Corrections or additions?
This article was prepared for the January 16, 2002 edition of U.S.
1 Newspaper. All rights reserved.
Life in the Fast Lane
On Wednesday, January 9, Merrill Lynch announced it
had laid off 9,000 employees, 16 percent of its staff, and that it
was taking a $2.2 billion charge. The country’s number one brokerage
house is leading its peers in slashing jobs. Its staffing, as high
as 72,000 not too long ago, is down to 57,000, and more cuts are
expected.
In October the company offered severance packages to all of its
employees,
and the lay-offs began in November.
The Princeton area lost some jobs but also gained some. A Denver
operations
center will close by midyear and 650 customer service jobs, about
two-thirds of those at the Denver Meridian Complex, will move to the
Hopewell campus.
Merrill Lynch will hire locally to fill the positions of Denver
residents
who choose not to move. Most of these jobs will involve customer
service
— answering calls from current and prospective clients. Some will
require a license to give financial advice.
As Merrill consolidates, the Hopewell campus is rapidly adding people
and there are now 5,000 people there. Another 3,000 people are spread
among the Scudders Mill headquarters campus, Morgan Lane, College
Road, and Roszel Road, swelling the total in Central Jersey to 8,000,
up from 6,500 last year.
Other slashes in the budget amounting to $1 billion involve closing
and subletting excess office space ($500 million), writing down
technology
assets ($300 million) and other costs totaling $200 million.
Top Of PageAnthrax Clean-Up: No Windfall
`We haven’t dealt with anthrax
before.
Nobody has,” says Bill Mulvey, spokesman for the IT Group
(NYSE:ITX).
The corporation, with headquarters in Pittsburgh and a 175-person
office in the Horizon Business Center, does, however, have substantial
experience in hazardous waste clean-up. When the deadly toxin was
sent through the mail last fall, the IT Group got the call to clean
it up in contaminated post offices and in the Hart Senate Office
Building.
Now the IT Group itself is in dire need of remediation. In
mid-December,
with debt approaching $700 million, and its stock priced at 38 cents
a share, the New York Stock Exchange applied to the SEC to delist
the company. The stock had traded as high as $7.85 a share during
the previous 52 weeks.
The company is retrenching, and Mulvey says it is looking into all
options, including restructuring its loans, the sale of all or part
of its business, and bankruptcy. Four hundred employees, out of a
staff of 8,000, were laid off at the end of last year, and more
lay-offs
are possible in 2002. Nine of the employees who lost their jobs had
been working out of the Hamilton office. The company has announced
that 21 of its offices will be closed or consolidated. Mulvey says
the Hamilton office is not among them, and will stay open.
The IT Corporation, the entity in charge of the anthrax clean-ups,
is the largest wholly-owned subsidiary of the IT Group. In addition
to environmental clean-ups, the IT Group manages facilities, including
the Kennedy Space Center and a number of military bases, and takes
on wetlands projects. “We put the Kissimmee River back on its
natural course,” Mulvey gives as an example.
Work on the anthrax clean ups continues. Mulvey says he checked into
the clean-up of the Trenton main post office, in Hamilton, as recently
as last week. “There’s nothing new in Hamilton,” he says.
The post office still has not decided how to rid that facility of
its extensive anthrax contamination. Until a more encompassing
solution
is decided upon, Mulvey says his company’s employees are working at
purging the anthrax by hand.
There has been talk that the Trenton post office clean up is just
too difficult, and that the facility should be abandoned. “If
they decide the clean-up is not worth it, I don’t know what that
means,”
says Mulvey. Could the building just be sealed? Or bulldozed? Would
that take care of the problem? Mulvey says it is a thorny question
and would require extensive input from the CDC and other experts in
disease control.
Meanwhile, the IT Group is working on a solution to its financial
problems. Mulvey says he expects the company will be able to complete
its anthrax clean-up contracts. After all, he says, “anthrax is
a short term problem. Or, at least, we hope it is.”
