A11
B USINESS
THE BULLETIN • TUESDAY, MAY 4, 2021
p
DOW
34,113.23 +238.38
BRIEFING
Verizon sells Yahoo
and AOL for $5B
AOL and Yahoo are be-
ing sold again, this time to
a private equity firm.
Wireless company
Verizon will sell Verizon
Media, which consists of
the once-pioneering tech
platforms, to Apollo Global
Management in a $5 bil-
lion deal.
Verizon said Monday
that it will keep a 10%
stake in the new company,
which will be called Yahoo.
Yahoo at the end of the
last century was the face
of the internet, preced-
ing the behemoth tech
platforms to follow, such
as Google and Facebook.
And AOL was the portal,
bringing almost everyone
who logged on during the
internet’s earliest days.
Verizon spent about
$9 billion buying AOL
and Yahoo over two years
starting in 2015, hoping
to jump-start a digital me-
dia business that would
compete with Google and
Facebook. It didn’t work
— those brands were al-
ready fading even then —
as Google and Facebook
and, increasingly, Amazon
dominate the U.S. digital
ad market.
Manufacturing
slowed in April
Growth in U.S. manu-
facturing slowed slightly
in April partly due to a
snarled global supply
chain after hitting a 37-
year high in March.
The Institute for Sup-
ply Management, a trade
group of purchasing man-
agers, said Monday that
its index of manufactur-
ing activity fell last month
to a reading of 60.7. That
was down from a March
reading of 64.7, which had
been the highest level
since December 1983.
Any reading above 50
indicates manufactur-
ing is expanding. April
was the 11th consecutive
month manufacturing has
grown after contracting
in April 2020, when the
country was struggling to
deal with the shutdowns
caused by a global pan-
demic.
The slowdown in April
reflected a number of
problems facing U.S. facto-
ries including disruptions
in supply chains for critical
components such as com-
puter chips.
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Trial begins over Apple’s app store fees
BY MICHAEL LIEDTKE
The Associated Press
SAN RAMON, Calif. —
Apple’s lucrative app store
was alternately portrayed as a
price-gouging monopoly and
a hub of world-changing inno-
vation during the preamble to
a trial .
The contrasting portraits
were drawn on Monday as law-
yers for Apple and its foe, Epic
Games, outlined their cases in
an Oakland, California, federal
court .
The trial, expected to last
most of this month, revolves
around the 15% to 30% com-
mission that Apple charges for
subscriptions and purchases
made from apps downloaded
from its store — the only one
accessible on the iPhone, iPad
and iPod.
Epic, the maker of the pop-
ular Fortnite video game, laid
out evidence drawn mostly
from Apple’s internal docu-
ments in an attempt to prove
the company has built a digital
“walled garden” during the past
13 years as part of a strategy
crafted by its late co-founder,
Steve Jobs. The formula, Epic
contends, is designed to make it
as difficult as possible for con-
sumers to stop buying its prod-
ucts and services.
“The most prevalent flower
in the walled garden is the Ve-
nus fly trap,” said Epic lawyer
Katherine Forrest. Later, For-
rest highlighted expert testi-
mony that will be submitted
during the trial that estimated
Apple reaped profit margins of
75% to 78% during 2018 and
2019, even though Jobs publicly
said the company didn’t expect
to make large sums of money
from the app store when it
opened in 2008.
Apple brushed off Epic’s ar-
guments as a case brimming
with unfounded allegations
made by a company that wants
to get rid of the app store com-
mission to increase its own
profits while freeloading off an
iPhone ecosystem that has cost
3D-PRINTED HOME
EXPANDS OPTIONS
The Associated Press
EINDHOVEN, Netherlands — Elize
Lutz and Harrie Dekkers’ new home is an
1,011-square foot two-bedroom bungalow that
resembles a boulder with windows.
The curving lines of its gray concrete walls
look and feel natural. But they are actually at
the cutting edge of housing construction tech-
nology in the Netherlands and around the
world: They were 3D printed at a nearby fac-
tory.
“It’s special. It’s a form that’s unusual, and
when I saw it for the first time, it reminds
me of something you knew when you were
young,” Lutz said Friday. She will rent the
house with Dekkers for six months for about
$970 per month.
The house, for now, looks strange with its
layers of printed concrete clearly visible —
even a few places where printing problems
caused imperfections.
In the future, as the Netherlands seeks ways
to tackle a chronic housing shortage, such con-
struction could become commonplace. The
country needs to build hundreds of thousands
of new homes this decade to accommodate a
growing population.
Theo Salet, a professor at Eindhoven’s Tech-
nical University, is working in 3D printing,
also known as additive manufacturing, to
more than $100 billion to build.
Karen Dunn, Apple’s attor-
ney, pointed to Epic’s internal
documents outlining a strategy
called “Project Liberty” that
paved a way for Fortnite to pur-
posefully breach its app store
contract last summer and set
up a showdown over the fees.
“Rather than investing in in-
novation, Epic invested in law-
yers, PR and policy consultants
in an effort to get all of the ben-
efits Apple provides without
paying,” Dunn said.
find ways of making concrete construction
more sustainable. He figures houses can be 3D
printed in the future using 30% less material.
“Why? The answer is sustainability,” he said.
