A11
B USINESS
THE BULLETIN • TUESDAY, APRIL 6, 2021
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BRIEFING
LG to exit mobile
phone business
South Korean elec-
tronics maker LG said
Monday it is getting out
of its loss-making mobile
phone business to focus
on electric vehicle com-
ponents, robotics, artifi-
cial intelligence and other
products and services.
LG’s board approved
the shift in strategy and
the company expects
to fully exit the mobile
phone business by the
end of July, it said in a
statement.
LG was once the
third-largest mobile
phone maker but has lost
market share to Chinese
and other competitors.
It was still No. 3 in
North America, with a
13% market share be-
hind Apple’s 39% and
Samsung’s 30% as of the
third-quarter of 2020, ac-
cording to Counterpoint
Technology Market Re-
search.
The company said it
was selling its phone in-
ventory and would con-
tinue to provide services
and support for various
periods of time depend-
ing on where they are
sold.
Amazon illegally
fired 2 workers
The National Labor Re-
lations Board has found
that two outspoken Ama-
zon workers were illegally
fired last year.
Both employees, Emily
Cunningham and Maren
Costa, worked at Amazon
offices in Seattle and pub-
licly criticized the com-
pany, pushing it to do
more to reduce its impact
on climate change and to
better protect warehouse
workers from the coro-
navirus.
Cunningham shared
with The Associated Press
an email from the NLRB,
which said it found that
Amazon violated the
rights of the two workers.
The government agency
also confirmed on Mon-
day that it found merit in
the case.
In a statement, Ama-
zon said it fired the em-
ployees for repeatedly
violating internal policies,
not because they talked
publicly about working
conditions or sustain-
ability.
Cunningham said the
ruling proves that they
were on the right side of
history.
“Amazon tried to si-
lence us,” said Cunning-
ham. “It didn’t work.”
U.S. services sector
hits record high
The U.S. services sec-
tor, which employs most
Americans, recorded re-
cord growth in March as
the easing of coronavi-
rus restrictions released
pent-up consumer de-
mand.
The Institute for Sup-
ply Management, an as-
sociation of purchasing
managers, reported Mon-
day that its nonmanufac-
turing index rose to an all-
time high 63.7 last month
from 55.3 in February. The
old record of 60.9 was set
in October 2018.
New orders also hit a
record, and hiring and
prices grew faster.
Anything above 50
signals growth, and the
services sector, which
includes banks, retailers
and restaurants, is on a
10-month winning streak
since rebounding from
the economic impact of
the pandemic in spring
2020. The March read-
ing was much higher
than economists had ex-
pected.
— Bulletin wire reports
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Deschutes Brewery ranked
nation’s No. 10 craft brewer
With New Belgium no longer a craft
brewer, Deschutes jumps up a spot
BY MICHAEL KOHN • The Bulletin
espite having a down year in terms of sales volume, Deschutes
Brewery gained ground in a list of the top country’s top beer
sellers.
The Bend-based brewer ranked 10th among craft breweries and 19th
overall, according to a list produced by the Brewers Association. The
association ranked the top 50 craft brewers and top 50 overall brewers.
The beer industry suffered heavy
losses early in the pandemic when
restaurants and bars closed for
months on end, limiting the amount
of draft beer sold. Packaged beer sales
did increase for many companies as
Americans bought more canned and
bottled beer to drink at home. But the
overall numbers were still down for
most brewers.
Last year, Deschutes took the 11th
spot in the ranking of craft breweries.
It jumped one spot in 2020 after New
Belgium Beer was acquired by Kirin.
That acquisition took New Belgium
out of the craft beer category.
To meet the definition of a craft
brewery, a company must have an an-
nual production of 6 million barrels
of beer or less. The brewer must also
meet the definition of independent,
meaning that no more than 25% of
the craft brewery can be owned by a
company that is not a craft brewer.
Deschutes Brewery sold 235,000 bar-
rels of beer last year, according to Erin
Ranin, marketing and communica-
tions specialist for Deschutes Brewery.