— Kathleen McGinn Spring
Novatia Corporation, 301A College Road East,Princeton08540. Mark E. Hail, president. 609-951-0181; fax, 609-951-0185.Homepage: www.enovatia.comFour partners — one of them the owner of TaylorTechnology — have opened an analytical chemical services companywithin the walls of Taylor Technology. It works with researchscientistsand managers to do consulting, contract analysis, devise products,and research collaborations. It can work with mass spectrometry,separationstechnology, nuclear magnetic resonance, and data management in anyof these industries: pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and chemical.The partners are Jeff Whitney, Mark Hail, Dave Detlefsen, and PaulTaylor.”We provide our services and products separately or as completesolutions that integrate all aspects of instrumentation, methods,and data management,” says Whitney. He majored in molecular andcell biology at the University of Massachusetts (Class of 1990) andjoined B-MS in Connecticut, where he led work on ultra-high throughputdata processing. In 1998, for Coelacanth in East Windsor, hecoordinatedthe Analytical Chemistry Group. He is now vice president atCoelacanth.Taylor is a graduate of Michigan State with a doctorate in plantpathologyfrom the University of Wisconsin who very successfully founded andsold his first firm. He had opened an analytical environmentallaboratorythat merged with others to form Enesco, the largest of its kind inthe country. It was sold to Corning in 1989. Then he opened TaylorTechnology in 1991 (U.S. 1, November 20, 1991). With Novatia, he plansto collaborate on new drugs and proteomics.Hail went to the University of Kentucky, Class of 1984, and has aPhD in analytical chemistry from the University of Florida. He workedon triple gradupole tandem mass spectrometers at Finnigan Corporationin San Jose. He joined Bristol-Myers Squibb in 1994 as part of amultidisciplinarygroup, Investigative Analytical Research, to help automate thecharacterizationof biological drug targets and synthetic organic compounds. He leftB-MS last year.Detlefsen went to Nebraska Wesleyan University (Class of 1983) andhas a PhD in chemistry from the University of Michigan. He didpostdoctoralresearch at Harvard Medical School and went to Bristol-Myers Squibb,where he developed NMR-based methods for the structure analysis ofbiomolecules. He left B-MS last July.”Our goal is to accelerate drug discovery and product developmentcycles by providing services and products that address criticalanalyticalapplication needs,” says Whitney.Top Of PageExpansionsMerrill-Adams Associates, 202 Carnegie Center,Suite 103, Princeton 08540. Ken Levinson, senior vice president.609-275-2992;fax, 609-951-9110. E-mail: merrilpn@voicenet.com,Www.merrill-adams.comThe six-person office of an executive career marketingfirm has tripled its space with a move from Forrestal Village to theCarnegie Center. Founded by Grant Shannon, Merrill-Adams Associatesis based in Parsippany and also has offices in Philadelphia andRockefellerCenter in Manhattan. It had been at Forrestal Village for 10 years.Merrill Adams works in 100 different industries but focuses on a nichemarket: fee-based services for senior level executives making between$75,000 and $1 million. In 15 years it has placed more than 8,000professionals.Merrill-Adams’ fees are determined by the effort that needs to putforth. “If someone contracts with us, we do everything forthem,”says Ken Levinson, senior vice president, “but we can do differentthings for different people. Someone may require three resumes.Anothermay need a biography and cover letter. The fee depends on how muchresearch and how much coaching is needed.””Many times we will work with someone who is fully employed butwants to make a change,” says Levinson. He can help individualsget an advancement within a company or empower them to transitionto a new industry. “I don’t think other companies specialize inthat.”Levinson grew up in New York City and graduated in 1983 from YorkCollege, in Queens, as a geological sciences major. He sold insurancefor Prudential and rose to managerial positions with a staff of 300people in multiple locations. When he left in 1999 to joinMerrill-Adams,he was a vice president.The move was a quality of life decision, says Levinson. “I wentfrom managing large numbers of people in the insurance industry toa very small company, from a very high-profile stressful job to afamily-owned business. And my involvement with marketing programs,recruiting, and training gives me an unusual perspective on variousjob markets.”Levinson makes no promises about his success rate, which he says willfluctuate according to the industry and the job market as a whole.And just because the client pays a fee, he or she is not guaranteeda job. “It is against the law for us to promise a job,” saysLevinson. “We are not a job placement agency.”Top Of PageManagement MovesAmerican Re Corporation, 555 College Road East,Box 5241, Princeton 08543-5241. Edward J. Noonan, president, CEO.609-243-4200; fax, 609-243-4257. Home page: www.amre.comAfter 18 years with American Re Corporation, Edward J. Noonan, 43,will resign as president and CEO in March. The announcement was madeby Munich Re, the world’s largest reinsurance company, which paid$3.3 billion for American Re in 1996. Noonan took over as presidentearly in 1997.As the company finished its third straight year of losses, RainerKueppers, spokesman for Munich Re, told Rueters that “thedevelopmentof American Re has not been as good as we would have wanted it tobe.”Last year, with a huge bill from the September 11 attacks, wasparticularlybad, but there was trouble well before that. The Financial Timesreportedin early-2000 that the entire U.S. re-insurance industry was introuble,and that things were particularly bad for American Re. The publicationquoted Noonan as saying, “it is hard to identify a line ofbusinessin the industry today which is adequately priced.”The Financial Times went on to say “while the industry’s combinedratio in 1999 was already 114.3, the third highest of the decade,American Reinsurance’s ratio was a desperate 120. In other words,the company’s expenses and claims outweighed the income taken in onpremiums by an incredible 20 cents on the dollar.”Noonan subsequently reduced the ratio, and there was hope that thecompany, the second largest in the U.S. reinsurance market, wouldbe profitable in 2001. Said Kueppers, “Our senior managers agreedwith Noonan that 2001 should end in profit. It became clear weeksbefore the end of the year that this would not be the case, evenwithoutthe losses from September 11. We discussed the situation and Noonanhas resigned.”Noonan, a graduate of St. John’s University, joined American Re in1983 as a production assistant in the Treaty Division. In 1989, heassumed responsibility for U.S. treaty operations, and in 1992, forall business with U.S. insurance companies.Noonan’s replacement is John P. Phelan, president of Munich Re’sCanadiangroup. Phelan, 54, was born and raised in Kilkenny, Ireland, graduatedfrom Patrician College in Ireland, and worked for Guardian Insuranceand Lukis Stewart Price Forbes in Montreal. He joined MunichReinsuranceCompany of Canada in 1973.Top Of PageDeathsDavid Fox Milton, 41, on December 8 in Quito, Ecuador.He was a corporate account executive for Peterson’s.John F. Drake, 64, on January 5. He was a real estateagent for Weidel Realtors.Ira N. Weinstein, 53, on January 8. He had been vicepresidentof Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. in Princeton.William J. Lister, 64, on January 11. He was aself-employedcertified public accountant. A memorial mass will be Saturday, January19, at 11 a.m. at St. Paul’s Church in Princeton.Jacqueline Washington, 61, on January 13. She had workedat the Medical Center of Princeton for more than 40 years.Corrections or additions?This page is published by PrincetonInfo.com— the web site for U.S. 1 Newspaper in Princeton, New Jersey.
