B/E Aerospace announced Monday that it plans to make a public offering of 13 million shares of its common stock. The Florida-based parent company of Marysville’s Flight Structures Inc. said it plans to use the money to pay off $250 million in loans. Also Monday, the company announced it was raising its projections for 2006 profits. B/E said its managers now expect profits next year to top 2005’s performance by about 40 percent, in part because of an accounting change.
SonoSite scanner gets test by NASA
A hand-carried ultrasound machine made by Bothell’s SonoSite Inc. will be used by NASA to practice the emergency treatment of a knee injury in space. The test will be conducted aboard the Aquarius, located under about 60 feet of water near Key Largo, Fla. It is designed to replicate a shelter that would house astronauts on the Moon. Each aquanaut will use SonoSite’s notebook-sized MicroMaxx system.
County hotels get fuller in October
Sixty-five percent of Snohomish County’s hotel and motel rooms stayed full during October, a slight improvement compared to the same month in 2004, according to Smith Travel Research. For the year to date, however, overall occupancy at the county’s hotels is up 14 percent over last year’s first 10 months. The average room charge in October was $70.98.
Delta Air Lines stock buyback questioned
Delta Air Lines Inc., which lost $2.6 billion in the first nine months of this year, needs the $3 billion in annual cost savings from its reorganization plan to survive, chief financial officer Edward Bastian told a bankruptcy court on Monday. But U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Prudence Carter Beatty said Delta may have been wrong to spend $2.4 billion to buy back its own shares. “It is a question of if you had that money rather than had spent it that way, you might not be in the position you are in,” she said.
T-bill rates mixed in Monday auction
The Treasury Department auctioned three-month bills at a discount rate of 3.9 percent, down from 3.94 percent last week. Six-month bills were auctioned at a discount rate of 4.155 percent, unchanged from last week. The discount rates reflect that the bill sells for less than face value. For a $10,000 bill, the three-month price was $9,901.42 while a six-month bill sold for $9,789.94. Separately, the Federal Reserve said Monday that the average yield for one-year Treasury bills, a popular index for changing adjustable rate mortgages, fell to 4.3 percent last week from 4.36 percent the previous week.
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