In 2019, Deschutes shipped 288,966
barrels of beer, which was down from
311,000 barrels of beer in 2018.
“After the challenging year we’ve
had, we’re glad we’re still here and
we are looking forward to improving
trends, which it looks like we’re be-
ginning to see,” said Deschutes Brew-
ery founder Gary Fish. “Our team is
psyched for the future.”
Deschutes Brewery’s recent acqui-
sition of Boneyard Beer could help
boost the company’s sales in 2021. In
2019, Boneyard sold close to 30,000
barrels of beer, all in draft.
Bart Watson, chief economist for
the Boulder, Colorado-based Brew-
ers Association, said production fell
across the board in 2020 and many
companies were put in a bind finan-
cially. The hardest-hit companies were
those that rely more heavily on draft
beer for their sales portfolio.
“The total craft industry was down
for the first time in the modern era,”
said Watson. “Many brewers had
tough years, but it’s difficult to sepa-
rate which of those struggles are go-
ing to continue and which were sim-
ply due to the unique nature of 2020.”
America’s top-selling craft brewery
last year was D.G. Yuengling and Son
Inc., this country’s longest-running
brewery, founded nearly 200 years
ago. The other companies rounding
out the top 10: Boston Beer Co., Sierra
Nevada Brewing Co., Duvel Moortgat,
Gambrinus, CANarchy, Bell’s Brewery
Inc., Artisanal Brewing Ventures and
Stone Brewing.
Ninkasi Brewing Co., based in Eu-
gene, ranked 33rd place among craft
brewers and 42nd overall. Rogue Ales
Brewery, based in Newport, ranked
37th among craft brewers and 46th
place overall.
EURO
$1.1811 +.0048
Northwest
officials
consider
hydrogen
fuel option
Associated Press
Ryan Brennecke/The Bulletin
D
p
Pandemic gutted jobs
at Oregon breweries
Employment at Oregon breweries
tumbled 43% in the first months of the
pandemic. While many of those jobs
bounced back over the summer as the
state gradually reopened, brewery jobs
remained down nearly 29% — a greater
fall than at restaurants and bars, overall.
That’s according to a new analysis by
Damon Runberg, regional economist
with the Oregon Employment Depart-
ment. His findings underscore the degree
to which the state’s beer sector relies on
brewpubs to support Oregon’s distinctive
craft brewing segment.
People certainly didn’t drink less
during the pandemic. Liquor sales
jumped 20% in April 2020, during the first
month of the pandemic, to a record high.
The problem Oregon brewers had,
Runberg concludes, is that most don’t
simply brew beer — they also sell it in
brewpubs. And those all closed in March
2020, at the outset of the pandemic. Mc-
Menamins notably laid off “almost every-
one” as it shut down its distinctive bars,
restaurants, theaters and hotels across
the Northwest.
Oregon’s breweries were already un-
dergoing a generational transition in the
months before the pandemic hit.
Oregon breweries shed 1,000 jobs be-
tween the summer of 2019 and the start
of the pandemic, nearly 12% of the sec-
tor’s total employment. Those losses were
overshadowed by the 3,500 jobs that
vanished in the spring of 2020, but they
were significant.
If you prefer to see the stein as half full,
though, there are good reasons for opti-
mism about the months ahead.
Just 15 breweries stopped reporting
employment figures to the state during
the first six months of the pandemic,
according to Runberg’s data, 7% of the
total. That suggests the vast majority of
breweries, like the bulk of all Oregon busi-
nesses, were weathering the pandemic.
And that means they will be able to hire
again when business returns.
— The Oregonian
Reporter: 541-617-7818,
mkohn@bendbulletin.com
OLYMPIA, Wash. —
More folks from Pacific
Northwest government and
industry are jumping on
the hydrogen bandwagon
to test if the alternative fuel
could be a viable and green
replacement for diesel and
gasoline, in some situations.
