Corrections or additions?
This article by Barbara Fox was prepared for the July 17, 2002 edition of U.S. 1 Newspaper. All rights reserved.
Life in the Fast Lane
Starwood Capital, the owner of the Princeton Marriott
at Forrestal Village, says it will convert that 294-room hotel to
a Westin brand hotel by September. Starwood owns the Westin brand,
and it also owns Sheraton, Four Points, St. Regis and W Hotels names.
In 1997, when Starwood bought the building for $19.6 million, Marriott
had the management contract, but that contract is expiring.
Meanwhile Marriott has opened its own property, the Lafayette Yard
Marriott Conference Hotel, in Trenton. And a developer, Bill King
of King Interests on Nassau Street, has submitted an application to
West Windsor to build a 74,000 square foot Marriott Residence Inn
at Canal Pointe, adjacent to the office building there. The Marriott
chain also owns a Residence Inn on Route 1 South in South Brunswick
and a Courtyard by Marriott on Route 1 South between Mapleton and
Scudders Mill Roads.
King hopes to start construction by the end of the year. The 3 1/2
acre site, contiguous to the AmeriSuites Hotel, is owned by Princeton
Land Partners (controlled by Carnegie Center developer Alan Landis)
and would be sold to Carnegie Hotel Developers LLC. Residence Inn
rooms typically are 50 percent larger than rooms at regular hotels.
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Bristol-Myers Woes
To meet sales targets Bristol-Myers gave hefty incentives
to wholesalers to stock up. Since April, the SEC has been investigating
these incentives, and on July 11 the company owned up to the investigation.
Bristol-Myers spokesman Bonnie Jacobs says the company is cooperating
with the SEC, and that the ongoing dialogue does not reflect any new
information. "The SEC has not stated to the company that it has
done anything improper in connection with the inventory situation,"
says Jacobs. The company has other troubles. After it had paid $2
billion to partner with would-be cancer curer ImClone, the FDA rejected
the drug and the CEO was arrested for insider trading. Also the company’s
patents are expiring on the cancer drug Taxol, the anti-anxiety drug
BuSpar and the diabetes treatment Glucophage — and the results
for a hypertension drug, Vanlev, were disappointing.
Still, the Bristol-Myers Squibb accounting problems are small potatoes
compared to those of Enron, Andersen, Tyco, Global Crossing, Qwest,
WorldCom, Xerox, and Vivendi. And its compatriots in the industry
are suffering too. Merck has admitted it had overstated its revenues
and costs by including about $14 billion paid to retail pharmacies
over three years, and this brouhaha postponed an IPO for Merck’s Medco
benefits subsidiary again. Also Elan, the Irish owners of the 130-person
former Liposome Company on Research Way, admitted to using off-balance
sheet vehicles in January. That, plus some approval setbacks, drove
out Donal Geaney and Tom Lynch, Elan’s chairman and CFO respectively,
from their jobs.
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Down-Sizings
The state’s private sector has seen its largest employment
decline in a decade, says the New Jersey Business & Industry Association.
Private companies lost jobs since the recession officially started
in July, 2001, with two-thirds of the workers losing their jobs in
the first five months of 2002.
"The continuing job losses tell us the recession isn’t over yet,"
says Joe Gonzalez, NJBIA president. "The hoped-for spring turnaround
has not materialized, the economy remains sluggish, and companies
are still cutting expenses." One third of these losses were in
the manufacturing industry. Among U.S. 1 area cutbacks:
Road, Windsor Business Park, Box 7528, Princeton 08543-7528. Robert
V. Tarantino, CEO. 609-799-0071; fax, 609-936-1369. Home page:
With its headquarters on Princeton Hightstown Road, Dataram designs
and manufactures high performance memory products for the server,
workstation and PC markets. Last month Dataram cut nearly one fourth
of its workforce worldwide and expects to save $2.5 million.
Despite this action, the 35-year-old company says it has preserved
its "key resources," the global sales team and its manufacturing
expertise. Dataram has such customers as Intel, Compaq, Dell, Fujitsu
Siemens, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, SGI, Sun, and Toshiba.
Box 5241, Princeton 08543-5241. John P. Phelan, president, CEO. 609-243-4200;
fax, 609-243-4257. Home page: www.amre.com
has started another round of layoffs. Counting cuts made last November,
they will amount to about 10 percent of the workforce. The most recent
layoffs, 100 people from the international insurance division, involve
both early retirement packages and severance agreements. About 800
people work on College Road West and College Road East, and a spokesperson
could not estimate how many of the layoffs involve those jobs.
American Re is a leading writer of reinsurance in the United States
and is part of the Munich Re Group. It serves insurers in more than
150 countries.
In 2001 American Re lost $862 million, mostly due to the terrorist
attacks. But underpriced contracts — cases where the risks turned
out to be greater than risk managers estimated — account for earlier
losses, $64 million in 2000 and a $101 million in 1999.
David Erik Chase AIA, CEO. 609-452-8888; fax, 609-452-8332. Www.hillier.com
downsizing that cut the total number of employees from 380 to 350
nationwide. About 200 people still work at Alexander Park office of
New Jersey’s largest and the country’s fourth-largest architectural
firm.
"Two big five-year jobs happened to wind down at the same time,"
says Lois Etz, a principal at Hillier. "We just finished the biggest
job in the United States, a 4 million square foot campus for Sprint
in Kansas City, and the biggest job in the United Kingdom, for Glaxo
Smith-Kline in London. And our institutional and corporate clients
just aren’t building as much in today’s business climate."
Some of the architects who left were not riffed but left for personal
reasons, Etz says. Hillier’s latest projects are to design 110 schools
in Buffalo and a student center in Dallas. It also has the new Princeton
Public Library and the Princeton school renovation, among other projects.
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Deaths
with Princeton Plasma Physics Lab.
Laboratories on Morgan Lane and FMC Corporation.
Corrections or additions?
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