The Fortune 500 comes out just once a year, but the companies on it make headlines every day. Here then are today’s highlights of news and happenings coming from the biggest names in business.
By Shelley DuBois, reporter
DOES NETFLIX EVEN SHIP TO ALBANIA? The video rental company is about to stop being a threat to bigger cable networks, Time Warner (TWX) total domination of the sector to that of the Albanian army taking over the world. [New York Times]
BRITISH OIL TAKES GE BACK TO ITS ROOTS After turning GE (GE) down twice, the British oil and gas services company Wellstream agreed to a $1.3 billion bid. GE CEO Jeff Immelt said the deal will help GE on its path to tighten up its core plan of making stuff rather than financing stuff. [Financial Times]
MAJOR GROCER FILES CHAPTER 11 A&P, or the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Co. (GAP) filed for bankruptcy, partially due to problems securing deals with its supplier. The grocer borrowed about $800 million from JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) to finance the bankruptcy proceedings. [Wall Street Journal]
WIKILEAKS BAD MEDICINE FOR PFIZER A cable from the U.S. Embassy in Africa in the latest wave of documents published by the website Wikileaks could provide evidence that Pfizer (PFE) tried to blackmail the Nigerian attorney general. The cable, sent in 2009, implies that the drug company funded an investigation to dig up dirt on the attorney general so he would drop charges for conducting an unethical antibiotic drug trial on Nigerian children in 1996. [Wall Street Journal]
WAL-MART’S EMPIRE STATE OF MIND The major retail store is talking with construction unions to build a store staffed with unionized workers in New York City. The New York City Council will discuss Walmart’s (WMT) Big Apple bid in January. [Wall Street Journal]
TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS President Obama is pitching his economic policies to about 20 of America’s top CEOs on Wednesday to try to gain support from the business sector. Some of the Fortune 500 companies expected to attend include IBM (IBM), Google (GOOG), Cisco (CSCO), Pepsico (PEP), Dow Chemical (DOW) and American Express (AXP). [Reuters]
FORMER GOLDMAN EMPLOYEE CONVICTED of stealing the source code for Goldman Sachs Group’s (GS) high-speed trading computer program. The convicted ex-employee, Sergey Aleynikov, is the second person accused of stealing Goldman’s code in the past two months. [Wall Street Journal]
BEST BUY WANTS THE WORM The consumer electronic company is going to start opening an hour earlier to try to milk the most it can out of the holiday season. Best Buy’s (BBY) schedule change is an attempt to counteract the overall trend of slow consumer spending during the rest of the year. [Boston Globe]