“And the first way to do that is by cutting down
the amount of concrete that we use.”
A new generation of startups in the United
States also are among the companies looking to
bring 3D-printed homes into the mainstream.
The home is made up of 24 concrete ele-
ments “printed” by a machine that squirts layer
upon layer of concrete at a factory in the city
before being trucked to a neighborhood of
other new homes. There, the finishing touches
— including a roof — were added. The house
complies with all Dutch construction codes
and the printing process took just 120 hours.
“If you ask me, ‘will we build 1 million of
the houses, as you see here?’ The answer is no.
But will we use this technology as part of other
houses combined with wooden structures?
Combined with other materials? Then my an-
swer is yes,” he said.
Exterior view showing the layers of the 3D-printed, 1,011-square foot, two-bedroom bungalow resembling a boulder with windows in Eindhoven,
Netherlands, on Friday. The fluid, curving lines of its gray walls look natural. But they are actually at the cutting edge of housing construction in the
Netherlands and around the world. They were 3D printed at a nearby factory. Peter Dejong/AP
Construction
spending up
U.S. construction
spending bounced back in
March following a Febru-
ary beset by frigid cold and
winter storms across large
swaths of the country.
However, spending on
construction projects rose
just 0.2% in March, the
Commerce Department
said Monday, significantly
less than the 1.7% jump
economists had expected.
That comes even as Feb-
ruary’s decline was revised
downward, as was Jan-
uary’s.
Still, through the first
three months of the year,
total construction spend-
ing of $328.3 billion is
4.5% ahead of where it
was last year.
Private construction
continued to grow, up
0.7% from the previous
month, with residential
construction up 1.7%.
Private spending
on construction of sin-
gle-family homes rose 2%
while spending on apart-
ments and other multi-
family units declined 0.3%.
Spending on govern-
ment construction proj-
ects fell again as state and
local governments remain
cautious as falling tax reve-
nues due to the pandemic
cut into their budgets.
— Bulletin wire reports
Pandemic
SBA taking applications
for restaurant relief grants
BY JOYCE M. ROSENBERG
The Associated Press
NEW YORK — Thousands
of restaurants and bars deci-
mated by the COVID-19 out-
break have a better chance at
survival as the government
begins handing out $28.6 bil-
lion in grants — money to
help these small businesses
stay afloat while they wait for
customers to return.
The Small Business Ad-
ministration is accepting
applications for grants from
the Restaurant Revitalization
Fund as of Monday. For the
first three weeks only applica-
tions from restaurants that are
majority-owned by women,
veterans and “socially and
economically disadvantaged”
applicants will be processed
and paid out, although any
restaurant can apply. After
that, grants will be funded in
the order that they’ve been
approved by the SBA.
The grants, up to a max-
imum of $10 million, are
Gerry Broome/AP file
A member of the wait staff takes food to outdoor diners at the Medi-
terranean Deli restaurant in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on April 16.
aimed at replacing lost reve-
nue at restaurant companies
with up to 20 locations. Busi-
nesses with more than one
restaurant can get up to $5
million per location, but each
applicant is limited to a total
of $10 million in funds.
Grant money is in addition
to Paycheck Protection Pro-
gram loans .
The restaurant industry
has been among the hard-
est hit by the pandemic. The
National Restaurant Associ-
ation estimates the industry
has lost $270 billion since the
start of the pandemic. More
than 110,000 restaurants shut
down long-term or perma-
nently and 2.5 million jobs
have been lost.
Intel will spend billions
in New Mexico, Israel
BY MIKE ROGOWAY
The Oregonian
Intel said Sunday it will
spend $3.5 billion to upgrade
its aging manufacturing facil-
ities in New Mexico and con-
firmed it will spend $10 billion
on a new factory in Israel, part
of a broad push to expand the
chipmaker’s production capac-
ity under newly installed CEO
Pat Gelsinger.
Sunday’s announcements
follow Gelsinger’s March decla-
ration that Intel will spend $20
billion to build two new facto-
ries in Arizona. After years of
carefully managing its capital
spending and returning money
to investors, Gelsinger indi-
cated the company is now bud-
geting for expansion instead.
Having committed to more
than $30 billion in new spend-
ing over the past two months,
though, Intel will need to do
more to cover those costs. Gel-
singer, like other chip execu-
tives, wants government sup-
port.
The U.S. and Europe need
to counter the subsidies gov-
ernments provide the chip in-
dustry in Asia, Gelsinger said
on “60 Minutes” Sunday night.
He described the chip sector
as an economic necessity and
national security issue — es-
pecially given a global chip
shortage that is constraining
production of everything from
laptop computers to automo-
biles.
“This is a big, critical indus-
try, and we want more of it on
American soil: the jobs that we
want in America, the control
of our long term technology
future,” Gelsinger said. He said
it will be “a couple of years”
before the chip industry over-
comes the current backlog in
demand.
On Sunday, he told “60
Minutes” that Intel expects to
quickly reverse its technologi-
cal setbacks.
“We believe it’s gonna take
us a couple of years and we will
be caught up,” Gelsinger said.
Investment analysts have said
Intel is likely to trail the indus-
try for most of the next decade,
at the least.
Intel is Oregon’s largest cor-
porate employer, with close to
21,000 people working at its
Washington County campuses.