The potential converts
include more than half a
dozen transit agencies from
Everett to Eugene, state leg-
islators and Boeing’s drone
subsidiary in the Columbia
River Gorge, KUOW re-
ported.
A week long demonstra-
tion tour with a hydrogen
fuel cell electric bus started
at Kitsap Transit recently
and traveled down the In-
terstate 5 corridor to eight
more stops at agencies large
and small.
“We’re studying all of
these opportunities to try
to determine what is the
best path for our com-
munity here to a cleaner
environment,” Ann
Freeman- Manzanares,
general manager of Inter-
city Transit, said when the
demonstration hydrogen
bus stopped in Olympia on
Thursday.
A hydrogen fuel cell
doesn’t burn anything. It
uses a chemical reaction
between the hydrogen fuel
and oxygen from the air to
produce electricity to drive
a motor. Fuel cell vehicle
tailpipes emit only water va-
por and warm air.
However, hydrogen fuel-
ing is comparatively more
expensive than battery elec-
tric and diesel bus technol-
ogy. The advantage is that a
hydrogen fuel-cell bus can
operate much like current
diesel buses can, but with
zero emissions and without
the range limitation and
recharging downtime that
current battery-powered
buses have.
TriMet in Portland has
committed to phasing in an
all-alternative fuel bus fleet
by 2040. So far, its evalua-
tion of options is leaning to-
ward battery electric propul-
sion. But hydrogen remains
on the table for some routes.
123RF
A bus powered by hydrogen
fuel cells sits at a bus station.
Court sides with Google in Android copyright case
BY JESSICA GRESKO
The Associated Press
The Supreme Court sided
Monday with Google in an $8
billion copyright dispute with
Oracle over the internet com-
pany’s creation of the Android
operating system used on most
smartphones worldwide.
To create Android, which
was released in 2007, Google
wrote millions of lines of new
computer code. But it also used
11,330 lines of code and an or-
ganization that’s part of Ora-
cle’s Java platform.
Google had argued that
what it did is long-settled,
common practice in the in-
dustry, a practice that has been
good for technical progress.
And it said there is no copy-
right protection for the purely
functional, noncreative com-
puter code it used, something
that couldn’t be written an-
other way. But Austin, Texas-
based Oracle said Google
“committed an egregious act of
plagiarism,” and it sued.
The justices ruled 6-2 for
Google Inc., based in Moun-
tain View, California. Two con-
servative justices dissented.
Justice Stephen Breyer wrote
that in reviewing a lower
court’s decision, the justices
assumed “for argument’s sake,
that the material was copy-
rightable.”
“But we hold that the copy-
ing here at issue nonetheless
constituted a fair use. Hence,
Google’s copying did not vi-
olate the copyright law,” he
wrote.
Justice Clarence Thomas
wrote in a dissent joined by
Justice Samuel Alito that he
believed “Oracle’s code at issue
here is copyrightable, and Goo-
gle’s use of that copyrighted
code was anything but fair.”
Only eight justices heard
the case because it was argued
in October, after the death of
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
but before Justice Amy Coney
Barrett joined the court.
In a statement, Google’s
chief legal officer, Kent Walker,
called the ruling a “victory for
consumers, interoperability,
and computer science.” “The
decision gives legal certainty to
the next generation of devel-
opers whose new products and
services will benefit consum-
ers,” Walker wrote.
Oracle’s chief legal officer,
Dorian Daley, condemned the
outcome. “The Google plat-
form just got bigger and mar-
ket power greater. The barriers
to entry higher and the ability
to compete lower. They stole
Java and spent a decade litigat-
ing as only a monopolist can,”
she wrote in a statement.
Microsoft, IBM and major
internet and tech industry lob-
bying groups had weighed in
on the case in favor of Google.
The Motion Picture Associ-
ation and the Recording In-
dustry Association of America
were among those supporting
Oracle.
The case is Google LLC v.
Oracle America Inc., 18-956.