the doldrums it got stuck in during the global financial crisis.  Whilst one might not be impressed see Sony’s share price decline 1.4% to […]

We’re only at midweek, but traders are celebrating on selling floors around the world as the leading indexes continue to rise to lofty and, in some cases, record highs. The Footsie 100 closed up 35.8 points yesterday to reach its highest point since December 2007.  The Nikkei Index broke past the 14,000 mark to 14,180 […]

Okay.  I admit it.  We’ve been hard on HSBC (LSE:HSBA) this past 12 months.  In fact, I gave them a pretty strong poke in the eye just two weeks ago today on 23 April, when I berated them for their treatment of the “little people.”  And I was a wee bit sarcastic about them about […]

Whilst the UK was enjoying a bank holiday, Apple and Facebook were celebrating their individual statuses on the Fortune 500.  The Fortune 500 ranks the largest U.S. companies by revenue. Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) broke into the top 10 for the first time.  It became the only tech company in the current top 10 elite U.S. stocks, when […]